The 1959 album Elton John called the best singing ever: “One of the finest”
In a world full of glam rockers, Elton John was always the perfect package when he came out in the 1970s.
He and Bernie Taupin had a sixth sense whenever they worked together, and when you listen to their epic run of records up to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, there aren’t too many bases that John didn’t get to cover when working on his tunes. But if there was one thing that he worried about above everything else, it was being able to deliver his songs to the people whenever he sang.
Which is strange because John didn’t fancy himself as a singer when he started making music. He knew that he would eventually get to play for some major acts and maybe even become an accomplished songwriter later in his life, but the only reason why he ended up singing most of his tunes was after he had hit rock bottom. If he were writing his own stuff, though, he might as well pull from every single great singer that he listened to.
The Beatles and The Rolling Stones may have been the biggest names in rock and roll, but John wasn’t looking to become strictly a rock singer. He liked all forms of music whenever he turned on his record player, and when you look at his history of collecting anything and everything that came on the charts when he was a kid, he was just as infatuated with Aretha Franklin as he was with Elvis Presley when he heard her.
In fact, John may be one of the few rock and roll artists in the world who took to soul music the best. He and Phil Collins were among the precious few who actually seemed to know the genre inside and out when they started making more soulful tunes, and the fact that John ever managed to get a song on the R&B charts with ‘Bennie and the Jets’ was the kind of feat that no one would have predicted.
His songs didn’t sound that out of place when they were heard on Soul Train, but John knew the best singing had to deal with music that was a little bit deeper. The best singers that he ever heard had some real power behind their voice, and while the biggest R&B artists worked tirelessly for their sound, Nina Simone had the kind of voice that was shot through with the kind of life experience that no one else had.
She was already one of the biggest names in jazz music when John first caught wind of her, but the work that she did on her live album Nina Simone at Town Hall was enough to stop him in his tracks, saying, “Her most famous and probably her best album is Nina Simone at Town Hall, an album which demonstrates the eclectic breadth of her material, one of the really amazing things about her. ‘Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,’ a traditional song, is on that album, as is ‘The Other Woman,’ which is probably one of the finest vocal performances of all time–it’s just incredible. And the great thing is, you listen to those songs today and they still sound beautiful and fresh.”
But the real magic to it was that not every song needed to sound absolutely perfect. Some of the best singing is almost like acting to a certain degree, and when you listen to Simone do her renditions of songs like ‘Summertime’ or ‘Wild is the Wind’, you can feel every single ounce of emotion that she’s ever felt in her life coming out of her voice, to the point where she sounds like she’s about to explode towards the end of the performance.
Other massive divas since then have tried to copy that kind of formula, but there’s something about Simone’s performances that the Mariah Careys and Whitney Houstons of the world can’t fully capture. There’s a certain sheen to what the modern R&B belter can do, but there’s no doubt that Simone approached every one of her songs like she had lived through every single story she talked about.
