1968: Bobby Womack, Fly Me To The Moon
By Kameryn Alexa Carter
The first time I fell in love with Bobby Womack’s adlibs, I was lying on the floor in the golden hour with the turntable whirling his album Fly Me to the Moon. As the title suggests, many of the tracks are covers, and perhaps this cast Bobby’s language between language in sharper relief for me. As I held the originals in my head, Bobby’s minor flourishes gradually became more noticeable than the melody or the lyrics themselves. The magnificent tonal shift that occurs in his cover of the titular “Fly Me to the Moon” made me aware from the very first licks that I was about to witness a serious departure from its predecessors. His staggered phrasing, the soul-swing of the arrangement, the doubling of his harmonies, his flyflyflyflyflyflyfly just before the end of the song— suddenly I forgot any other versions existed.
Bobby’s “California Dreamin’” also epitomizes reinvention. His version slows the song significantly, accentuates the classical guitar, with a use of horns that are unmistakably characteristic of soul. And those in-between improvisations. I can barely mimic the subtle run of his you know at :57 but each time I listen to the song I try and try. His somebody help me now, his scatting as the song fades out. His easing casually into every measure rather than hitting the beats right on the head as the Mamas and the Papas do in the original. It’s almost as if Bobby’s adlibs become another instrument, his wail mimicking the prominent saxes on “I’m in Love.” I call it a wail, but that word feels wrong. A groan, a moan, keen, whine, at times approaching a yowl. And in these moments— the moments in which Bobby is at his best and truest, I am transported back to the place where I first learned to sing, perhaps the first place I ever heard music. Church.
My family came up to Chicago from down South during the height of the Great Migration. From Memphis, from Smith Station, from Hollandale, from Roseland, Louisiana— and with them they brought their sounds. I come from a lineage of humming and singing while performing labor, while performing quotidian tasks. Humming to stay awake, humming to stay alive. Singing to communicate: with each other, with God. Playing instruments to fellowship with loved ones. To rock to sleep. Music is our oral history. Toward the end of every dinner, someone always makes their way to the piano, as if it’s a way of saying goodbye. And all this singing, all this humming originated in my family’s religious music and spilled over into its secular counterparts.
For me, Bobby is evidence of this hallmark of so much Black music—this boundary blurring, this exchange. He makes love songs sound like church songs sound like love songs. His moans are eroticism and praise and lamentation. And those sounds which live between phrases, the subtext— it is there that one can hear the twinning of down South Black Christian music and secular music the most. When I hear his yeaaaahhh and his all I’m trying to tell you and lord have mercy. When I hear every repetition, elongation, and crescendo, I’m immediately clapping my hand to my knee in the back pew of my childhood church. I’m in my grandma’s frontroom at her Wurlitzer, the bench creaking in 4/4 time.
Bobby’s addition to “Moonlight in Vermont '' of “light my fire, light my fire, light it light it light it…” and its amazing reprise in the last 10 seconds of the song would almost certainly make Blackburn and Suessdorf gasp. He warbles with the meadowlarks, trills with the evening summer breeze. The background singing reminiscent of early counterparts like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, the falsetto of his skiiiii trailssss: it’s all soul, it’s all church, it’s all Black. Rather than treating the moments in between phrases as negative space, Bobby’s adlibs invent and occupy a new positive space— in some cases nudging the main phrases themselves just slightly into the background. I know yall know what I’m talkin ‘bout, he reminds us. And this, to me, is what blows all the originals out of the water. We do know. No one else can sing them like Bobby. No one.
Kameryn Alexa Carter is a Black poet and assemblagist. She has a BA in English with a concentration in Literary Studies from DePaul University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, phoebe, Spoon River Poetry Review, LETTERS, and Bennington Review.