Last year, I wrote a little about Brenda’s Lee’s Christmas classic, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” and how, at 78, she had just made a music video to go with the song she recorded when she was 13. Whomever handles Brenda Lee’s business affairs knows how to keep the money coming. For 2024, there’s a new Spanish-language version of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and Brenda got to take it easy. Producers used AI to go back to 1958 and have “Brenda” sing en Español.
I was a weekend Smooth Jazz DJ for about three years in the early 2000s, right as the number of stations that could make the format work on commercial radio was getting smaller. I was never one of the main on-air talent at Orlando’s WLOQ, 103.1 FM, but you might hear me Saturday afternoons or Sunday mornings. I’d be playing – still on CDs – Euge Groove or Mindi Abair or Acoustic Alchemy. Smooth Jazz was never my personal favorite, but it can be nice while reading or studying – not a lot of lyrics to distract you.
Singer/songwriter Kinky Friedman died June 27 of Parkinson’s disease. I never saw Kinky perform live, but I read all his mystery novels and admired that he was able to create a more clever fictional version of himself that replaced the real guy in the public eye.
I imagine he’d appreciate that when People magazine wrote his obit, it neglected to mention his song, “People Who Read People Magazine.”
You’ve heard this song in commercials. You’ve heard it on oldies radio. It’s been used in The Crown and I, Robot and even as the name for a TV series, but odds are still good you see the wrong face in your mind when you hear Fontella Bass sing “Rescue Me.” Despite the song reaching #4 on the Billboard pop chart two years before Aretha Franklin ever had anything close to a hit single, so many people still think “Rescue Me” belongs to the Queen of Soul. Here’s the original Fontella Bass track laid over a colorized version of a live TV appearance.
You can understand why someone might hear Aretha in “Rescue Me.” Both Bass and Franklin were soul singers who grew up in the gospel choir – Bass in St. Louis and Franklin in Detroit. Aretha never officially covered “Rescue Me,” although she recorded a thirty-second version with new lyrics in the early 1990s to promote Pizza Hut. You gotta wonder if the ad agency knew it was Fontella Bass’ song when making the pitch.