Song Lyrics Sunday: Water Courses.

This week the theme for Jim Adam’s Song Lyric Sunday is to find a song that mentions a River/Stream/Creek/Brook. The prompt is suggested by Di of pensitivity101. 

Our weekly host Jim says “Take some time to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this music challenge, and even better, read as many of them as you can as you will probably find many enjoyable songs and it is quite possible that you will learn a thing or two. “

My first song this week is a great song written in 1974 by Al Green. This was three years after getting married . We were living in Devon, we had had our eldest he was a year old and I was expecting our second lad.

“Take Me to the River” is a 1974 song written by singer Al Green and guitarist Mabon “Teenie” Hodges. Hit versions were recorded by Syl Johnson, Talking Heads, and Delbert McClinton. In 2004, Green’s original version was ranked number 117 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Green’s 1974 recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011.Al Green originally recorded the song for his 1974 album, Al Green Explores Your Mind, produced by Willie Mitchell and featuring musicians Charles, Leroy and Mabon “Teenie” Hodges (of The Hodges Brothers), drummer Howard Grimes, and the Memphis Horns. Green and Mabon Hodges wrote the song while staying in a rented house at Lake Hamilton, Arkansas, for three days in 1973 in order to come up with new material. According to Mitchell, Green wrote the words and Green and Hodges wrote the tune together.nGreen dedicated his performance on the record to “…Little Junior Parker, a cousin of mine, he’s gone on but we’d like to kinda carry on in his name.” According to one writer, “Green’s song squares the singer’s early religious convictions with more earthly interests”, but when the singer became a pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in 1976, he dropped the song from his repertoire.

Writing in The Independent in 1994, Tim de Lisle wrote: “Musically, it was much like any other track sung by Green and produced by Willie Mitchell, the Southern-soul maestro who ran Hi Records, the Memphis Horns and the Memphis Strings: R’n’B with lashings of subtlety, a light, easy, late-night sound, in which the strings, the horns, the organ, the guitars and that wild-honey voice blend into a single swinging, winning thing. It doesn’t sound like a band playing: it sounds like a lot of instruments humming.”The song was released as a single in the U.S. in 1982, in the “Motown Yesteryear Series”.

There have been many versions of this song and here is my favourite from Annie Lennox. Medusa is the second solo studio album by Scottish singer Annie Lennox, released on 6 March 1995 by RCA Records. It consists entirely of cover songs. The album entered the UK Albums Chart at number one and peaked in the United States at number 11, spending 60 weeks on the Billboard 200. It has since achieved double platinum status in both the United Kingdom and the United States. As of 2018, Medusa had sold over six million copies worldwide.

I don’t know why I love you like I do
All the changes you put me through
Take my money, my cigarettes
I haven’t seen the worst of it yet

I wanna know, can you tell me?
I’d really like to stay

Take me to the river
Drop me in the water
Take me to the river
Dip me in the water

Wash me down, wash me down
Wash me down, wash me down

I don’t know why you treat me so bad?
Think of all the thing that we could have had
Love is an ocean and I can’t forget
My sweet sixteen I’ll never fret

I wanna know, can you tell me?
I’d really like to stay

Take me to the river
Drop me in the water
Take me to the river
Dip me in the water

Love me, squeeze me
Love me, tease me
Till I can’t, till I can’t
Till I can’t, till I can’t

I don’t know why I love you like I do?
All the trouble that you put me through
Sixteen candles blowin’ on the wall
And here I am the biggest fool of all

I wanna know, can you tell me?
I’d really like to stay

Take me to the river
Drop me in the water
Dip me in the water
Drop me in the river

Dip me in the water
Drop me in the river
Push me in the water
Drop me in the river

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Al L. Green / Mabon Hodges

Take Me to the River lyrics © Jec Publishing Corp., Jec Publishing Corp, Al Green Music, Inc.

When I get off of this mountain
You know where I wanna go?
Straight down the Mississippi River
To the Gulf of Mexico
To Lake Charles, Louisiana
Little Bessie, girl that I once knew
And she told me just to come on by
If there’s anything she could do

Up on Cripple Creek, she sends me
If I spring a leak, she mends me
I don’t have to speak, she defends me
A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one

Good luck had just stung me
To the race track I did go
She bet on one horse to win
And I bet on another to show
Odds were in my favor
I had ’em five to one
And that nag to win came around the track
Sure enough we had won

Up on Cripple Creek, she sends me
If I spring a leak, she mends me
I don’t have to speak, she defends me
A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one

I took up all of my winnings
And I gave my little Bessie half
And she tore it up and threw it in my face
Just for a laugh
Now there’s one thing in the whole wide world
I sure would like to see
That’s when that little love of mine
Dips her doughnut in my tea

Up on Cripple Creek, she sends me
If I spring a leak, she mends me
I don’t have to speak, she defends me
A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one

Now me and my mate were back at the shack
We had Spike Jones on the box
She said, “I can’t take the way he sings
But I love to hear him talk”
Now that just gave my heart a throb
To the bottom of my feet
And I swore and I took another pull
My Bessie can’t be beat

Up on Cripple Creek, she sends me
If I spring a leak, she mends me
I don’t have to speak, she defends me
A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one

There’s a flood out in California
And up north it’s freezing cold
And this living off the road
Is getting pretty old
So I guess I’ll call up my big mama
Tell her I’ll be rolling in
But you know, deep down, I’m kinda tempted
To go and see my Bessie again

Up on Cripple Creek, she sends me
If I spring a leak, she mends me
I don’t have to speak, she defends me
A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one

Source: LyricFind

My second song is Up On Cripple Creek from The Band. Released two years before hubby and I were married and I was working as a window dresser.

“Up on Cripple Creek” is the fifth song on The Band‘s eponymous second album, The Band. It was released as an (edited) single on Capitol 2635 in November 1969 and reached No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Up on Cripple Creek” was written by Band guitarist Robbie Robertson, with drummer Levon Helm singing lead vocal.

Robertson said of writing the song:

I had some ideas for ‘Up On Cripple Creek’ when we were still based in Woodstock making Music From Big Pink. Then after Woodstock, I went to Montreal and my daughter Alexandra was born. We had been snowed in at Woodstock and in Montreal it was freezing, so we went to Hawaii, really as some kind of a way to get some warmth, and to begin preparing for making our second album. I think it was really pieces and ideas coming on during that travelling process that sparked the idea about a man who just drives these trucks across the whole country. I don’t remember where I sat down and finished the song, though.

“Up on Cripple Creek” is notable as it is one of the first instances of a Hohner clavinet being played with a wah-wah pedal.^[2] The riff can be heard after each chorus of the song. The clavinet, especially in tandem with a wah-wah pedal, was a sound that became famous in the early to mid-1970s, especially in funk music.

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Happy Sunday all 💜💜