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their hands to
Unchained Melody,
the song would never be
the same. The
Righteous Brothers
version would
become iconic. Any singer approaching
Unchained Melody
“straight”
today (or any day since mid 1965) is taking a
major risk. I recently witnessed a 15-year old listening to
a performance of
Unchained Melody
by a singer whose
style owed more to Roy Hamilton, Waylon Jennings and
Marty Robbins than to Bobby Hatfield. She asked why
they were singing it ‘funny.’ Melisma has become the
requirement, the expectation. If you don’t drag
Unchained
Melody
to church with a detour through
American Idol,
you are somehow shortchanging the song, performing it
in an unacceptable style.
Roy Hamilton’s
original hit version of
Unchained Melody
shared honors with Al Hibbler and Les Baxter – three very
different approaches to the same song, if there ever were.
Hamilton’s version should be required listening in a Roots of
Soul course. If the Righteous Brothers were over the top in
the soul department (they were), then Roy Hamilton was under
it. Hamilton, who had sung with the Searchlight Gospel Singers
in 1948, could wail with the best of them, as he did on the
previous year’s
You’ll Never Walk Alone.
In barely a seven
year period, Roy Hamilton showed he could do it all, from
soul to opera to Elvis. There were healthy traces of all those
styles in Hamilton’s best work. Here, his gospel sound was
restrained, even minimal by today’s standards, although the
Georgia-born singer clearly had the chops to take it up a
notch when the occasion called for it.
