People know this song from Bobby Womack’s 1974 release, which reached No. 10 on the Hot 100 (No. 1 on the Hot Soul Singles chart), but that wasn’t its first time around the track. That came back in 1962, when it was released by the Valentinos on Sam Cooke’s SAR label.
The Valentinos were Cooke’s pet project. Originally known as the Womack Brothers, Cooke changed their name and made 17-year-old Bobby the lead singer, replacing his older brother Curtis. For their first secular song, Cooke took a spiritual already recorded by the Womacks called “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray” and gave it to his staff songwriters, J. W. Alexander and Zelda Samuels, to rework. As you can hear, they didn’t do much beyond rewriting the lyrics.
It seems obvious that Womack should release the song once he went solo, but he originally had no plans to do so. He was in the studio, with his brothers serving as backup singers, when they warmed up on their old family standard. The tape was rolling, but Womack had to be convinced to include it on the album. It became his biggest hit.
In the meantime, the J. Geils Band, whose early albums were chock-a-block with frat-house interpretations of R&B classics, had covered the song for their 1971 debut, and it too reached the lower reaches of the charts. Listening to the boys from Boston strip the tune of every bit of charm, you can hear why Womack might have wanted to reclaim the song as his own.
