Song of the Day 9/6: Blood, Sweat & Tears, “God Bless the Child”

Billie Holiday co-wrote this with Arthur Herzog Jr. — each claimed the other’s contribution was minimal — and recorded it three different times. Hundreds of others have covered it, usually as a slow-burning ballad of self-reliance. It took Blood Sweat & Tears, on their first LP with barrel-chested belter David Clayton-Thomas on lead vocals, to turn it into a salsa-spiced celebration.

The arrangement is by Dick Halligan, who played trombone on the first BS&T album but switched to organ when founder Al Kooper left the band. Kooper had also charted the horn parts, so Halligan stepped forward. Fred Lipsius, who plays the alto sax solo on the track, later recalled, “One day, he asked if he could write a chart for the band. None of us knew that he arranged! His first chart on ‘God Bless The Child’ knocked everybody out.” It knocks me out, too.

Though the LP leaned more commercial than its predecessor — producer James William Guercio, the horn-happy impresario behind the Buckinghams and Chicago, saw to that — the track still shows off the group’s jazz roots. The trumpet solo is by Lew Soloff.

Holiday and Herzog agree that the song’s idea was hers. She was fresh from a fight with her mother, who wouldn’t lend her money even though she lived off Holiday’s earnings. In the heat of the argument the singer spat out, “God bless the child who’s got her own!” and a jazz standard was inseminated.

Each of Holiday’s three recordings differs from the others, especially in her phrasing. The last, with Tony Scott and his orchestra in 1956, is heard most frequently, but I prefer the first, recorded for the Okeh label with Eddie Heywood and his orchestra in 1941. Its tempo is just a tad quicker than her later versions, which tended to gild the lily with over-lush arrangements, giving it less of the world-weary vibe she adopted later. That’s the great Roy Eldridge on trumpet.