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Try a Little Tenderness |
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Written: 1932 |
Words and music by: Harry M. Woods,Jimmy Campbell and Reginald Connelly |
Written for: Independent Publication |
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On the Main Stage at Cafe Songbook | ||
Jimmy Duranteperforming "Try a Little Tenderness"
More Performances of "Try a Little Tenderness" |
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Otis Reddingperforming "Try a Little Tenderness"Live on television Performance, December 9, 1967, the day before Otis Redding and members of the Bar Kays were in a fatal plane crash in Madison, Wisconsin. Otis Redding recordings of "Try a Little Tenderness"
More Performances of "Try a Little Tenderness" |
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Cafe Songbook Reading Room"Try a Little Tenderness" |
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| About the Origins of the Song | ||
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No doubt many fans of Soul music associate "Try a Little Tenderness" with the most well known Soul performer of it, Otis Redding. In fact, Michael Bublé says in his on-stage performance of the song in 2005 that it was written and made famous by Redding. Neither claim was correct, as we are certain Michael knows by now. In fact, in the YouTube comments after the video of his 2005 performance, Stella Singleton corrects the record:
We like the Durante too and have featured it on the Cafe Songbook Main Stage above along with Redding, partly to illustrate the inherent qualities of the song that enable it to be performed so successfully by two such diverse singers. Interestingly, the Redding performance (as well as many other Soul and R&B recordings) precede both the ones by Durante and Buble, both of which are much more in the tradition of the decades long history of performances that go back to the song's origin in 1932. (see the Cafe Songbook Record and Video Cabinet (right column this page) for a snapshot of that history. More about the history of the song will appear, eventually, in this space. |
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Posted Comments on "Try a Little Tenderness":
From: Ron, July 05, 2018: The lyrics to "Try a Little Tenderness" exemplify the way a song reflects its culture when written and first performed--but not necessarily decades afterward. As gorgeous as the song is, and as often as it was a hit in the past (by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra among others), few vocalists have sung it in this century, surely not in 2018, eighty-six years after Woods, Campbell, and Connelley wrote it . I've never read a discussion of what some contemporary feminists would call its patronizing sexism, a sharply critical attitude prominent decades before today's "Me Too" movement--despite its tender empathy for housewives trying to cope with straitened circumstances: "Women do get weary/ Wearing the same shabby dress." The pay-off to the man for some tenderness in the midst of such privation comes toward the end of the song: "You won't regret it/ Women don't forget it./ Love is their whole happiness." Claims of such simplistic psychological fulfillment and the consequent gratitude earned by "a little tenderness" might have struck most women in 1932 as sensitivity. But the opposite may be true today for feminists, men as well as women. |
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Credits("Try a Little Tenderness" page) |
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For further information on Cafe Songbook policies with regard to the above matters, see our "About Cafe Songbook" page (link at top and bottom of every page). |
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1932
Notes: Recorded December 8, 1932 and released as a single, this is the first recording. |
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