I have always loved the song A Song For You. By, The Carpenters. Or at least I always thought it was by The Carpenters. Up until a couple of years ago, I’d never heard any other version of the song, and thought it was an original of theirs. Then I heard the version by Simply Red, which was just as good as the Carpenters version, and even in some ways it was better. Mostly because of the instrumentation, not the singing. Although the lead singer of Simply Red is a fabulous singer. It’s different for sure. I think mainly because he made a video that captured the essense of the song, which of course, back in the day of The Carpenters didn’t exist.
I watched the videos of the song by The Carpenters and Simply Red enough times that, You Tube being You Tube in the algorythmic way it is, it started suggesting to me all the different versions of the song that are out there. I will come back to that later in the blog. In any event, up to about a couple of weeks ago, I never clicked on any of them. I still thought it was a Carpenters song covered by Simply Red. I was happy and content with that view and I believed it as fact.
Another song I have loved since the first time I heard it and for 40 years now is the Lee Ritenour song Is It You. It was a fairly big hit back in the day, but you rarely hear it anymore. However, it’s just a song that is always in my head and it comes to the surface when I hear other things every now and then. That was the case a few months ago. I have been listening to a lot of jazz online lately while I work, and Lee Ritenour is actually a jazz legend, with that one pop song I know his only real venture into that realm. So, I googled it, and I found this version, which is one of the best live versions I know. A much jazzier version than the pop song version. Both great though. Up until a year ago, I viewed Lee Ritenour as a one hit wonder type of pop star. In actuality, as I said, he is a jazz legend who happened to have one crossover hit.
Fantastic version, as I said, but what grabbed me more than anything was the female black singer performing the lead vocals. I had no idea who she was or is, but I had to find out. Which I did. Her name is Kenya Hathaway, and if that name sounds familiar, it’s because she is the daughter of Donny Hathaway. More about him later. Reading up on her and learning what she has done other than that song led me to read up on Donny Hathaway and his life. A tragic life as it turns out. More about that later as well. Other than his extensive solo work and being a prolific producer before that, he did a few other things. One I will mention in the other part of this blog. Most know of him today for his duets with Roberta Flack.
One of my favorite artists growing up was Roberta Flack, and the songs she sang as duets with Donny Hathaway. It turns out they went to University together and he was the one that got her the record deal that led to them recording the duets they did together, although she was very popular on her own when she first came out. I believe she won the Grammy for song of the year two years in a row, which no artist has done before or since. Not that any of that matters to me. I just love her songs and the way she sings them. Here are 3 of those.
And the two duets with Hathaway.
Then shortly before Hathaway died.
As I read up about Donny Hathaway, one thing I learned that I didn’t know is that he sung the theme song from the 70’s sitcom Maude. I love that theme, one of the best ever in my opinion. I watched Maude here and there growing up, but since I was only 7 when it started and was into sports a lot more than anything else during the time period, I rarely watched it more than once a year until I was about 13, when it was in its last year.
I also loved the show Good Times, and the theme from that show as well. Good Times was a spinoff from Maude, and Maude was a spinoff from All In The Family. All In The Family and Good Times I watched every week for the entire runs of both shows, mostly because we watched them as a family on the main TV, which was the only color TV in the house growing up.
Things I knew about All InThe Family and Good Times. All In The Family was set in New York City, while Good Times was set in the Chicago, in the projects. Maude was Edith’s cousin from Chicago, and Maude’s maid was Florida, who was the reason they spun off into Good Times. Of course, that is not accurate as I now know. Only as of a couple of days ago in fact.
I googled the Maude theme when I learned it was sung by Donny Hathaway, and while i listened to it, I was trying to see if I could tell it was him singing it. I couldn’t. He was very versatile and talented, and he sang many different things and styles where he adapted to the piece. While I was listening to that song on You Tube, the next video up was a suggestion to watch an episode of Maude. It was late and I was tired. I didn’t feel like doing any more work that day, so I clicked on the episode. It was one from the last season, where Maude and Walter are breaking up, and on the verge of making that permanent. I think I saw it back in the day, but didn’t remember the specific episode. I will post it below. It’s a very good episode, the writing is fantastic, Bea Arthur is her usual fabulous self, as she was a tremendous comedic actress with off the chart timing. As I watched it, I noticed something in the plot that threw me though.
The reason they are splitting is that Walter wants a stay at home wife, and Maude is running for State senator, which meant she would end up in Albany most of the time if she won. That is where my mind started to ask questions. Maude and Walter lived in Chicago, so why would she run for state senator in New York. They lived in a town called Tuckahoe, a town I never knew of other than it was where the show Maude took place. It could have been made up as far as I know. There was a reason that I made that incorrect connection.
Because I watched Good Times and it was clear at all times that show was set in the Chicago projects, and Maude was just visiting Edith to look after the family because they were sick when she appeared on the two episodes of All In The Family before they decided to spin that show off, I presumed she was from Chicago and just visiting. If you watch the opening credits for both shows, it appears that Maude could be set in Chicago, because while Chicago and New York are very different types of towns, they share a lot of similarities. I have been to both several times, and had been to both in the early 70’s. It would be an easy mistake to make if you didn’t watch Maude steadily or regularly back then.
So, after the episode, I read up on how the whole thing took place. Maude was set in Suburban New York, and while Florida the maid worked at her house, when they spun Good Times off of Maude, they changed the setting to Chicago and changed the characters a bit from how they were presented on Maude. TV does that when it suits the project they have. Good Times was already an idea that was being worked on before they decided to make Florida the main character, which as it turns out, didn’t play out that way as Jimmie Walker ended up the main character. Clearly though, it was about a black family in the Chicago projects. I missed the Maude part simply because I didn’t watch that show very much, was young, and presumed by the time that I did 5 years later that if Florida the maid from Good Times worked for Maude, Maude must live in Chicago. Not getting the whole story and drawing conclusions from other facts led me to get it wrong.
And so, I return back to Donny Hathaway, through Kenya Hathaway, and by way of a Carpenters song that wasnt a Carpenters song really. It was a Leon Russell song that many other artists covered.
Kenya Hathaway, if you watched the Lee Ritenour clip I posted above, has a very joyous way of presenting and singing. She has a big, unique smile and she expresses joy and happiness that way. Her father also has that smile if you look at the album cover clip from The Closer I Get To You video I posted above. But, overall, he wasn’t a happy person. You can read up on him to see his story, but it’s a tragic story of someone with deep mental illness that plagued him his entire life. Because of that, and his talent, he was very suited to sing the song A Song For You, which is a very introspective, reflective and melancholy song if you sing it the way Hathaway does. Now my favorite version of that song. Leon Russell wrote a great song, but I didnt like his performing of it at all.
To really sing that song, you have to completely understand deep pain. Donny Hathaway was a very troubled guy, and he knew a lot about pain. Karen Carpenter obviously had deep issues within her that drove her to the destructive behavior which ended up taking her life. Both of them died around 33 or 34, not even yet in the prime of their lives. Others sing the song, sing it well, but they dont convey the pain the way those two did, in their own very different ways and singing styles. As Don McLean said in my previous blog, to express pain you have to feel pain, and suffer. No doubt how much both of those two singers suffered and felt pain in their short lives. Because she was fairly good at expressing pain, I just presumed it was a song the Carpenters wrote or originated. My memory is that their version came out after Hathaway’s, but I would have been way too young to know that then.
This is already a long blog. What is my point here?
Once you get an idea in your head that something is a certain way, and you start to believe it as fact, even though it isn’t or might not be, it’s very tough to get past that. Possibly, at one moment later on, you realize you had it wrong, or maybe you have a new perspective on it and it changes your view. But until that time, it limits your view of things and life.
My recent success and enlightenment when it comes to betting on and playing horse racing is directly related to changing my view of many things within that, what is happening and how I am viewing and approaching it. The reason it took me almost 40 years to reach my full potential doing that is simply I had wrong ideas based on experiences which created facts in my head which weren’t facts at all, and my view of what was actually happening was simply wrong. It limited my ability to achieve. All I can say for certain is that over all these years I have been playing the wrong races, the wrong way and with the wrong mindset. All of that because of ideas I developed very early on when i started and have been the foundation of every interaction I’ve had since, up until about 3 months ago when I changed my focus and opened my eyes to what was in front of me.
Ideas are great. But they can limit you if you don’t get the whole story then base everything you do on those potentially false ideas. It’s a trap we all fall into, but a dangerous trap if you aren’t lucky enough to stumble onto a Maude episode, or different versions of songs that show you another way to see them.
The show All In The Family is, at it’s core, a show about a man with a very narrow and limited view of life and how things are, which is turned on its head when he is forced to live with his hippie, radical, combative son in law, and then has black neighbours who move in and as it turns out, that family is much more successful than his. None of that ever changes his mind about how life is, but it probably would most if they were confronted with situations like that. Or with a character like cousin Maude, or the many other situations when Archie was presented with different ideas and types than fit the mold in his head that he had cemented much earlier in life when he didn’t know better. By that time, he should have, but never did. The ideas simply limited him to believe what he believed before he should know better.
This is basically where the whole chain of All In The Family, Maude, Good Times and The Jeffersons started. On this type of confrontation between those who have ideas who limit them and those who clash against them but get nowhere.
And it took off when Maude hit the scene.
Archie liked to say case closed, and that was his view of the world. His limited view of the world. No matter how foolish that sounded.
It is just plain foolish to ignore situations and events that clearly show you that you have it wrong because you want to hang onto ideas that you have come to see as facts. But then, as we know, that is what many of us do. We limit ourselves because we want the world to be as we always thought it was. Not how it actually is. Some change and adapt. Others will just go right on to the point Archie Bunker did. Which is looking like a fool.
The choice is always up to the person themselves. Limit yourself, or adapt and see the world as it is. Even if that goes against what you have believed all your life.
No comments:
Post a Comment