2023-08-18 17:00:10
ATLANTIC (SOURCE : DISCOGS.COM)
Find all the episodes of the series “One song, two versions” ici.
A song and two Grammy Awards almost twenty-five years apart. Killing Me Softly With His Song performed by soul singer Roberta Flack was crowned best song of the year in 1973 by the American music awards, while the adaptation by hip-hop group Fugees won the award for best R’n’B performance in 1997. And all thanks to a poem written on a napkin of the Troubadour, a folk club in Los Angeles.
« Strumming my pain with his fingers/Singing my life with his words/Killing me Softly with his song » (“scratching my pain with her fingers/singing my life with her words/killing me little by little with her song”) are the first verses written by the young guitarist Lori Lieberman when one evening in 1971 the concert hall at the gothic allure on Santa Monica Boulevard empties. She has just attended the concert of folk singer Don McLean, and one of his blues on his sentimental breakup, Empty Chairs, metaphorically “killed” her. She then showed the poem to her co-author Norman Gimbel and its composer, Charles Fox, who transformed it into a slow-tempo folk song. Lori Lieberman finds this first version a bit old-fashioned and her producers believe in it so little that they offer it as an audio playlist for American Airlines. Not such a bad idea, actually.
Immediate success
On a flight from Chicago to Los Angeles, soul singer Roberta Flack hears it. In turn, touched by the lyrics, when she got off the plane, she contacted the producers and obtained the rights to the song. The pianist rearranges the music, speeds up the tempo, adds percussion and lets her vocal power do the rest. It’s an immediate success: the song remains number one on Billboard for more than a month. Killing Me Softly will become a soul music classic that will nurture the next generation of hip-hop.
Twenty years later, childhood friends of Haitian origin Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel and the American of Jamaican origin Lauryn Hill, their high school friend, will give it a second life by offering a modern version for their second album. , The Score. Initially, their intention is not that. The trio used to sing this song in the sound systems of the Caribbean district of New York, “Bed-Stuy”, where the tradition wanted that the “bosses” of the different sound systems compete by recording unreleased, dubplates, during which the chatters insult, threaten, gently mock their opponents. Lauryn Hill then transformed the lyrics into: « Soundboy killing vibe/Killing a soundboy with his song » (“the sound guy kills the vibe/I’m gonna kill him with this song »).
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