Once more, with feeling
Celebratory song still resonates through years
Feeling Good is perhaps the ultimate feel-good song: it soars and swoops, invoking the joy of nature, the freedom of a bird flying high. It thrills.
Feeling Good was written to express a particular kind of euphoria: that which comes with liberation from oppression. It was written by British songwriters Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for their stage musical The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd; the show toured provincial British theatres in 1964 before opening on Broadway in 1965.
Roar is a curious, allegorical musical about power, class and race. Two characters, Sir and Cocky, play an endless, Samuel Beckett-esque game — but the arrival of The Negro (renamed The Stranger or The Black Man in later productions) shakes things up. While Sir and Cocky argue, and after being the object of racist taunts, The Negro wins the game and celebrates his victory by singing Feeling Good.
In its original arrangement, Feeling Good — as sung by Cy Grant in the U.K. and Gilbert Price on Broadway — hardly seemed the kind of song that would set the world on fire. What power the song had lay in the strong vocal performances of Grant and Price.
Before the show opened on Broadway (starring Newley — who recorded his own version of Feeling Good — as Cocky), an original cast recording album was released. Singers and musicians seized on it. Among the first was John Coltrane. In his version, the theme typically drifted in and out of focus as Coltrane’s sax floated and fluttered. Sammy Davis Jr. gave it gravitas, with twangly electric guitar.
It took Nina Simone to find the song’s essence. In 1965, she and her arranger Hal Mooney brought in a big band, gave it a swing and a kick, emphasized the first and third beats like the strides of loping giant, introduced a tingling piano triplet, and unleashed Simone’s rebel spirit in a stunning vocal performance. Released during the ferment of the civil rights protests, Simone’s Feeling Good was a manifestation of that movement’s burning desire for freedom.
Simone’s interpretation became a template for almost all subsequent versions (though one band, Traffic, went its own way with a self-indulgent organ-heavy jam on its 1969 album Last Exit).
Foremost among these was Muse’s blistering cover on its breakthrough 2001 album, Origin of Symmetry.
Michael Bublé’s swinging, blowsy interpretation in 2005 and its accompanying video channelled James Bond theme songs — aptly, as Newley had co-written Goldfinger. A 2009 version from American Idol alumnus and sometime Queen singer Adam Lambert closely followed Muse’s.
■ The Life of a Song Volume 2: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 More of the World’s Best-loved Songs, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
The Financial Times Limited