Following up on this morning's Melanie Fiona post, here's a bit of a delayed Stu Reid Sampler. Fiona's tune, "Give It To Me Right" samples "Stand By Me", a song originally by Ben E. King but performed the world over by numerous well known artists. In fact, in 1999 BMI ranked it the 4th most performed song ever, with over 7 million performances. Wow.
UPDATE: HA! As an astute reader points out, the song actually samples the Zombies' "Time of the Season". So this post doesn't make a ton of sense. BUT, "Stand By Me" is a great song with a well-known and interesting chord progression anyway, so let's talk about it!
The chord progression is famous, known as the 50s progression. You might recognize it from songs like "Every Breath You Take", "Blue Moon", and Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls".
Perhaps the most famous cover of the tune is John Lennon's. It's pretty cool - here's a video of him performing it in studio.
Additionally, here are two of my favorite versions. The first is the original, by Ben E. King. The second is a mostly a cappella cover by The Fugees - dope.
2 comments:
Couple of things...
I like the blog, great music! I thought id mention however that "Stand by Me" that you posted by the Fugees is actually by a band called "4 The Cause" although it was wrongly labelled as the Fugees back in the Napster days and i assume it has spread to many computers! Here is the video for the song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQmfTlPey7U&feature=related
There is however a remix of "Give it to me right" by Melanie Fiona on youtube with Talib Kweli and in the first 5 seconds of the song he actually sings the lyrics to "stand by me" presumably because he thinks it would work well.
I actually considered combining the two into a "mash-up" but ive never got round to it.
Also (bonus info). Although "give it to me right" samples The Zombies, the instrumental was origionally created by Necro for his song "who's ya daddy" (also on youtube) and Melanie Fiona added like a violin or something to it.
Take care
Yeah! We actually wrote up that Melanie Fiona track on the 15th as well - http://www.thestureidexperiment.com/2009/04/stand-by-melanie-fiona.html
Kweli also says "that's like some Ben E. King" in the intro, referencing "Stand By Me". So they are definitely cousin-songs.
Very interesting about the 4 The Cause mislabeling. I have no idea where I stumbled across that track - thanks for setting the record straight.
Y'all are smart.
Post a Comment