Random musical aside

I happened to hear recently, for the first time in a while, one of my all-time favorite songs, Sam Cooke’s Bring It On Home to Me.  Looked it up on Wikipedia to learn more about it, and gleaned several fun facts:

–It was only a B side.  The A side was Having a Party – obviously a far lesser song, although one can understand what the record company was thinking.

–The backup vocalist with the deep voice, whose call-and-response interplay with Cooke is so powerful, was Lou Rawls.

–The piano player, who does his part so beautifully although it’s simple enough that I suppose any really first-rate session pianist could have nailed it, was Ernie Freeman, who did a lot of jazz, pop, and R&B records and worked with Woody Herman, Duane Eddy, and Frank Sinatra, among others.

–Cooke must not initially have realized how good a song it was, as he offered it to fellow singer Dee Clark, who turned it down.