Monday, September 13, 2004

Tony Bennett, "Cold, Cold Heart"
(November 3, 1951)

On the face of it, the notion of an urbane pop singer like Bennett covering the sin-and-salvation of Hank Williams seems fucking absurd, like an open invitation to point-missing. But if there's any inherent contradiction, it may have been visible only in hindsight. (The music-lovers of 1951 didn't have to contend with Hank's corpse, after all.) There were a lot of Hank covers in the early fifties, including those by singers we've encountered before or will meet soon -- Rosemary Clooney, Jo Stafford, Frankie Laine, Joni James, and Tony Bennett once again -- proving once and for all to anyone who cared that in spite of the 'honk' in his voice, both authorial and laryngeal, his songs were universal enough to map themselves easily onto 1951's mainstream ballad-form. But Hank's songs are so strong and the prevailing chart ethos of 1951 was so frequently middling that it seems like such a trivial thing to prove.

So...Bennett, then. He sings this with the same abject quaver of "Because of You," so I can't get with it. Kind of a pity, really. I feel a microscopic bit of protectiveness towards him, 90% of which is identical to the public sentiment which caused his Unplugged to hit like it did about ten years ago. Yeah, he was never a tasteless egomaniac, stuck to his principals (more or less, and more rather than less), still has some chops left, kinda classy still, so it's "OK" to like him, and maybe I can explain my dislike of his chart stuff by saying his later jazz stuff was better. It's all rather recieved, sure, but...wait. Didn't he dress up like Flava Flav at the MTV Video Awards one year? Uh... 2

(link)