Soul Music

The Brecht/Weill song Mack The Knife first appeared in The Threepenny Opera in Berlin in 1928. Sung about the criminal MacHeath, the 'play with music' is based on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, who was inspired by the real-life English highwayman, Jack Sheppard. The song became a hit when performed in 1959 by Bobby Darin. Ella Fitzgerald famously forgot the words when performing live in Berlin in...

Nkosi Sikelel iAfrica (Lord Bless Africa) is a song that runs through the very soul of South African life. It was originally composed in 1897 by Enoch Sontonga, a Xhosa clergyman at a Methodist mission school near Johannesburg who is said to have been inspired by the melody of John Parry's 'Aberystwyth', a hymn that would've been shared by Welsh missionary's at that time. It went on to travel the...

Mr Blue Sky is the Electric Light Orchestra's brilliantly off-beam classic song. It was released as a single in 1978, having first appeared on the ELO album 'Out of the Blue' in 1977. Written by Jeff Lynne, it was a no.6 hit in the UK, and has endured on the radio airwaves ever since. Tracey Collinson whose husband, Nigel, loved the track tells of the meaning it has for her. Musicologist, Allan Mo...

This much-loved hymn based on Psalm 23 has been set to music many times, including Brother James' Air and Crimond. The Queen requested the Crimond version at her wedding. Harriet Bowes Lyon's tells the story that her mother, Lady Margaret Colville, (formerly Lady Margaret Egerton) taught the descant to the Queen and Princess Margaret, and was summoned to sing it when, two days before the wedding,...

"Tomorrow we're going in search of a song and in search of a dream of England which has travelled right around the world" - Will Parsons No one can be sure of the true origins of the song Scarborough Fair. It's a melody of mystery, of voices of old, of ancient days. It's travelled through land and time, drawing singers and listeners in where ever they maybe. For Will Parsons and Guy Hayward it's a...

Long before it was a worldwide hit for Rod Stewart, the Cat Stevens song 'First Cut is the Deepest' made a name for Ike and Tina Turner's former backing singer, PP Arnold. PP describes the emotional connection she felt to the lyrics, having emerged from an abusive marriage shortly before recording it. The song's original producer, Mike Hurst describes how he achieved the huge 'wall of sound' produ...

Johann Sebastian Bach's Cello Suite No I in G major is one of the most frequently performed and recognisable solo compositions ever written for cello. Yet it was virtually unknown for almost 200 years until the Catalan cellist, Pablo Casals discovered an edition in a thrift shop in Barcelona. Casals became the first to record it and the suites are now cherished by musicians across the globe. The w...

Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' took him years to write. It originally had as many as 80 verses. Recorded for his 'Various Positions' album, it was almost ignored when first released in 1984. Only Bob Dylan saw its true worth and would play it live. John Cale eventually recorded a version which was heard by an obscure musician called Jeff Buckley. The song has been covered by hundreds of artists incl...

"La Boheme is a work of genius, for me it's the perfect opera. There's not a bar or a word or anything you'd want to alter. It just gets to you" - Opera Director John Copley CBE. Soul Music ventures back into the Parisian winter of Puccini's beloved 'La Boheme' where legendary Opera Director John Copley CBE reflects on his 40 years of bringing this tale of friendship, love and loss to the stage of...

'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' by The Smiths is explored through personal stories. Released in 1986 on 'The Queen Is Dead' album, it's become an anthem of hope, loss and love. As a teenager, Andy listened to it with his father, as he drove him to work. They had a moment of connection, and when his father died suddenly a few weeks later, the song took on huge significance. When her young so...

Gracias A La Vida - thank you to life - is a song that means a lot to many people around the world. Recorded by artists as diverse as Joan Baez and the magnificent Mercedes Sosa, it reflects the bittersweet nature of life's joys and sadnesses. To the people of Chile where it was written in 1966 by Violetta Parra, it has become an anthem that brings people together in times of trouble. One man tort...

Marianne Faithfull recalls the classical French Love song which went on to inspire a 1960s hit record by Elvis Presley. 'Plaisir d'Amour' somehow found its way through 18th century orchestration (Hector Berlioz) and 1960's folk revival, to an unexpected re-invention as Elvis’s 'I Can't' Help Falling in Love with You'. Written in 1784 by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini, the song muses on the pleasures and...

"Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again." So wrote the poet AE Housman lamenting the loss of his brother in the Boer war in his epic poem A Shropshire Lad. It harks back to a simple idyllic rura...

Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor, is one of the most popular and moving pieces of music. But, as academic and composer Andrew Gant explains, it wasn't written by Albinoni and is now attributed to 20th century Italian composer, Giazotto. Award-winning veteran BBC foreign correspondent, Malcolm Brabant recalls the ' cellist of Sarajevo', Vedran Smailovic, playing it everyday for weeks amidst the wreckag...

The hauntingly beautiful Welsh song Myfanwy 'is in the air in Wales' according to singer Cerys Matthews. She along with others discuss what the melodic tale of unrequited love means to them. They include a Welsh woman living in Sicily for whom the song represents 'hiraeth', a longing or homesickness for Wales and another who believes it expresses the 'wounded soul of the Welsh'. A man remembers ho...

Labi Siffre wrote Something Inside So Strong in 1984. Widely believed to have been inspired by seeing film footage from South Africa, of young blacks being shot at by white policeman, the singer-songwriter now reveals that the lyrics were also informed by the oppression he had experienced as as a gay man. The song has been taken up by individuals and groups around the world who have suffered from...

"It's the kind of music that makes you feel like you're just hurting so good" People of different ages reflect on why the pop country classic 'Crazy' made famous by Patsy Cline brings out such strong emotions in them. Featuring a young woman mourning the loss of a father's love after divorce - and broadcaster Fiona Phillips reflects on losing her father to Alzheimer's disease. 87 year old Wayne Re...

"I'm convinced it's the best thing ever written and recorded in the history of things written and recorded" - Moby. Rhapsody in Blue was premiered on February 12, 1924, in New York's Aeolian Hall. Through its use at the opening of Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' it’s become synonymous with the city that inspired its creation. But for people around the world, George Gershwin's "experiment in modern music...

The story behind the song, 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas'. It was first performed by Judy Garland in the 1944 MGM musical Meet Me In St Louis', for the now famous scene in which she and her seven year old sister, played by Margaret O'Brien are downcast about the prospect of moving away from their beloved home. Garland asked the composer, Hugh Martin to modify his original lyric, explaini...

How Brahms' German Requiem has touched and changed people’s lives. It was written as a tribute to his mother and designed to comfort the grieving, Stuart Perkins describes how the piece arrived at the right time in his life, after the death of his aunt. Axel Körner, Professor of Modern History at University College London, explains the genesis of the work and how the deaths of Brahms' friends and...

Few songs can claim to be - quite literally - as far reaching as the 1967 classic 'Can't Take My Eyes off You'. Former astronaut Christopher Ferguson heard this song as an early morning wake-up call aboard the space shuttle Endeavour. Mother of two, Michelle Noakes sang this classic piece to the baby she was told she may never be able to carry. A honeymoon couple recall how their marriage proposal...

Pascal Rogé is one of the world's greatest interpreters of French piano music. From the seat of a concert hall piano, he leads us through a personal and musical journey of Erik Satie's Gymnopédies. You may not immediately know the title but in hearing just the first few notes, you are most likely to know the music. It's a collection of short, atmospheric pieces of which Gymnopédie No.1 is perhaps...

"Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root..." Billie Holiday's famous song expresses the horror and anguish of those communities subjected to a campaign of lynching in the American South. Soul Music hears the stories of people whose relatives were lynched by white racists and of the various forms of grief, anger and reconciliation that have followed. These inc...

How the choral work The Dream of Gerontius, by Edward Elgar, has touched and changed people's lives. For Terry Waite, it was the first piece of music he heard as a hostage in the Lebanon, after four years in solitary confinement. Writer and broadcaster Stephen Johnson describes how Elgar's own fragile emotional state is written into the music, which describes the journey taken by a dying man. Sing...

Don't Leave Me This Way was written in the early 1970s by songwriters Huff, Gamble and Gilbert. They were the composers behind the famous black American Philadelphia Sound. It was first performed by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, featuring Teddy Pendergrass on lead vocals. It later became a hit for Thelma Houston and The Communards. As the title suggests, the song is all about longing, yearning...