I was just listening to an infectious tune sung by The Pussycat Dolls (from their PCD album) that rang a bell with me: it's the song "Right Now," and I had heard it before, back in the 80s when I was in college...that time it was sung by a cool British band called "The Creatures."
It made me wonder who really had written the song, because it has this '40s kind of swing feel to it...you can just picture a couple jitterbugging to it. After a little digging..actually too much digging, I think...I finally determined it was originally written by Mel Torme. Torme was called "easily the greatest of all scat singers this side of Ella Fitzgerald" ("Mel Torme's Finest Hour") and lived 1925-1999.
I downloaded both versions of "Right Now" from iTunes (you couldn't find the 1983 version from "The Creatures" on there, which leads me to what's wrong with online music services, but that's another topic for another day) and it's really fun to play them back to back. In fact playing different versions of songs back-to-back is kind of a sub-hobby for me; you should try it sometime.
Anyway, the point of all this is to say that, it seems to me it's a shame the original creators of things sometimes get forgotten. This seems to happen to songwriters in particular the most. I wonder if any of the new fans of the song "Right Now," brought in by the PC Dolls (who I must admit have a very catchy version of the song) will know that this song was written back in the middle of the 20th century, or will ever hear of Mel Torme.
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