Tags
Gordy 7026 (A), December 1963
b/w He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands
(Written by W.A. Bisson, Esther Gordy Edwards and Berry Gordy)
Following on from her chaotic rendition of We Shall Overcome, cut as part of a Martin Luther King tie-in album to coincide with the Great March on Washington, Liz Lands – big-voiced, big-haired, classically-trained pseudo-operatic soprano Liz Lands – is here called upon to sing about the murder of President Kennedy. Without hearing the record, it feels as though she was in danger of becoming Motown’s Poet Laureate, wheeled out for political statements whenever the label wanted to Make A Comment with a serious, pretentious, “prestigious” gesture.
Certainly, the spectre of a real horror show was on the cards for this one – mawkish, sentimental, pompous, ghastly, even ghoulish. But instead, here, against all the odds, and in complete contrast to We Shall Overcome, the gravity of the situation and the sincerity of the record completely win out over stylistic excesses. It’s as though Gordy, Lands and everyone else involved knew they simply couldn’t bollocks this up, under any circumstances. And, incredibly, they don’t.
Everything about this should go hideously wrong, on paper at least. A tribute to a slain President laid with simplistic platitudes, (co-)written by Berry Gordy and sung by Liz Lands, neither of whom had exactly built a reputation for subtety or lightness of touch. But it’s actually almost perfect.
Berry Gordy believed in John F Kennedy, and this tribute may be the only thing he ever did that wasn’t a calculated commercial cash-in from the get-go. Maybe that makes me sound naïve, but I believe this. It might have been completely cynical, a bandwagon-jumping attempt of the most crass and brazen kind imaginable, but I don’t think so – it sounds honest to me, sounds hurt.
In today’s post-Band Aid atmosphere, this would have been cut as a charity single, with all the connotations of goodwill and cynicism and public posturing that phrase conjures up, but that doesn’t seem to have been the motivation for May What He Lived For Live. Berry Gordy sent copies of the record to both Jackie Kennedy and President Johnson as a heartfelt expression of solidarity; even Berry couldn’t be so appalling as to do that and not really mean it. No, this is for real, and I believe every word of it.
It helps that it’s actually one of the best songs Gordy ever had a hand in writing, no joke and no exaggeration. Like the Beach Boys’ The Warmth Of The Sun, inspired by the same feelings of numb shock stemming from the same event, it tries to deal with a national catastrophe on an emotional level. But instead of transposing the tragedy to a personal romantic problem, as with the Beach Boys record, here Motown confronts it head on. You think you’ve won, you twisted fucks? You’ve just lost. You will never, EVER beat us.
It’s disarmingly non-specific in its lyrics – Gordy later noted ruefully that it could apply just as easily to Dr King in the wake of his assassination, so generic are the platitudes when written down, and it’s no great stretch to consider it as a religious song about the crucifixion of Jesus rather than a lament for a politician – but at the same time it’s also very specific, because the context informs every moment of this, suffusing Liz’ every syllable, straight out of the speakers to the listener’s heart.
This is a steady, solemn march, a 55bpm dirge marked out metronomically in 4/4 time for organ, piano and gospel choir (the Voices of Love, aptly named here for once), stately but never funereal. Liz keeps largely in the alto and mezzo-sporano roles, perhaps out of deference to the seriousness of the occasion, and – some shock, this – she’s utterly brilliant, her standard operatic schtick suddenly appropriate, her delivery suddenly perfectly-judged, rich and resonating, as though knowing this might have to strike a chord with people for whom this really did seem like the end of the world, and to both echo and soothe their pain not just now but throughout the years. It doesn’t actually seem to have done so – it garnered little attention then and it’s little remembered now – but it certainly gets me, every single time.
It’s got everything and nothing to do with JFK; it’s just a towering, defiant record, and it’s magnificent in every sense. Kennedy himself is almost absent from the song, and similarly everywhere. Your own thoughts and feelings on the Kennedy administration and the assassination are irrelevant; this is about reacting to a loss, not the details of that loss. And if you don’t feel it in the pit of your stomach –
Enemies he made / Trying all to save / Let it be, now that he’s gone
Dreams he had for men / Have no dying end
May what they tried to kill live on
Live on
Live on
LIVE ON
– then there’s no hope for you. That “live on” bit, the song’s true devastating punch, is majestic. Soaring right up the scale, resolving in something approaching a full-on, dramatic, defiant chorus, followed by a high soprano “LIVE!” to end the song, itself dissolving into a howl of anguish right at the absolute top of Lands’ register (the only point in the song where Liz abandons control, usually the downfall of her Motown recordings but perfectly fitting here), all backed up by an astoundingly well-judged brass riff… it’s just top-class songcraft and singing, regardless of the setting.
Liz Lands’ Motown masterpiece is no sober requiem, then – JFK himself becomes a cipher, a sand sculpture at the centre of the song – but the tone is resolute and inspirational, both for and about we who must survive rather than those taken from us. Keep calm and carry on.
MOTOWN JUNKIES VERDICT
(I’ve had MY say, now it’s your turn. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment, or click the thumbs at the bottom there. Dissent is encouraged!)
You’re reading Motown Junkies, an attempt to review every Motown A- and B-side ever released. Click on the “previous” and “next” buttons below to go back and forth through the catalogue, or visit the Master Index for a full list of reviews so far.
(Or maybe you’re only interested in Liz Lands? Click for more.)
 |
 |
| The Miracles “Christmas Everyday” |
Liz Lands “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands” |
DISCOVERING MOTOWN |
|---|
Like the blog? Listen to our radio show! |
| Motown Junkies presents the finest Motown cuts, big hits and hard to find classics. Listen to all past episodes here. |
Motown Junkies 
And I bet when I said I only really liked one Liz Lands record, you all thought I meant “Midnight Johnny”, right? But no.
LikeLike
Actually, I thought you meant “Keep Me”!!!
LikeLike
Connie Francis also quickly had a JFK tribute single out too, “In The Summer Of His Years.”
I was only 9 but old enough to perceive the sense of mass shock. I remember every store in our Philadelphia neighborhood being closed, and I’d never seen television act like that before: there were no commercials on all three networks and just THE STORY. All weekend long.
That December you couldn’t do your Christmas shopping in any department store without seeing racks full of albums of Kennedy’s speeches with “In Memoriam” on their covers.
This goes too to why the timing of The Beatles was so perfect. One writer put it, that when they first appeared on Ed Sullivan the coming February, it was if they gave a numbed nation, still in grief over the murder of a beloved young president, “permission to be happy again.”
LikeLike
that’s what I like best. writing about the stuff that’s indefensible on many levels but just works. the mysterious stuff. We all have our own very personal faves that defy conventional wisdom and taste. for this reason this may be my favorite review so far. thanks
LikeLike
I remember reading about it but i’ve never heard it.
LikeLike
I totally agree with the reviewer that this is a sincere tribute, a beautifully crafted song, lovingly performed. To me it’s just a pity the tribute was intended for a man who almost brought the world to nuclear destruction. When I listen to this record I always try to forget it was written with this arrogant war monger in mind and imagine it was written as an epitaph for a more deserving person of which, of course there are many.
LikeLike
I don’t know where you live, but if you suddenly found yourself living within 100 miles of nuclear missiles, controlled by a belligerent government, and capable of transforming you, your family, and everyone else you know to ashes, you might be inclined to ask your government leaders to do something about it that assured that the above would not happen.
LikeLike
I ‘nafalmat’ come from the UK, but that’s irrelevent really because I would feel the same no matter where I came from. What I despise about the UK and America is that it was considered perfectly acceptable to have nuclear weapons, just a few hundred miles from the USSR, in Turkey pointing at the Russia, but not acceptable to have similar weapons at a similar distance pointing at the USA. Thank god Khrushchev had the decency to back down. It was him that saved the world from the first nuclear war, not Kennedy. Perhaps the song should have dedicated to him instead.
LikeLike
I suppose you are an adherent of a branch of the straw man concept that dictates that one who constructs a fearsome straw man and then removes it himself is considered a hero. That was no act of decency that led to the Khrushchev’s removal of his straw man. He was scared shitless, and his success in making his buddies in the Kremlin look like a bunch of morons led to HIS removal. Just as Jack Haney and Nikiter Armstrong.
LikeLike
Correction: Just ASK…
LikeLike
I’m not ardently an adherent of anything politcaclly speaking, but I simply don’t think that everything the USA and the UK do is right and everything the USSR did, or Russia does now, is wrong. People are people throughtout the world, and there’s good and bad in all races, religions, etc. That’s simply a fact. I was in my late teens in the UK in 1962 during the Cuban crisis, and believe me no one was I knew was looking on Kennedy as being some kind of hero, we we’re just frightened we were all going to blown to pieces, and there was a huge sigh of relief when Khrushchev backed down. Maybe the feeling was different in the USA, but that’s how the majority of ordinary folk felt in the UK. The one who backed down and avoided nuclear conflict was the one who was looked upon as the peace maker.
LikeLike
Your opinion. I have bigger fish to fry, like what happened to my shape??? Now I’m a big square inside a bigger square!!! What’s with that!!!!
LikeLike
Good. Now I have my shape back.
LikeLike
I appear to have 2 now.
LikeLike
It ain’t cool to be a square, Man! Get hip!
LikeLike
Tell me about it. Looks like a hack job. I”ll bet nafalmat got in touch with his komrads at the KGB!
LikeLike