Ella Fitzgerald

Listen: Sunshine Of Your Love / Ella Fitzgerald
Sunshine Of Your Love / Ella Fitzgerald

Always found a weak spot for 60′s jazzy covers of then popular Top 40 hits. A lost art nowadays I suppose.

Right through to the mid 70′s, there seemed an abundance of them tailor made for cocktail lounge jukeboxes. No idea how many versions of ‘Misty’ I own, and certainly have even more pressings of an all time favorite, both as an original and a cover, Bobby Hebb’s ‘Sunny’.

My guilty pleasure Ella Fitzgerald track has to be ‘Black Coffee’, which was never issued on 7″. Not that I know her work extensively, but I do recall hearing it, just one time, on the radio, in a friend’s parent’s car, with both of them smoking upfront. Nasty but a time period snapshot still vivid in my brain.

Her rendition of ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ comes pretty close. Hey, it’s flip is ‘Hey Jude’, imagine that. But hands down, this A side documents an, at times, raspy vocal that I find most uncharacteristic of Ella Fitzgerald. And then there’s the song choice, The Cream! Come on, that’s pretty funny.

Wouldn’t be surprised if it was “Alright, give me the lyrics, I’ll sing it already. Let’s just get this over with.”

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