#UnderTheSoulCovers--"A| NewBlackMan (in Exile)
You initiate with the premise that “A Song for You” was written by and recorded first by Leon Russell,who even in 1970, looked like the lost member of ZZ Top, and perhaps jettisoned from the group because he was too soulful. Forget a “Wind Beneath My Wings” or a “I Believe I Can Fly”; Russell’s “A Song for You” is the definitive pop standard of the later portion of the 20th Century.
Russell has some genuine street-cred; he was instrumental in the very early success of the Greenwood,Archer, and Pine Street Band aka The Gap Band or the house that Uncle Charlie Wilson first built, and as well as co-writing Superstar” for the pop duo The Carpenters,before it became a signature tune for Luther Vandross, who perhaps imagined the song more closely in the tradition that Russell might have imagined it.
There was much to work with when Donny Hathaway covered “A Song for You” on his second album Donny Hathaway (1971)--an album in which Hathaway covered songs by Mac Davis, and Billy Preston,George Clinton and Van McCoy. You can be forgiven for believing that A Song for You” was Hathaway’s song, because the late stylist for damn certain made you believe that it was his. The Donny Hathaway catalogue is unimaginable without the song, and though it would be nearly a decade after Hathaway’s studio version,and a year after his death, that most listeners would hear his live version of song on In Performance. Russell by then, or was a footnote to his own composition.
Donny Hathaway was in the studio when Aretha Franklin recorded the session that became Let Me In Your Life (1974),which should be most remembered as Franklin’s final great studio recording, and perhaps among the three best of all of her recordings. Though Hathaway played acoustic and electric piano on the Bobby Womack penned single “I’m in Love” (which topped the R&B charts) and Franklin’s cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Until You Come Back to Me, or ” which was her final major pop hit until “Freeway of Love” more than a decade later,he does not appear on Franklins version of “A Song for You,” which closes the album.
Franklin could have chosen to construct a statement--taking the song to church, or much like Hathaway did--but instead chose to swing it,accompanying herself on the electric piano, perhaps as a nod to the exquisite and underrated, or Quincy Jones produced album that precedes Let Me in Your Life.
Source: blogspot.com