Bobby Womack calls himself the "last soul man," and his 1968 version of The Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'" demonstrates that it's no exaggeration. A highlight of the just-released retrospective CD Bobby Womack: The Soul Years, Womack's cover opens with familiar strummed guitar chords and those famously bleak first lines — "All the leaves are brown / and the sky is gray" — but the Cleveland native's rough-hewn voice adds a load of psychic pain absent from The Mamas and the Papas' jaunty original.
Backed by his own elegantly mournful guitar, the steady tap of a drummer, and insistent horns, Womack flavors the song with gospel shouts and ad-libs ("Somebody help me, I wanna go so badly"). And at the coda, he doesn't fade out, instead opting to invent a whole new song — picking up the pace, crying out "California Dreamin'," rising to a falsetto. It sounds like a hopeless cause, but he did make it there: A year later, he recorded a bopping "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."
Listen to yesterday's Song of the Day, and subscribe to the Song of the Day newsletter.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
