The release of this comprehensive set of Ben E. King’s complete ATCO/Atlantic singles was, sadly, well-timed. King, who died in April 2015, was one of the great soul singers of his generation. This is the first of two planned sets, covering the early, best known period of his career, 1960 to 1966. His is a great story of being discovered more or less by accident and being recruited for a group called The Five Crowns; and the Crowns being signed to replace The Drifters after their lead singer went solo and their manager fired the rest of them; and then King being recognized for his powerful and supple baritone and smooth style and signed as a solo act in 1960.
But he’s best remembered for his first couple of solo hits, which came after a couple of near-misses. The stirring Latin-tinged ballad “Spanish Harlem” was actually the B-side of his third single cut in October 1960, but New York DJs liked it better than the A-side song, a forgotten number with a mambo beat called “First Taste Of Love.” “Spanish Harlem” launched King’s career as a crossover artist, charting high on both the R&B and pop charts. If the stars were aligned when that record was cut, there was also a lot of skill involved in addition to King’s superb singing – Leiber and Stoller produced the record and a young Phil Spector was also on the studio team.
And of course the follow-up was even better and more enduring. “Stand By Me,” which King co-wrote with Leiber and Stoller, topped the R&B charts and hit No. 4 on the Hot 100, and has been revived at least a couple of times since then.
Those of course were the biggest hits of Ben E. King’s career, but that career lasted another 50 years. This set only covers the first six of those years, and includes all of the singles, A and B sides, from 1960 to 1966, some of which have never been on CD before in these original mono versions from original master sources. There’s a lot to like here, especially those first two singles that didn’t chart. The first one is pretty swell, with Otis Blackwell’s “Brace Yourself” as the A side and Goffin-King’s “Show Me The Way” on the other. The second one is a real knockout, as King was paired with the powerful LaVern Baker on a couple of fine R&B songs, “A Help-Each-Other Romance” by the great Charlie Singleton (who wrote dozens of hits including “Strangers In The Night”) and the B side, Baker’s gently swinging country-soul ballad “How Often.” It makes me question the taste of the public at the time or the promotion that went into these sides that they weren’t hits.
King never quite returned to the heights of those first two big singles, but he had many more in the Top 100, and of course the oddly stirring “I (Who Have Nothing)” that hit No. 16 in 1963. The Goffin-King chestnut “Tell Daddy” that hit No. 2 on the R&B chart is a little creepy from this vantage point, and its arrangement with strings and backing chorus are emblematic of the approach that was used too much (for my taste, anyway) on King’s records as the years went on. Any set of recordings from 50 years ago is bound to provide some good historical and sociological lessons, like the infantalization of women in songs like “Tell Daddy.” There’s a lot of kissing going on in these songs, and also an awful lot of smoking, too. Again, from the vantage point of 2015 it seems even counter-intuitive, of course it wasn’t at the time!
But I digress. With 49 songs, most of which were mid-level hit singles in the early to mid-60s, this set is really a treasure trove of music that for the most part you just don’t hear any more. For of course the history of pop music is much more than just those big hits; it’s the lesser hits that provided much of the soundtrack of the era, and which often spoke just as powerfully to nearly as many fans. Most of these songs were penned by the top writers of the era, and King was one of the best interpreters of the age, too. So dig into a set like this (which as is usual with Real Gone products has very good liner notes and documentation), and prepare to learn a little and be moved a little – or a lot.
Real Gone / Atlantic, 2015
Here’s a 1988 interview with King that appeared on WHYY’s Fresh Air in 1988 and was re-aired shortly after his death in 2015.
