"Try a Little Tenderness": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"Try a Little Tenderness"

Michael Bublé performing "Try a Little Tenderness" (2005)
(This live performance can be found on the albums Caught in the Act, It's Time as well as on The Michael Bublé Collection.

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:

"Try a Little Tenderness" is a song written by Jimmy Campbell, Reg Connelly and Harry M. Woods. It was first recorded on December 8, 1932, by the Ray Noble Orchestra (with vocals by Val Rosing). Both Ruth Etting and Bing Crosby recorded it in 1933. I like the Jimmy Durante version.

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.

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.

• Michael Bublé: HDGoodMusic
• Otis Redding: Ame Link

Cite this page: "Try a Little Tenderness": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/t/try_a_little_tenderness.html