If a musician can carry a tune, then usually they become the default singer, if it is even decided that a singer is necessary. Though there are vast swathes of music that have no vocal features, and all of us vocalists have heard the jokes about us – first to start talking, last to stop talking, and never around to carry equipment, etc – the reality is that vocal focal points are the earmark of all the music that becomes standards. And vocalists that exist in the pure space of vocals only can often swing a certain kind of magic that only other vocalists can really appreciate.

In other words, if it’s cutting into your chest and boring into your heart, thank a vocalist. Which is the entire basis for this list. Listen first. Call a doctor afterward.

Arthur Prysock “When I Fall in Love”
From Arthur Prysock Sings Only For You (1962)



The spoken intro in all of its Blue Velvet eeriness sits aside a lyric that is/seems/sounds so deeply earnest that it’s disturbing. No posturing rock belter could touch this back in 1961, or now, and for me it’s the basis for understanding that I always prefer a good real-real over any kind of fake-fake.

Billy Eckstine “Mister You’ve Gone And Got The Blues”
From Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (1954)



If you wanted a vocal antecedent to Oxbow’s Serenade In Red, and every vocal contained therein, this is it. “When your friends point a finger at you because you’re starting to look like you feel…” Jesus. A light piano tinkling in the background for most of the song. I’d be lying if I said this song hadn’t seen me seeing suicide as a possible solution.

Tindersticks “Don’t Look Down”
From Curtains (1997)



Stuart A Staples on this song captures all of the words usually associated with his band Tindersticks. Yearning, crooning, harrowing, soulful and yet it’s none of those words that have attracted me to this song. It was this line: “So it shot out of me, as though all of the love just got ripped out of me”. Yeah. Been there.

Billie Holiday “You Don’t Know What Love Is”
From Lady In Satin (1958)



I once made the mistake of saying, to Diamanda Galás no less, that it was my dream to cover this song. A song by casual estimations I have listened to 1786 times. I know this because of Apple Music. I know it because it’s the only thing I listened to when writing A Long Slow Screw, one of my novels. Galás got the sheet music and covered it later, telling me, “Hey, what did you expect? It is a great song. If it makes you feel any better I’ll dedicate it to you.” And she did. Live. Once. Cold comfort for a song I lived. But so it goes.

Jon Lucien “Laura”
From Premonition (1976)



The short story is that Lucien got trouble from his record label who aggressively misunderstood what he was trying to do. But before then he tossed off this standard like it was the easiest thing in the world, which it absolutely was not by the sound of it. It haunts exactly like the woman the song is named for from the movie that suggests as much.

Oxbow “1000 Hours”
From Love's Holiday (2023)



Is it bad form to mention me here? Not if every time I hear the song it makes my hair stand on end. “I love you…too much”. Drenched in a mixture of heartfelt emotion, menace and a deep seated sense of loss in a pop setting, I am still shocked I sang it and even more shocked that it came out of my head and my mouth the same way it came in: with a healthy dollop of horror.

Johnny Mathis “Open Fire”
From Open Fire, Two Guitars (1959)



I’ve been pimping this record since I found it vinyl diving at Goodwill. In every interview, along with my life long enduring fascination with the man singing it, Johnny Mathis, I’ve sang its praises. Mathis is mostly known for his pop hits, and even those have a sort of ghostly power, and no one achieves in small spaces what Mathis does. With a voice that’s distinct and afloat in what Brazilians call saudade, this is as good a song of seduction as there ever was.

Lydia Lunch “Gloomy Sunday”
From Queen Of Siam (1980)

No list like this would be complete without a mention of the informally named “suicide song”. With music by Rezső Seress and enduring, alternative lyrics written by László Jávor (or Sam Lewis and Desmond Carter, depending on your tastes) they all point to the same place. Though the number of suicides supposedly caused by the song can’t be verified at least one could: that of the songwriter, Seress. And Lunch’s take on it? If anything summed up the late 1970s where she first made her mark, this was it.

Ella Fitzgerald “Speak Low (When You Speak, Love)”
From Speak Love (1983)



Kurt Weill song with Ogden Nash lyrics and Ella kills it. “Our moment is swift…”, a paean to our finitude. It destroys me. Every time. It’s like “Freebird” for some. That is, if asked for requests, as I have been, by jazz combos, I’ll always ask for this. It separates the riff from the raff: those that can play it well, and those whom it consumes.

Johnny Hartman “A Slow Hot Wind”
From The Voice That Is! (1964)

Johnny Fucking Hartman. The singer’s singer – who could boast of a fan club that included Sinatra and Dean Martin – never really got his due, but he will here. Because not only is this column headline a lift from his record The Voice That Is! but his song “The Day The World Stopped Turning” from the same record was openly co-opted by Oxbow on Love’s Holiday with our song “The Night The Room Started Burning” – a tribute if there ever was one. But… his voice. Absolutely otherworldly. And we’re all the better for it.

Eugene S Robinson is interviewed by Laina Dawes in The Wire 473. Wire subscribers can also read the interview online via the digital library.