Excellent rap songs that sample Otis Redding that are definitely better than the new Kanye and Jay-Z song:

• Marley Marl and the Juice Crew - The Symphony (Hard to Handle)
• De La Soul - Eye Know (Dock of the Bay)
• Kanye West - Gone (It’s Too Late)
• EPMD - The Steve Martin (Let Me Come Home)

View high resolution

I guess it’s probably time to wrap up Try A Little Tenderness Week.  Thanks for playing.  Here’s a recap:

Otis Redding, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Ken Boothe.  And a link to an essay on the differences between some of these versions.

I’ve also got streampad up and running, so you can listen to all the Tendernesses at the bottom.

Bonus Reading Material

This Rob Bowman character, who I got that last quote from, turns out is the world’s leading Try A Little Tenderness scholar, as far as I can tell (by virtue of writing one essay about the song).  This makes him pretty much the coolest.  If I were an ethnomusicologist, instead of a half dozen blog posts, I’d do something like “The determining role of performance in the articulation of meaning: the case of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’” which Bowman wrote for a book called Analyzing Popular Music.  It’s a little heavy on formal differences that went over my head, and a few pages are missing from the Google Books version, but it’s pretty cool:  He compares the recordings of Bing Crosby, Franklin, Cooke, and Otis and has a bunch to say about it.  This also includes the “motherfucker” quote.

Important bit of information I learned: there are two outtakes of Otis’s version, and at least one of them might be available somewhere.  Hearing this would be pretty fantastic, so far I’ve only got 30 seconds.