Gerry Goffin, lyricist, died on Thursday. He was 75. With his first wife, Carole King, Goffin co-wrote some of the finest popular songs of all time: Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Natural Woman, Up on the Roof, Wasn’t Born to Follow, and many more. As such, he was one of the key architects of pre-Beatles pop.
Plenty of people have sung Will You Love Me Tomorrow, and the song has proven adaptable to any number of treatments: the Shirelles’ original paired Shirley Owens’s vulnerable vocal with a perky backing track; Carole King’s own version pared it down to piano and vocal; Dave Mason from Traffic layered phased acoustic guitars and organ over a half-time feel; the Four Seasons’ take on the song is quite, quite mad (diminished chords, incredibly ornate harmonies, electric sitar, verses consisting of single bass notes/bass drum, with a cavernous echo); Laura Branigan’s went for melodrama, taking it even more slowly than King did on Tapestry and underpinning her skyscraping vocal with 1980s synth pad and slightly ersatz gospel piano. I could go on
All of these recordings have their merits. The song is damn near indestructible, after all, and contains maybe the best lyric Gerry Goffin ever wrote. But none of them have what I think of as the song’s ideal arrangement. Shirley Owens’s vocal is certainly one of the best, but the emotion of her performance is undercut by the sha-la-las and the bouncy piano and drums. King sang her own song already knowing it was a classic, and it shows; the tempo is on the draggy side of stately and, being blunt, her voice was never up to the task. Mason is somewhat oleaginous, although his arrangement (half-time verse, double-time bridge) was definitely on to something.
So whose version to listen to, if you only have room in your life for one?
Maybe Ronnie James Dio’s?
Don’t laugh.
Ronnie James Dio, heavy-metal vocalist known for popularising the devil-horns hand gesture, lead singer of Rainbow, Black Sabbath and Dio, began his career in music in the 1950s as a trumpeter, then a doo-wop singer with a buttery tenor. One of the best-known yarlers in the business, Dio was capable of singing beautifully if the mood took him, and when he sang Will You Love Me Tomorrow in 1962 with his band Ronnie & the Prophets, he sang it about it as well as anyone ever has. It’s a simple recording, not much more than a demo, but stripping down the arrangement of the Shirelles’ original gave the vocal more space (without having to slow the tempo) and allowed the words to resonate. In response, Dio delivered a quite lovely performance. I would really love to have a high-quality version of it, as the one I have sounds like it’s been taken straight from an acetate, or at best a much-played 7-inch. Just don’t think of the Holy Diver video while listening to it, or it’ll spoil the effect somewhat.
Ronnie James Dio and his Prophets
songs from so deep 