Celebrating ‘Stand By Me’ icon Ben E. King

Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 280 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.

A few weeks ago, I noticed on my handy soul music birthday calendar that Ben. E King was born on Sept. 28 1938, and thought he would be a great musician to feature today.

I brought his name up to my husband and to several friends who are way younger than I am, and the immediate response from all of them consisted of the same three words: “Stand By Me.” So while covering his life, musical career, and major hits both with The Drifters and as a solo artist, let’s take a deep dive into that one epic hit of his.  

David Collins wrote the Ben E. King biography at Musician Guide:

Born Benjamin Earl Soloman in Henderson, North Carolina, on September 28, 1938, King moved with his family at age 11 to New York City, where his father opened a luncheonette in Harlem. King had sung in church choirs throughout his childhood; at Harlem’s James Fenimore Cooper Junior High he eagerly set out to start his own singing group, which was dubbed the Four B’s, as all of its members’ names started with the letter B. Accounts vary as to how King’s professional career got started, but most agree that it began in his father’s restaurant, where King often sang as he worked. Somehow, his smooth tenor attracted an authoritative ear, and King was asked to join the singing group the Crowns, with whom he immediately began touring on the rhythm and blues circuit.

Also cutting a swath through that circuit was a group called the Drifters; popular throughout the 1950s, the Drifters had cut 11 albums by 1958 when, with record sales slumping, the group disbanded. But George Treadwell, the Drifters’ manager, was contractually obliged to deliver the group to audiences for years to come.

Scrambling to replace the old group, Treadwell discovered the Crowns and renamed them the Drifters, as he had retained legal use of the name. A complete overhaul was apparently just the ticket for the Drifters. Atlantic Records liked their new sound so much that its executives assigned ace producers Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and Phil Spector to produce a string of new recordings. The new Drifters struck quickly with the Number Two hit “There Goes My Baby,” which was sung and co-written by King, then only 20, and followed by “Save the Last Dance for Me”–with King again contributing lead vocals–which reached Number One on the pop charts in 1960.

Another 1960 release by the Drifters featured King singing lead over a background of Spanish guitars. The sound intrigued Spector and Leiber so much that they decided to try King as a soloist on a similar number, “Spanish Harlem.” The song soared up the charts and King soon found himself performing solo as one of America’s most favored balladeers. His eminence was cemented the following year when “Stand by Me”–his own composition–made the Top Ten on the pop charts and Number One on rhythm and blues lists.

Here’s a short bio from Ed Collects’ YouTube channel:

Here’s King singing a medley of his famed lead parts with The Drifters: “This Magic Moment,” “Dance With Me,” “There Goes My Baby,” and “Save The Last Dance For Me.”

He died on April 30, 2015 and his obit in The Guardian continues his story:

It was with Spanish Harlem that he stamped his own identity on the airwaves and the pop charts in the early weeks of 1961. Here was an instant pop classic, Leiber’s romantic, evocative lyric perfectly matching a melody, composed by the 21-year-old wunderkind Phil Spector, that artfully heightened the drama by suddenly tightening in the middle couplet of each six-line verse before gently releasing the consequent tension. Accompanied only by a marimba, a double bass, a choked triangle, a bass drum and a discreet backing choir, with those swirling strings and a solo soprano saxophone creating an instrumental interlude, King’s rich, ardent voice was at its most compelling, and the record became his first solo top 10 hit.

Here’s “Spanish Harlem,” which was released on Dec. 31, 1960:

The Queen of Soul later released her own iconic take on “Spanish Harlem.” Rhino Records described it in “Single Stories: Aretha Franklin, “Spanish Harlem.”

Franklin’s take on “Spanish Harlem” was one of the three new recordings included on her 1971 greatest-hits album, along with “You’re All I Need to Get By” and “Bridge over Troubled Water,” and it was actually the second single to be released from the album, following “Bridge over Trouble Water.” Aretha changed up the lyrics slightly, shifting the lyric “a red rose up in Spanish Harlem” to “there’s a rose in Black and Spanish Harlem,” thereby giving it an element of social consciousness.  

In the wake of her death, Rolling Stone put together a piece about the 50 greatest Aretha Franklin songs, and her version of “Spanish Harlem” made the cut:

“A transfixing example of the way Aretha could refurbish a familiar song, ‘Spanish Harlem’ was a romantic rumba in the hands of Ben E. King, who made it a huge hit in 1961. Opening with a blaxploitation-flick-style riff and a subtle lyrical rewrite, Aretha modernizes it for the civil rights era. In her hands (and those of Dr. John, who played piano on the session), you can sense the heat pounding on the Harlem sidewalk in ways the song’s writers – the unusual combo of Phil Spector and Jerry Leiber – may have intended.”

Here’s Aretha’s version of “Spanish Harlem”:

In 1971, Laura Nyro teamed up with Labelle and recorded “Spanish Harlem” for her “Gonna Take a Miracle” album:

King’s Guardian obit continued to describe his career trajectory:

With Stand By Me, a few months later, he had his first R&B No 1, and went to No 4 on the pop charts. Credited to Leiber and Stoller (under their regular nom de plume) and King, it was based, like many early soul songs, squarely on an old gospel tune. Again the arrangement was spare but highly effective, inspiring King to respond with a majestic performance in which powerful emotions were typically expressed with a dignified restraint – King wrote the words about his wife-to-be, Betty, whom he would marry in 1964. Taking his birth surname, she was known as Betty Nelson, and survives him, along with a son and two daughters.

There had been a Latin rhythmic undertow to all these records, and Amor made it more explicit, not entirely to King’s benefit. Pomus and Shuman’s Here Comes the Night, his last release of a hectic year, was perhaps too subtle to win great success – it barely crept into the top 100 – but showed the singer at his very best, his phrasing beautifully judged over the melody’s complex, flamenco-inspired syncopations and yet another imaginative orchestration.

The last big hit of this phase of King’s career came in 1962 with Don’t Play That Song (You Lied). Co-written (with Betty Nelson) under a pseudonym by Ahmet Ertegün, a Turkish diplomat’s son who had founded Atlantic Records, its plaintive accusations suited the singer perfectly. Like Spanish Harlem, it would find a second life in the hands of Aretha Franklin, another Atlantic artist, while Stand By Me eventually found another effective interpreter in John Lennon. All three songs have become standards.

Mary Grace Watkins at Bustle reminds us of the films and commercials that used King’s most well-known song in “Where Have You Heard ‘Stand By Me’ Before?”

Badfinger at Power Pop also explored “Stand By Me”:

King recorded this after he left the Drifters. Charles Albert Tindley wrote “Stand By Me” but it was a gospel hymn. He did copyright it but some say it goes back a century early.

The Staple Singers covered it in 1955 and King tried to get the Drifters to cover it but they rejected it. Now… let’s back it up a little…this version of Stand By Me really didn’t sound like the version we know. King took this song to songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and they modernized it and made it into the song we know today with King’s help.

The bassline was the innovation the track has been missing. It gave what had been a mournful gospel hymn the uplifting rhythm it needed. King also had the idea of asking the drummer to turn over his snare and scrape across the skin with a brush – creating that infectious groove.

Singer Ben E King and writer Mike Stoller recall how a song originally intended for the Drifters came alive thanks to a killer bassline

Leiber, Stoller, and King were credited but they left off Tindley’s name who came up with the version of the song they heard.

Ben E King, co-writer and singer

Of all the songs I wrote or co-wrote in my career, this is my favourite. It came at a strange time, though. I’d just left the Drifters and had to plead with Ahmet Ertegün, the president of Atlantic Records, to find a place for me. He put me to work with legendary songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It was like a schooling for me – a kid from Harlem who knew nothing about anything.

There’s been some debate about how the song was conceived. But, as I recall, we’d some time left over at the end of a session, and I was asked if I had any songs in my head. I’d originally intended Stand By Me for the Drifters. The song we eventually recorded wasn’t so different from what I’d come up with. Jerry may have changed the lyrics in places, but not by much.

It was 1960, but in my vocal I think you can hear something of my earlier times when I’d sing in subway halls for the echo, and perform doo-wop on street corners. But I had a lot of influences, too – singers like Sam Cooke, Brook Benton and Roy Hamilton. The song’s success lay in the way Leiber and Stoller took chances, though, borrowing from symphonic scores, and we had a brilliant string arranger in Stan Applebaum.

But Jerry Wexler, a producer at Atlantic, was unimpressed. He hated it because we’d gone into overtime in the studio with an expensive orchestra. I wasn’t trying to make a hit with Stand By Me, though. I was just thrilled one of my songs was being recorded at a time when there were so many great songwriters around, people like Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King.

I still perform it in all my shows. I’ll do it as long as I’m breathing. I’m so proud it has stood the test of time.

Tom Eames at Smooth Radio wrote “Ben E King’s Stand By Me: a song as enduring as the love that inspired it”:

On paper, Stand By Me seems a simple song, and certainly King wrote it with simple intentions: a love song to his partner at the time, Betty Nelson. Pop songs are seldom expected to mirror the lives of the artists who created them, but it certainly adds a sparkle to the song to know that Nelson would go on to celebrate five decades of marriage with the man who sang to her: “If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall / All the mountains should crumble to the sea / I won’t cry, I won’t cry / No, I won’t shed a tear / Just as long as you stand, stand by me.”

It’s especially fitting that a song about enduring love – a love able to survive, no matter what trials and traumas it encounters – was built equally strongly to stand the test of time.

Andrew Hickey featured “Stand By Me” in A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs: Episode 94.

The record sounded remarkably original, for something that was made up almost entirely out of repurposed elements from other songs, and it shows more clearly than perhaps any other song that originality doesn’t mean creating something entirely ab initio, but can mean taking a fresh look at things that are familiar, and putting just a slight twist on them.

In particular, one thing that doesn’t get noted enough is just how much of a departure the song was lyrically. People had been reworking gospel ideas into secular ones for years — we’ve already looked at Ray Charles doing this, and at Sam Cooke, and there were many other examples, like Little Walter turning “This Train” into “My Babe”. But in most cases those songs required wholesale lyrical reworking.

“Stand By Me” is different, it brings the lyrical concerns and style of gospel firmly into the secular realm. “If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall, and the mountains should crumble to the sea” is an apocalyptic vision, not “Candy’s sweet/And honey too/There’s not another quite, quite as sweet as you”, which were the lyrics Sam Cooke wrote when he turned a song about how God is wonderful into one about how his girl is loveable.

This new type of more gospel-inflected lyric would become very common in the next few years, especially among Black performers. Another building block in the music that would become known as soul had been put in place.

The record went to number four on the charts, and it looked like he was headed for a huge career. But the next few singles he released didn’t do so well — he recorded a version of the old standard “Amor” which made number nineteen, and then his next two records topped out at sixty-six and fifty-six. He did get back in the pop top twenty with a song co-written by his wife and Ahmet Ertegun, “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)”, which reached number eleven and became an R&B standard:

[Excerpt: Ben E. King, “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)”

Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Nick Murray, and Brittany Spanos wrote “20 Best Covers of Ben E. King’s ‘Stand by Me’” for Rolling Stone:

Fifty-five years after its release, the song has become a modern standard, reinterpreted countless times across genre, era and culture. From Otis Redding and Muhammad Ali’s early attempts to Stephen King and Miley Cyrus’ later revisions, here are 20 interpretations worth standing by.

Some of them I wasn’t aware of, like this cover by Muhammad Ali:

Here’s Maurice White’s take on “Stand By Me” from 1985:

“Playing for Change” documented the use of “Stand By Me” to unite musicians and people all around the world.

From the award-winning documentary, Playing For Change: Peace Through Music comes “Stand By Me,” the first of many Songs Around The World produced by Playing For Change. This Ben E. King classic features musicians around the world recorded by the Playing For Change team during their travels. This song continues to remind us that music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people.

I’ll close with this magnificent choral rendition at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, performed by Karen Gibson and The Kingdom Choir:

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