Leon Russell — a songwriter's songwriter, a musician's musician — is finally getting his due
LOS ANGELES — Anyone tracing a path through the history of American soul music could do worse than to catalog the many, many renditions of Leon Russell's "A Song for You."
Start with Russell's tender yet stately original, which opened his debut solo album in 1970 after the years he spent haunting Los Angeles recording studios — that's him playing piano on the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" and the Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man" and the Beach Boys' "California Girls" — as a member of the storied Wrecking Crew of first-call session musicians. Then move through Donny Hathaway's virtuosic R&B aria, Willie Nelson's cosmic-cowpoke ballad and Aretha Franklin's queenly slow jam on your way to the pleading testimonial with which Ray Charles won a Grammy Award in 1994; skip ahead to hear later interpretations by Herbie Hancock and Christina Aguilera, Whitney Houston and — why not? — the pairing of rappers Bizzy Bone and DMX.
The latest to take up "A Song for You," which salutes a partner for teaching the narrator "precious secrets of a true, Bootsy Collins and Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, among others. An L.A.-based singer and songwriter known for her collaborations with and James Blake, Martin does "A Song for You" as a hymn, more or less, with churchy organ rippling beneath her airy vocals.
