Gotta say, this new Biden administration and the invigorated Democratic Congress has far outstripped every expectation I had coming out of Trump’s Reign of Error. The change in the mood of the country over the past two weeks has bowled me over. Feels like a brand new day.
This criminally overlooked Van Morrison composition, from “Moondance,” should be a gospel-soul standard, but after a few covers in 1970, the same year Morrison’s LP was released, it has been recorded only three times in the past 50 years. None of the others holds a candle to Esther Phillips’ version, recorded at the start of her second comeback from severe heroin addiction and released by Atlantic in late 1970 as the B-side of a stand-alone single. (The A-side, the Tammy Wynette tune “Set Me Free,” barely scraped the R&B Top 40.) Having Arif Mardin arrange the strings and backing vocals and using Jim Dickinson’s Dixie Flyers studio band certainly didn’t hurt.
Van gave it his all, but the simpler arrangement doesn’t pack quite the same emotional punch.
Phillips, who started recording as Little Esther, was only 14 in 1949 when she was discovered by Johnny Otis in a talent contest at his Barrelhouse Club in Watts, where Phillips (then Esther Mae Jones) lived with her mother. In the next year her produced her on seven Top 10 R&B hits; three reached No. 1. She signed with a new label the next year and promptly fell to pieces.
The hits stopped, and by the time she was 20 she had moved to Houston to live with her father and get treatment for her heroin addiction. She was discovered singing in small clubs there by none other than Kenny Rogers, who steered her to his brother’s record company, where she had a big hit with the country song “Release Me” in 1962. But by 1966 she was back in rehab, re-emerging in 1970. She released 11 LPs between then and her death in 1984 but had only one more hit — a remake of “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” that reached No. 2 on the dance chart and No 20 on the Hot 100 in 1975.