“I didn’t think I could ever do this”: The song Eric Clapton called too hard to sing
Eric Clapton never claimed to earn his road stripes as the best singer in the world. He would usually let his guitar do the talking, and looking at the stunning amount of classic solos he left in his wake, was anyone really complaining that he didn’t have as much time behind the microphone as some of his bandmates in Cream? Clapton may have grown into becoming a great frontman as the years went on, but he still thought that he wasn’t experienced enough to take on this soulful classic.
Looking back on how Clapton’s career panned out, though, much of his best moments came directly from blues. Throughout The Yardbirds and even his solo career, ‘Slowhand’ could always find ways to sneak the blues back into his classics, like putting the odd blues cover in the middle of things or turning any solo into the kind of swaggering guitar break that Muddy Waters would have been proud of.
But soul is a different approach to the genre entirely. While they both rely on the same bluesy structure throughout, what Clapton did was much more straightforward compared to the raw emotion that artists like Sam Cooke or Aretha Franklin had sang back in the day, especially when looking at his version of a song like ‘Little Wing’ compared to the Jimi Hendrix original.
Then again, Clapton did have some soul in him when he could. Listening back to Derek and the Dominoes, most of that album is driven by the pain in Clapton’s soul as he cries out in pain for Patti Boyd, which wasn’t all that different from what the biggest names in soul music had been doing for years. It was within his reach, but even the genre veterans don’t dare to touch what Ray Charles had done.
Because if you break it down, Charles could be considered ground zero for what soul music would be. He had his roots in jazz and blues, but hearing him putting that trademark rhythm behind everything was what made tunes like ‘What’d I Say’ and ‘Hit the Road Jack’ some of the biggest soul numbers of the rock and roll era. And while ‘Sinner’s Prayer’ was a different beast, Clapton knew that he had no way of doing the song justice.
Despite doing his own rendition on his album Journeyman, Clapton still thought that the song belonged to Charles, saying, “We did the Ray Charles song called ‘Sinner’s Prayer’, which is fantastic, and I didn’t think I could ever do this song, because vocally it’s very very dynamic, it looks like a very hard song to sing, and we did it very quickly.”
While Clapton does a fine rendition of the tune, it is clear that’s something missing from the Charles original. Even if he didn’t write the song himself, Charles pulled out a piece of his heart for the record here, pleading with his higher power to see through his faults and help him atone for his sins.
That said, it’s not hard to see where Clapton got some of his influences from, either. From how he sings on ‘Wonderful Tonight’ to the tenderness of ‘Tears in Heaven’, Clapton still took pieces of that soulful croon and spun it into his own take on being brokenhearted.
