"Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)" (Marvin Gaye)

After proving Motown president Berry Gordy wrong with the huge success of the single "What's Going On" (Gordy had initially refused to release the song, feeling it was uncommercial and would alienate longtime fans with its social message), Marvin Gaye continued in his social consciousness vein with "Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)."  
After taking an extended break from recording, largely due to being depressed about the death of his friend and singing partner Tammi Terrell, who'd passed in 1970 from a brain tumor, Gaye decided that, if he was going to record again, he only was going to make music that spoke to things he cared about: love, life, God, people, and nature.
As Gaye told Britain's Disc and Music Echo in 1971, "I can remember as a child I always kept myself to myself, and I always dug nature.  I used to fool around with worms, beetles, and birds, and I used to admire them while the other kids were playing sports.  It was like some strange force made me more aware of nature."
It probably seemed completely out of left field at the time for an R&B star to release a song about environmental concerns, but Gaye felt it was his duty to say something.
Incidentally, Gordy didn't care for "Mercy, Mercy Me" either.  (Apparently, he also had to be told what ecology was.)  But, once again, he changed his tune when the single version became a Top 10 seller in 1971.
Apart from Gaye's heartfelt delivery and poignant commentary about the ills mankind had inflicted upon the environment, I love the sound of this track.  There's the deep, signature Funk Brothers groove and Wild Bill Moore's unhinged sax solo, but then there's also that echo created by the heavy reverb on the percussion instruments.  That spacious sound created by the woodblock and congas is so evocative of the song's somber mood; it not only sets the scene that Gaye is drawing upon distant memories of better times, but it also replicates the paved-over, hollow sound of inner cities in that era.
In fact, if you are old enough to remember what most downtowns across America looked like in the 70s to the mid-80s, you'll know what I mean: there often were few trees, lots of concrete and asphalt, and lots of abandoned buildings.  In that emptiness, the cold sounds of vehicles and machines were amplified, including the din of demolition—the crashing and banging of falling debris and dump trucks.  Those were the sounds I heard as a child when my parents would take me to downtown Asheville.  Or when we visited relatives in the Rust Belt.  Or when we went to D.C. for the first time and stayed on South Capitol Street.
And it was that sound that struck me the first time I heard the song on the radio as a kid.  I remember being amazed that a sound could capture a time and place so precisely.
And I still marvel at Gaye's brilliance to not only use his words but also the very aural texture of America's crumbling cities to reach listeners.  It's simply a great and important song.

"For What It's Worth" (Buffalo Springfield)

It's almost ridiculously simple: an understated acoustic guitar playing a single chord, paired with an electric guitar with the tremolo cranked up, playing the same two-note pattern, over and over—plucking the 1, plucking the 5, and then back down to the 1 of the scale.  It doesn't sound like a formula for any kind of hit song.  But that's the structure of "For What It's Worth" by short-lived folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield.
The song was penned and sung by Stephen Stills, who most notably went on to form supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash after Buffalo Springfield imploded (the result of creative tensions between Stills and bandmate Neil Young and various members getting busted—and even deported—for possession).  Although it's often assumed that the track is a protest song about the Vietnam War, that's not the case.  Stills wrote it after witnessing a run-in between police and students on LA's Sunset Strip.
There were a number of bars and clubs geared to teens and college students along Sunset Blvd.  Various business owners and older residents had grown tired of kids congregating outside the late night clubs, and they pushed to have a "no loitering" ordinance passed, which stipulated a 10 pm curfew.  Students saw this as a violation of their rights, so they took to the street outside a club called Pandora's Box (currently the site of a traffic island, across from a strip mall).  Things started peaceably enough.  But as the number of student protestors grew and they started blocking traffic, that's when the riot squad got called in.  Stills wasn't directly involved in the protest; he'd merely driven through the area, saw the tense situation, and turned right around and headed home, where he came up with the music and lyrics in a matter of minutes.
A close read of the lyrics reveals that it's neither explicitly pro-students nor pro-police; it's merely a chronicle of the event by a bystander who can't really comprehend how things got so out of hand.  In short, you have the students marching and holding picket signs on one side because they're pissed off about a curfew, and then police overreacting on the other.  That's why the refrain (I think it's time we stop. Children, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down) is just as important as the line Nobody's right if everybody's wrong, in my humble opinion.
So it's not a protest song.  But it is one hell of a piece of journalism, set to the funkiest backbeat in all of 60s folk-rock.

"Into the Mystic" (Van Morrison)

Van Morrison's Moondance (1970) is one of those rare albums that fits any mood.  Its tinges of R&B and jazz can drag me out of gloom when I'm down or play the perfect companion when things are sunny.  At the same time, its folk-rock jangle can be the perfect prescription for soothing a stressful day.
It's just a well made, genre-defying record that stands the test of time.
One of my favorite tracks from the album is "Into the Mystic."  Originally titled "Into the Misty," Morrison sensed the inherent spirituality of the song and decided "Into the Mystic" was a richer, more fitting title.  In it, Morrison uses vivid seafaring imagery and a soulful, bass-driven groove to explore the spiritual side of the human condition, poetically addressing everything from love to mortality in a mere three minutes.
In short, there's nothing quite like hearing Van the Man belt out I wanna rock your gypsy soul followed by that dual saxophone riff to make your spirit feel like it's soaring.

"Strawberry Fields Forever" (The Beatles)

So much has been written about "Strawberry Fields Forever" already, so I'll keep the history portion brief.
In 1966, The Beatles had tired of touring.  The crazed fans, various death threats, and breakneck schedule had taken their toll, and the band was on the verge of breakup.  So they officially retired from the road and turned their focus exclusively to making records.
The studio follow up to their mid-1966 album Revolver originally was planned as a concept album: a collection of original songs about childhood memories of growing up in Liverpool.  As we all know, the band famously took the album concept in a different direction, pretending to be an Edwardian-era marching band in day-glo uniforms, playing a concert for a crowd of onlookers.  Nevertheless, two songs were recorded for the nostalgia project before it was abandoned: Paul McCartney's "Penny Lane" and John Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever," both released as a double A-side single in February 1967.
Strawberry Field (minus the "s") was the name of a Salvation Army home for children, located a short walk from Lennon's childhood home.  He and his boyhood friends would often play in Strawberry Field's garden, despite his aunt's stern orders not to trespass on the property.  (My guess is that's exactly why they played there and why it held such fond memories for him.)
I first heard "Strawberry Fields Forever" on the car radio on the way home from my elementary school's annual Halloween Carnival, which was sort of a throwback to rural harvest festivals, complete with bobbing for apples, cakewalks, and the like.  The ghosts-n'-goblins feel of the evening kind of fit with the psychedelic vibe of the song's eerie Mellotron flutes, strange backwards percussion, and heavily compressed strings.  So for many years, the song just evoked fond memories of being 6 years old and playing carnival games in a homemade lion costume.
But when I bought Magical Mystery Tour on CD as a teenager and listened to it while driving to/from school, "Strawberry Fields Forever" resonated with me for a different reason.  Lennon's poetic, stream-of-consciousness lyrics painted the picture of a bittersweet childhood: the innocence and escape of Strawberry Field pitted against feelings of being a misunderstood oddball.
I'd also felt like the odd man out growing up.  I was an only child, and there were no kids my age in my neighborhood to play with, so I learned early on to keep myself occupied—drawing, building Lego cities, going on fantasy time travel adventures on my bike, or pretending to be a rock star and putting on concerts for my stuffed animals and action figures.  I also spent a lot of time around the adult members of my family.  Consequently, my interests and topics of conversation tended to be a little more World News Tonight than Fraggle Rock.  So I often felt like I was speaking a different language from some kids at school, never really connecting with them on an intellectual level.  That's why Lennon's whole lyrical motif of knowing you have a passionate, singular point of view but having difficulty expressing it to others really struck me.  
I came to embrace the song's refrain Strawberry Fields, forever as a kind of rallying cry for individuality—a declaration that, just because you're misunderstood by some doesn't mean you should change how you look at the world.

"You're All I Need to Get By" (Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell)

"You're All I Need to Get By" (1968) is one of the best ballads ever released by Motown.  The Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson-penned track is dramatic without drifting into the realm of melodrama.  It works because, even with those dulcet strings, you have The Funk Brothers rhythm section keeping the song rooted in soul along with Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell delivering their vocals with gospel-tinged fervor.  It's passionate, and it's honest.
As I've written before, Terrell and Gaye weren't actually romantically involved.  Although, that's almost hard to believe, listening to a performance like "You're All I Need to Get By."  I think it's fair to say that they were soulmates.
While performing with Gaye at Hampton-Sydney College in Virginia, Terrell, who had been prone to migraine headaches her entire life, collapsed on stage in Gaye's arms after complaining that she wasn't feeling well.  Turned out that she had a malignant tumor, growing in her thalamus.
Recovering from the first of many operations and wheelchair-bound, Terrell still wanted to record, and "You're All I Need to Get By" was the first single that she worked on, post-surgery.  Because of their schedules (and also to allow Terrell sufficient time to rest and recover), she and Gaye didn't cut their vocals together in the studio; their vocals were recorded separately and then edited together as a duet afterward.  Nevertheless, there's still a palpable feeling of unity on the track.  And under the difficult circumstances, I think it's even more poignant that they were singing to each other (even if it was via studio wizardry): you're all I need to get by.

"Take Five" (Dave Brubeck Quartet)

"Take Five" is one of those curious songs that seems to cross every boundary.  Even people who claim to not like jazz will embrace "Take Five" as one of their perennial favorite songs.  Personally, I think it has as much to do with its eternal cool factor as it does with its indelible saxophone melody.  Saying that you're a fan of "Take Five" is like casually flashing your membership card to the avant-garde.
Brubeck and his band had come back from a 1958 U.S. Department of State-sponsored world tour, where they had acted as "jazz ambassadors," sharing the uniquely American art form with developing nations and countries that had been cut off from the West by the Iron Curtain.  Along the way, they jammed with local musicians in places like India, Pakistan, and Turkey, where they soaked up the intricate folk rhythms, which often were in time signatures like 7/8 or 9/8—time signatures that were uncommon to jazz in 1958.
All of those experiences were distilled into the album Time Out (1959), which presented a set of seven original compositions, all in time signatures other than waltz (3/4) or common (4/4) time.
During one of the sessions for Time Out at Columbia's famed 30th Street Studio in New York, drummer Joe Morello was playing around with a rhythm in 5/4 time, and Brubeck asked saxophonist Paul Desmond if he could come up with a melody that played off Morello's beat.  Desmond doodled around for a bit and came up with two passages but struggled with how to unite them into a single song.  So Brubeck stepped in and added the staccato piano vamp, creating a foundation for the verse, and then figured out the release heading into the bridge section.  And "Take Five" (named for its 5/4 time signature) was born.
Curiously enough, the song is credited only to Desmond, even though it is the tune most associated with Brubeck.

"Rhapsody in Blue" (George Gershwin)

George Gershwin had earned renown writing jazz-inflected pop tunes and music for Broadway in the late 1910s and early 20s.  But no one (perhaps even Gershwin himself) anticipated that he would win acclaim as a classical music composer.
It was late 1923, and famed bandleader Paul Whiteman was making plans to stage a concert in February 1924 at New York's Aeolian Hall to, once and for all, legitimize jazz as an accepted art form.  The gist of the "Experiment in Modern Music" performance was to show how jazz and classical idioms could intertwine through a series of educational/experimental performances.
The year before, as part of the Broadway musical revue Scandals of 1922, Whiteman had conducted the orchestra for Gershwin's Blue Monday, a one-act jazz opera that transported Leoncavallo's Pagliacci from Calabria to a basement bar on Harlem's 135th Street.  It flopped.  In fact, it went over so poorly with the audience and critics that it was removed from all subsequent performances of the revue.  Nevertheless, the ambitious piece made such an impression on Whiteman that Gershwin was his logical first choice when commissioning an original work for the upcoming Aeolian Hall concert.
But Gershwin turned him down flat.  He told Whiteman that there was no way he could write and refine a brand new composition (without embarrassing them both) in the few weeks between the New Year and the February show.
Gershwin didn't give Whiteman's commission another thought until his lyricist brother, Ira, showed him an article in the New York Times, which quoted Whiteman as saying that George was hard at work on an experimental piece of music for the Aeolian Hall show.
Being over a barrel, Gershwin set about writing the composition with only 5 weeks to spare and work left to do on a brand new musical, Sweet Little Devil, which was set to open on January 21.
While on the train to Boston in mid-January to "test market" Sweet Little Devil before its formal debut on Broadway, the first pieces of what Gershwin was tentatively calling his American Rhapsody started to fall into place.
"I suddenly heard—and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end…I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness."
The final piece of the puzzle came at a cocktail party back in New York, where the composer was noodling around on piano, as he often did.  Ira was nearby listening and realized that the improvised theme George was playing—that grand, andante section that United Airlines has famously used in its commercials since 1987—should be the finale of the piece.
The final title of the work was suggested by Ira, too.  Having visited an exhibition of James Whistler's paintings, Ira was inspired by the titles of several of the works (Symphony in White, No. 1; Nocturne: Blue and Gold; Arrangement in Gray and Black—a.k.a Whistler's Mother).  Ultimately, it was decided by the brothers Gershwin that the piece should be called Rhapsody in Blue.
***
I love this piece of music in any form.  And while I'm very fond of the fully orchestrated version with its signature glissando clarinet wail at the start, there's another version that is my personal favorite, which is embedded below.
Back in 1993, pianist and music historian Artis Wodehouse compiled the album Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls, using Yamaha's Disklavier technology to read and interpret player piano rolls that Gershwin had cut for the Duo-Art Piano Roll company in the 1920s.  In essence, what you hear on the recording is Rhapsody in Blue in its purest, simplest form: Gershwin himself on piano, circa 1927, playing his heart out.
Gives me chills every time I listen to it.

"Air on the G String - Orchestral Suite No. 3, Movement 2, BWV 1068" (J.S. Bach)

I first heard the piece known as "Air on the G String" (a nickname given to the second movement of J.S. Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 3 after 19th century German violinist August Wilhelmj transposed it from D major to C major, thereby allowing one to play the melody completely on the G string of a violin) when I was a little kid.

My mom, ever the audiophile and music fan, had a copy of the avant-garde album Switched on Bach (1968) by electronic music artist Wendy Carlos.  If you're not familiar with the album, it's understandable; it has been out of print for a number of years, unfortunately.  On it, Carlos uses the Moog synthesizer to recreate a number of Bach's "greatest hits" with some pretty dramatic results.  Most importantly, it's futuristic while still respecting the source material, which keeps it from being just some experimental novelty record.

The second track of Switched on Bach is "Air on the G String," and it became a fast favorite of mine as a kid.  Carlos's arrangement for the synthesizer and the stereo separation of the recording push Bach's melody to the forefront, showcasing just what a beautiful melody it is.

I didn't hear "Air on the G String" performed by actual strings, though, until I was a pre-teen.  I was up early one Saturday morning, long before everyone else, and I started channel surfing to see what was on at that time of day.  I ended up landing on either A&E or Bravo (back when they had actual arts programming instead of dreck), and there was a string quintet on an empty stage, playing the piece.  It was only some interstitial clip that the station was using to fill time until the next scheduled program, but it was so achingly beautiful that I watched the whole thing.  

Listening to the piece as the sun came up and beamed through our living room windows, I couldn't help but get a little choked up.  The string version has been my favorite ever since.

Anyway, it's moments and memories like that that made me want to create this list.

"I Only Have Eyes for You" (The Flamingos)

"I Only Have Eyes for You" (1959) by The Flamingos is the kind of song that suspends time and space for me.  It's so perfectly wrought—the close harmonies, the dreamy instrumentation, the echoey backing vocals—that I have to stop whatever I'm doing and appreciate it, every time I hear it.
The song was written by Tin Pan Alley alums Al Dubin (lyrics) and Harry Warren (music) for a campy movie-musical called Dames (1934), which is pretty light on plot but heavy on lavishly choreographed dance sequences by Busby Berkeley.  (If you've ever seen random footage from Depression-era movie-musicals, where the dancers are creating insanely intricate geometric patterns as they move, you're viewing the work of Berkeley.)
The Flamingos got ahold of the song in 1959 after signing a recording contract with New York's End Records.  End's chief, George Goldner, and the group's artists & repertoire director, Richard Barrett (who'd discovered fellow doo-wop group Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers), had picked out several dozen songs for the group to practice with the ultimate goal of choosing a handful of the best cuts for an album.  One of the songs was Dubin and Warren's "I Only Have Eyes for You."  
Out of the 30 or so tunes that Goldner and Barrett had picked, "I Only Have Eyes for You" gave the most trouble to Terry "Buzzy" Johnson, the group's lead singer and resident arranger.  After hours of working on the song, Johnson just couldn't come up with an arrangement that satisfied him, feeling that the chord changes were too mundane or too derivative of other versions that had come before.
So he slept on it.
Actually, he fell asleep with his guitar on his chest in the midst of working on it, and the full arrangement—including the unearthly doo-bop sh-bop backing vocals, the triplet piano pattern, and the stacked vocals on every chorus—came to him in a dream.
As Johnson told Sound on Sound magazine in March 2009, "As soon as I woke up, I grabbed the guitar off my chest and it was like God put my fingers just where they were supposed to be.  I played those chords and I heard the harmonies, and so I called the guys.  I woke them all up and I said, 'Come over to my room right now!  I've got 'I Only Have Eyes For You'!"

"My Baby Just Cares for Me" (Nina Simone)

I first heard Nina Simone's version of "My Baby Just Cares for Me" in a somewhat unlikely place: an ad copywriting class in college.
Our professor was discussing how to write effective commercials.  Specifically, he was trying to instill in us that we didn't have to beat people over the head with a product name every 5 seconds.  (A skill that some of us were better at than others.)  Anyway, he was showing us a reel of commercials, where each spot was more about telling a story or conveying the feeling of a brand rather than pushing a product.  There was this one spot for perfume (a quick Google search reminded me that it was a commercial for Chanel No. 5, circa 1987) that had "My Baby Just Cares for Me" playing over cinematic shots of a model zipping through the desert in a sports car.  Of course, I didn't give a rip about the perfume or the model with her big-ass 80s shoulder pads; I just wanted to know what that song was.
After lecture, I marched down to Franklin Street to the former Schoolkids Records, recounted what I could of the lyrics to the Goth girl behind the counter, and watched the immediate look of recognition spread across her heavily-pierced yet sweet face.
"That's Nina Simone.  Oh, I love Nina Simone!"  She was practically giddy.
So that's how I ended up with a CD of Simone's 1958 album Little Girl Blue (which got lost/stolen somewhere along the way) and became a life-long fan of the Tryon, NC-born artist.
The song itself dates to 1930.  It was penned by lyricist Gus Khan and melodist Walter Donaldson (the duo behind other hit songs of the 20s/30s, like "Carolina in the Morning," "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby," and "Makin' Whoopee") for the Eddie Cantor movie-musical, Whoopee!  A search of the Cantor version on the Web will bring up a scene from Whoopee! of the actor/singer in blackface, doing a soft-shoe while singing the number to a crowd of onlookers.  Not going to mince words: it's revolting.  That's why I'm not posting a link.
But leave it to Simone to take something like that and completely reshape and own it.  Not only does she completely rework the melody and rhythms into a sleek, jazzy display of her virtuosity (she was as expressive a pianist as she was a vocalist), she revises the lyrics to fit the new context, too.  It's a 3-minute masterpiece.

"I've Got You Under My Skin" (Frank Sinatra)

Frank Sinatra recorded a slew of versions of Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin."  The most famous is probably the one from his 1956 album Songs for Swingin' Lovers featuring composer/orchestrator Nelson Riddle's signature Boléro-inspired arrangement.  But I prefer the rendition from the 1963 album Sinatra's Sinatra.  (Incidentally, that version also was arranged and conducted by Riddle.  More on that in a second.)
Story goes, Sinatra was growing disillusioned with his lack of creative control while signed to Capitol Records.  So in 1960, he founded his own label, Reprise, with the lofty goal that any artist signed to Reprise would have 100% artistic control and own the rights to his/her music outright.  Technically, though, he was still under contract with Capitol until 1962, so he ended up recording albums for both labels simultaneously, occasionally cutting the same song for separate releases, literally days apart.
During this period, Capitol also began re-releasing his late 50s hits on compilation albums to milk the cash cow while it could.  Not to be one-upped by Capitol, Sinatra recruited Riddle to re-record some of his old favorites for release on Reprise; Sinatra's Sinatra was one of those releases.  (The gimmick to beat Capitol: the re-recordings were in stereo–still a bit of a novelty at the time.)
Anyway, the reason I prefer the 1963 cut is because it swings a bit more.  It's looser.  Sinatra's delivery feels more playful and even more assured than the Swingin' Lovers version, which is saying a lot, because the '56 version is considered a defining performance.
And it's probably sacrilege to say this, but I prefer Dick Nash's ebullient trombone solo to Milt Bernhardt's original.  Nash's take just has a little more flash and feels a little brighter.  (Sinatra and Riddle actually had wanted Bernhardt on the '63 session, but the musician was booked for another recording.)  
Long and short, it's a commanding, timeless performance that illustrates why people will still be fans of Ol' Blue Eyes in 2063 and beyond.

"Constant Craving" (k.d. lang)

As I've written before, I'm usually drawn to a song by the way it sounds.  At least that's the initial appeal.  I can't help myself, though, from wanting to dissect lyrics and figure out what an artist is trying to get across.  (Unless it's something caveman-blunt like: "let's get wasted and shag like rabbits."  Don't get me wrong; that definitely has its place, too.)
I remember watching k.d. lang perform her breakout single "Constant Craving" from the album Ingénue on late night television back in 1992 and being captivated by the sound of her voice: velvety and smooth with just a hint of smoke.  I also was pulled in by the organic, alt-country feel of the song itself, which felt like a natural progression from her tomboy-cowgirl days of the late 80s, when she was trying maybe a little too hard to be Dale Evans, Patsy Cline, Marty Robbins, and Roy Orbison, all rolled into one.
Anyway, my assumption was that, with a title like "Constant Craving," the song was probably an exploration of obsession, not unlike Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" from a few years before.
But the more I've read about lang over the years, I think I missed the point the first time around.  The song seems to be more inspired by her devotion to Buddhism, exploring the nature of expression and overcoming (or, at the very least, coming to grips with) the need to be validated by others as an artist.
In fact, a fan asked lang via Twitter back in 2013 what the song meant to her.  She responded, "Divine dissatisfaction."
If you Google the phrase "divine dissatisfaction," you find a quote from choreographer/modern dance innovator Martha Graham regarding the nature of art, extracted from fellow choreographer Agnes de Mille's 1991 book, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham.  The setup is, de Mille was lamenting to Graham that she felt some of her best work had been overlooked, whereas something she felt was mediocre at best was garnering a lot of attention: 

"Martha said to me very quietly: 'There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.  And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost…No artist is pleased.  [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time.  There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others'…"

I think that sentiment fits pretty well with lang's lyrics.  
And it makes sense in context: in 1992, lang had been trying to garner mainstream country success for nearly a decade, but she didn't fit the mainstream mold.  So she was in the process of reinventing herself as a pop chanteuse.  It must have been extremely tough to leave behind a body of work and image that she'd worked hard to cultivate for years.
Also, she had doubts about the merits of the song itself.  Her writing partner, Ben Mink, told Mix magazine in 2013 that lang wanted to trash the song early on because she felt it sounded "too commercial."  It wasn't until they changed the key it was in and added touches like the anti-pop, European-sounding accordion that she ultimately felt better about it.

"Wicked Game" (Chris Isaak)

"Wicked Game" (1989, re-released 1990) from the album Heart Shaped World may be the sexiest song ever recorded.  It's not just Chris Isaak's whispered/falsetto vocals.  Or the lonesome slide guitar over a backing track that sounds like its was recorded in a smoky bar in Amarillo, TX, at 1 in the morning, circa 1957.  It's the song's inherent sense of danger and need.
It's a song about all-consuming passion, bordering on obsession.  It's a peek into a man's mind who is wrestling with giving in to animalistic desires versus doing what he knows is best, which is not getting involved in the first place.  He knows he's in for a world of hurt and emotional turmoil, but he can't help himself from falling.
Isaak walks a fine line between agony and ecstasy, peril and refuge, and that's what makes the song so compelling.
And apparently, the song is autobiographical.
It was inspired by a late night call that Isaak received from a female acquaintance, asking him to come over and "talk."  Long story short, he knew this woman was "trouble," yet it didn't stop him from welcoming her to his house.  In the minutes before she arrived, he worked through his wildly mixed emotions by writing both the words and music to "Wicked Game."
As he told Songfacts.com interviewer Dan MacIntosh: "She was probably upset because I was more excited by the song."

"Sunday Morning" (The Velvet Underground)

"Sunday Morning" (1966) is probably the most commercial yet sneakily subversive track The Velvet Underground ever recorded.  It was written at the behest of producer Tom Wilson, who wanted a radio-friendly single to introduce the band and its German chanteuse, Nico, to the record-buying world before its debut album dropped.  Although the song was intended as a vehicle for Nico, Lou Reed ended up singing the lead vocal instead in a Nico-like whisper, turning in one of his more pitch-perfect performances.  (And a fine, folk-rock guitar solo to match.)
On its surface, "Sunday Morning" sounds as safe as milk: a dreamy, upbeat lullaby, replete with Sugar Plum Fairy-visions of John Cale tinkling around on a celesta that happened to be in the recording studio.  Under its pleasant exterior, however, is an examination of anxiety and regret felt after a night of indulgence.  Reed delivers the vocal with such reverence it's easy to miss that he's not singing about waking up to church bells chiming outside his window.
Subject matter aside, the track has a memorable melody (the kind that you find yourself humming inappropriately on a crowded subway train) with lush, reverb-y production work by Wilson.
Anyone who bought the single thinking it was representative of the full album was in for a very rude, R-rated awakening.

"I Love You for Sentimental Reasons" (The Righteous Brothers)

"I Love You for Sentimental Reasons" was written in 1945 by Deek Watson and Pat Best of the vocal group The Brown Dots, a group Watson formed in 1944 after leaving The Ink Spots.  (Although, Best claimed that he alone wrote the song as a love letter to a girl, and Watson just took a writing credit as the leader of the group.)  Whatever the case, it's a song I never tire of hearing, no matter who's covering it or how many times it's covered.  And many have covered it: Nat "King" Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye & Mary Wells...  They all did great versions.  However, I prefer the Phil Spector-produced version for The Righteous Brothers from 1965.
Released as the B-side of the hit single "Ebb Tide," it's essentially a solo record by Bobby Hatfield (not unlike "Ebb Tide," actually).  As usual, Spector uses his "Wall of Sound" production technique, surrounding Hatfield with swirling strings, plucked harps, thumping bass, heavily reverbed drums, and female backing vocals.  It's no less dramatic than anything else Spector ever produced, but the feel here is even more pillowy and—dare I say it—sentimental; sonically, it's like taking a stroll through a cloud.
And there's nothing quite as soul-stirring as hearing Hatfield hit those high notes on the bridge.  If you've never heard this rendition before, you'll be a convert after you hear him sing Whenever you're in sight.

"At Last" (Etta James)

Etta James needed a career comeback.  And she was just 22 years old.  She'd had a couple of small R&B hits as a teenager in the mid/late 50s but had struggled to really make a name for herself.
Until she signed with Argo Records, an imprint of Chess, in 1960.
Rather than stick James back in a typical R&B context, label founder Leonard Chess decided she needed the crooner treatment instead, backing her with a full orchestra.  Instinctively, he knew that combining James's Ruth Brown-like swagger with lush strings would be the ticket to her success.
The hit singles and breakthrough album that resulted, 1960's At Last!, include some of my favorite performances ever put to tape.  On that album, James tackles everything from gritty blues to soulful, jazzy ballads, and she does it all seamlessly, sounding much older and wiser than any 22-year-old probably should.
But the apex of the whole disc really is "At Last" (as Chess no doubt knew when he titled the album).
A lot of people don't realize, though, that the song had already been around for almost two decades when James made it her own.  Bandleader Glenn Miller had recorded it with his orchestra for a 1942 cornball musical comedy called Orchestra Wives (you can watch a clip of the band playing the tune here).  I actually remember hearing that version on a Miller compilation album at my grandmother's house, many years before I first heard James's version on the Rain Man soundtrack (1988).  Miller's original is pleasant—a nice, dreamy little foxtrot that's made for strolling to the punchbowl between fast numbers.  (In other words, kind of forgettable.)
But James's interpretation is another thing entirely: the strings swell like a heart ready to burst, while James expertly wrings the emotion out of every syllable, caressing the tender moments and trumpeting every exclamation.  Dramatic without being melodramatic, romantic without being hokey, it's perfect in every possible way.

"Summertime" (Miles Davis)

I took voice lessons for a hot second back in high school.  My voice teacher (and I use the term "teacher" loosely) was a music professor at the small liberal arts college in my hometown.  He was consistently late to our appointments and was always distracted.  That is, when he bothered to show up at all.  Which really sucked, because I had to pay the guy for a month of lessons in advance, and the money was coming out of my own measly checking account.
One afternoon, we're plodding through Giordani's aria "Caro Mio Ben."  He's bored and distracted, which is making me bored and distracted.  So I start scanning his bookshelf (while I'm still belting out the song in Italian), and I see a copy of the Miles Davis-Gil Evans 1958 reimagining of George Gershwin's Porgy & Bess on the shelf.  So during a short water break, I ask him about it.
"I have a Miles Davis compilation album of his early Blue Note recordings.  Is this one good, too?"
He looked at me like I'd ripped one.  "Is it good?"
As I stumbled and stammered, trying to explain that I was just getting into jazz, and that I'd heard a mid-60s album Davis had recorded and didn't care for it, he stopped me.
"Yeah.  It's good."
He cut the lesson short by 15 minutes that afternoon, in an obvious rush to be somewhere else.  Incidentally, there was no next lesson.  Not because I pulled the plug.  (I should have, though.)  He just never showed up again.
About a month later, I ran into a girl I knew who'd also been taking lessons from him.  She filled me in that he'd been having an affair with the Dean of Students.  Apparently, they had both packed up and left town together right after my final lesson without giving anyone, including the college, any notice.
Anyway, when he cut my last lesson short, I walked across the street to our town's lone record store, where I asked the owner about Davis's Porgy & Bess.  There was no eye-rolling or irritated looks.  He just popped in the CD, and we listened to it over the PA system and talked music for about an hour.  I ended up spending the money set aside for the next month's voice lessons on Davis's Porgy & Bess and Kind of Blue.  Good investments, I'd say.
Regarding "Summertime" specifically, it's one of my favorite pieces of instrumental jazz.  Evans's arrangement strips Gershwin's aria down to its skeleton, turning it into a modal piece built upon lush, sultry chords, thereby giving Davis the freedom to stick to or stray from the melody as he pleases.  In three sophisticated minutes, it captures the swelter of a South Carolina Lowcountry summer night and also pays homage to Gershwin without being a carbon copy of the original.

"Theme from A Summer Place" (Percy Faith)

When I was maybe 3 or 4 years old, our local TV station would play old movies on Saturday afternoons.  The tune it used for the opening titles of its so-called Saturday Matinee was arranger/conductor Percy Faith's rendition of "Theme from A Summer Place."
To most people, the song evokes mental images of waves crashing on a beach and white sails against crystalline water, which is completely understandable.  But, for me, the tune is associated with weekends, when my dad wasn't having to run to work and my mom had time to tinker in the kitchen.  Hearing even the first few notes brings to mind Dad lounging on the sofa, religiously flipping through his monthly copy of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers' Journal and only half paying attention to the plight of Sandra Dee or Tippi Hedren or whatever former starlet was on the T.V. screen, while the smell of warm cinnamon or chocolate wafted in from the next room.
Thing is, even though it appears in the 1959 film A Summer Place, the song is not actually the title theme.  Composer Max Steiner, who also created memorable scores for the films Casablanca and Gone with the Wind, wrote the song for a brief scene between the film's two teenage protagonists to evoke the feel of young love (which explains why it was originally known as "Molly and Johnny Theme").  It came to be known as the "Theme from A Summer Place" when the Toronto-born Faith re-recorded it and turned it into one of the biggest songs of 1960.
Sure, it's a little cheesy.  But there's also something irresistible about Faith's recording—the lush, layered strings set against the reverb-heavy drums, playing a triplet pattern that's culled from 50s rock.  It's both of its time yet timeless.  And it's perfectly crafted to evoke nostalgia, be it summer crushes or lazy Saturday afternoons.

"Sleep Walk" (Santo & Johnny)

"Sleep Walk" (1959) by the duo Santo & Johnny is one of those songs that you might not know by name, but the moment you hear those dreamy opening chords and that wistful steel guitar, you know it by heart.
The story begins on a military base in Oklahoma at the start of World War II.
When brothers Santo and Johnny Farina were just toddlers, their father was drafted into the Army.  While stationed in Oklahoma for basic training, the elder Farina kept hearing Country & Western steel guitar music on the radio.  The lonesome, cowpoke twang was unlike anything he'd heard growing up in his native Italy or back in Brooklyn, where the family lived.  He quickly fell in love with the sound and wrote home to his wife, urging her to get steel guitar lessons for their boys.
It probably goes without saying that it wasn't easy finding a steel guitar teacher in New York in those days.  After a few less-than-successful guitar lessons at a music shop in Brooklyn Heights, the Farinas discovered Eddie Bell, a musician and teacher who had a gig playing Hawaiian steel guitar at a kitschy tiki bar in Midtown Manhattan.  Under Bell's tutelage, the brothers began to master their instruments (Santo on steel and Johnny on electric guitar).  By the late 50s, the brothers had gained a decent following in Brooklyn, playing covers of rock & roll/pop songs at school sock-hops, church dances, and small Brooklyn clubs.
One evening after a show, the brothers were too revved up from performing to go right to bed, so they started jamming to wind down.  The result was an ethereal instrumental that they initially called "Deep Sleep," which after some fine tuning developed into the international hit song "Sleep Walk."
Personally, knowing the backstory sheds so much light on this track, which otherwise seems a bit alien in the landscape of rock & roll in 1959.  Breaking the song down, you can hear a dab of the Country twang their father loved so much, a touch of Brooklyn doo-wop, a bit of their mentor's Hawaiian steel technique, and even a little Italian folk music.
It's that gorgeous melting pot of influences and haunting, note-perfect performance that make the tune a timeless classic.

"Moonlight Serenade" (Glenn Miller)

My grandmother was a big fan of Big Band.  Especially the music of trombonist/bandleader Glenn Miller.  I remember sitting on her living room floor as a kid and listening as she played Miller's albums, soaking up the sounds of "In the Mood" and "A String of Pearls."  
"That's music, baby," she'd tell me.
I liked the faster tunes, but it was Miller's breakout hit, "Moonlight Serenade" (1939), that really grabbed me the first time I heard it.  I made her stop the album to play it a second (and maybe third) time, just to soak it all in.  
When she asked me what it was about "Moonlight Serenade" that I liked so much, my four-year-old brain was at a loss for words to describe the masterpiece that I'd just experienced.  It wasn't "nice."  Or "pretty."  (Even though it was.)
Then, Gramma put it perfectly: "It's mellow."
Mellow.  Like a fine wine.  Or watching the sunrise on a quiet beach.  It's the best adjective for the so-called "Glenn Miller Sound."
After arranging music and playing for other bandleaders throughout the 30s, Miller formed his own band in 1937 but had trouble selling records and booking gigs because nothing really made his sound stand out.  He ended up breaking up the group just a year later, leaving him depressed and searching for his aural trademark.
When he retreated to New York in 1938, he began playing with new ways to arrange his compositions, and a formula hit him: put the clarinet out front to play the melody, a tenor sax to double the melody an octave below, and then add one more tenor and two alto saxes to play harmony.
That's exactly what you hear on "Moonlight Serenade," and exactly what pulled Miller out of the doldrums and into superstardom.

"Waiting in Vain" (Bob Marley & The Wailers)

Bob Marley's 1977 album Exodus is kind of the perfect balance of everything that made Marley, Marley: the political, the soulful, the spiritual, the sexual.  It's all in the mix.

Although it's a difficult album to cherry-pick, a standout for me has always been the track "Waiting in Vain."  At the center of this tranquil island groove lies a flaming heart of passion.  But it's hard to just label it a "love ballad"; it's less of a paean to love and more of a poetic ultimatum, directed at the object of Marley's desires.

Which brings us to the story behind the song.

It's no secret that Marley had a lot of relationships with women other than his wife, Rita.  We're talking a lot of other women.  I'm not even going to purport that I know anything about Rastafarianism or how Marley's own ideas about fidelity and fathering children were influenced by his religious mores, but he let it be known that he felt marriage was a trap and that his own marriage to Rita was more transactional than spiritual.

Long story short, "Waiting in Vain" was written to his love interest, Cindy Breakspeare—a Jamaican/Canadian model and former Miss World 1976.  Story goes, Marley met Breakspeare when she was a teenager and had tried for years to woo her to no avail (hence, the line in the song: It's been three years since I'm knocking on your door...)  It wasn't until after an attempt on Marley's life, which prompted him to leave Kingston for London, that he and Breakspeare became an item.  It wasn't long after that their son, singer Damian Marley, arrived on the scene in 1978.

"Tonight is the Night" (Betty Wright)

So back in 1991, "I Wanna Sex You Up" by the dubiously named Color Me Badd was everywhere.  It was on MTV all day long.  It was on the radio (in one of four different incarnations) at least once an hour.  It was obnoxious bordering on torture.  But my friends loved it, and my parents hated it, so of course I had to go out and buy the cassette single.
It wasn't until a decade later, listening to a classic R&B station in Washington late one night, that I hear that same bassline, set to this slinky little groove, and a young woman shouting I know you not gonna sing THAT song!  Being that this was pre-Shazam and smart phones, I had to keep an ear out, hoping that the DJ would announce the song and artist.  
After 8 minutes of sweet soul emanating from the speakers of my car stereo while stuck in 1 am traffic on I-395, there it was: "Tonight is the Night" by Miami's Betty Wright.  
And it was so much better than the New Jack knock-off. 
The track, a re-recording of Wright's own 1974 single about a young woman making love for the first time, is a cut off her 1978 "live" album, simply called Live.  Reason for my quotation marks is that it's not really a live album.  It's pretty obvious it was recorded in a studio and overdubbed with canned crowd noise.  The disc's sparse liner notes don't really say when/where it was taped.  Also, if you listen closely, you can hear where the cheering loops, over and over, during her spoken word intro to "Tonight is the Night."
Amazingly, the gimmick doesn't hurt the track.  Actually, it's oddly endearing and fun hearing Wright interact with the "crowd," telling the story of how the song came about via her producer stumbling across a poem in her private journal and her mother's infamous reaction when she heard her sing it for the first time.
The absolute pinnacle, though, is when Wright references her 1970 single "Pure Love" toward the end of the track, playing off her rhythm section with these little James Brown-esque "hits," stopping and starting the music with punctuated Ooh-ooh!'s.
It's the kind of performance that makes one wonder why she wasn't filling stadiums with thousands of screaming fans.

"Son of a Preacher Man" (Dusty Springfield)

"Son of a Preacher Man" is one of those songs that you hear playing in the background at a restaurant or the grocery store but never really hear.  That is, until some hyperactive nut makes a violent, dialogue-driven morality tale for the silver screen and places it, front and center, in a key scene.
The track was recorded in late 1968 (released 1969) at producer Lincoln "Chips" Moman's American Sound Studio in Memphis for the album Dusty in Memphis—Springfield's intended comeback album after a career slump.  Ultimately, the disc didn't prove to be a huge seller at the time, but it's consistently regarded today as one of the best Memphis soul albums of the late 60s.  And rightfully so; its eleven songs are so finely crafted and expertly delivered it's hard to believe Springfield was from London rather than the Deep South.
Apparently, "Son of a Preacher Man" originally was offered to Aretha Franklin to perform, and depending upon which bit of gossip you want to believe, she either turned it down, feeling it was disrespectful (being that she actually was a preacher's daughter), or she actually recorded a version in 1968 and producer Jerry Wexler shelved it because it was too "gospel-sounding."
In any case, Springfield's version is on point.  The greasy rhythm track, soulful horns, and the singer's smoky vocal create a vivid scene of tent revivals and teenage romance in the sweltering Delta heat.

"Melody" (Serge Gainsbourg)

French pop artist Serge Gainsbourg was never a stranger to controversy or pushing buttons.  Case in point: his steamy 1969 single "Je t'aime...moi non plus" with his then-girlfriend, British actress Jane Birkin, which replicated a conversation between lovers in the middle of getting it on, complete with audio vérité moans to ratchet up the realism.  (In the European countries where the single wasn't banned outright, it was a massive hit.)
Which brings us to the song at hand: "Melody" off the 1969 concept album Histoire de Melody Nelson.  In the album's brief 7-song cycle, Gainsbourg tells the story of a questionable love affair with a 15-year-old expat named Melody Nelson.  In "Melody," the story begins with Gainsbourg tooling around in his Rolls Royce at night, mired in his own thoughts, when he accidentally collides with Melody as she's riding her bicycle.  He rescues her and a steamy affair ensues, with Gainsbourg creepily declaring at the end of the track, Melody Nelson a les cheveux rouges / Et c'est leur couleur naturelle (translated: Melody Nelson is a natural redhead).
I'll say this: Gainsbourg's dirtbag proclivities leave me cold.  And the Lolita-esque story doesn't exactly grab me.  But it's his singular, literary approach to telling that story and the edgy, cinematic backing track, which combines session bassist Herbie Flowers's funky, inventive bassline with hard rock guitar and lush orchestral strings, that sell me on the song "Melody" and the album as a whole.
Even if you don't speak a word of French and are utterly turned off by the chain-smoking, dirty old man narrating the song, "Melody" still can be appreciated as a sonically rich, intoxicating piece of early 70s French pop art.

"Mannish Boy" (Muddy Waters)

"Mannish Boy" is built upon the prototypical, stop-time blues riff that people think of when they're poking fun at the blues:

Bah-dah-da-dum
(Insert something about your upbringing.)
Bah-dah-da-dum
(Insert a boast about your sexual prowess.)
Bah-dah-da-dum
(Insert a different boast about your power over the opposite sex.)
Bah-dah-da-dum...

And so on.

In the wrong hands, it can be hellaciously repetitive and boring.  But with a master like McKinley Morganfield (a.k.a. Muddy Waters) at the helm, it's electrifying.
The lineage of the song actually starts with Muddy's own rendition of the Willie Dixon tune "Hoochie Coochie Man" (1954), which fellow Chess Records artist Bo Diddley transformed into the stop-time boast song "I'm a Man" (1955), which Muddy in turn responded to with his irreverent "Mannish Boy" (1955).
Although I like the 1955 version, I prefer the hard-stomp 1977 version, recorded with guitarist Johnny Winter for the note-perfect album Hard Again.  What makes this version so great is the well-oiled machine backing Muddy: Pinetop Perkins on piano, James Cotton on harmonica, Bob Margolin and Winter on guitars, Charles Calmese on bass, and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith on drums.  And it's not so much what they do; it's what they don't do.  They keep things loose and simple, giving Muddy space to do his thing.  Smith holds down the same basic plodding drum pattern (not touching a cymbal until the last note) while the rest of the band riffs and shouts away.  Everyone, especially Muddy, sounds like he's having a ball.
I first heard this version in a jazz music appreciation class in college.  The professor was discussing the foundations of jazz, the blues being a major component, and he had his TA play the cut as an example of a single-chord electric blues.  There were the initial giggles from the classroom of 200 teenagers, who no doubt had visions of Calhoun Tubbs (I wrote a song about it.  Like to hear it?  Here it goes...) somewhat fresh in their minds.  But by the time Muddy sang his first refrain (I'm a man!) with Winter and pals shouting in the background like madmen, the whole class began to tilt in Muddy's favor.  By the end, the entire room was stomping and clapping along like we were in some gritty South Side blues bar.  It was a great moment.

"Forty-four" (Howlin' Wolf)

Sometimes my affection for a song stems purely from how it sounds.  In fact, I'd say that most of this list consists of tracks that appeal to me sonically, often in the form of unusual arrangements, quirky time signatures, odd instrumentation, studio wizardry, etc.  That's not saying I don't listen to or consider lyrics; I love a thought-provoking, well-written lyric.  I simply mean that my musical pretensions aren't guided by a song having to say something.  If the words resonate with me, I just consider it an added bonus.
Anyway, that brings me to the song at hand: "Forty-four." This blues standard, which is either credited to blues/boogie pianist Roosevelt Sykes (who was the first to record it in 1929) or Sykes's mentor, pianist Lee Green, basically is about a madman roaming the streets with his .44 revolver, looking for his cheating wife.
A ballad it ain't.
For as creepy as Sykes's original is, though, the great Howlin' Wolf's 1954 version will make you want to lock your doors and windows and then check them twice.  
It begins with Otis Spann's barrelhouse piano, Earl Phillips's thunderous drum pattern (which sounds like an army on the march), and Hubert Sumlin's ugly, looking-for-trouble guitar riff.  After a few bars, Wolf's voice comes in, shouting/singing I wore my .44 so long / It done made my shoulder sore.  And, by God, I believe him.  No matter how many times I listen to this track, that moment sends chills up my spine, every time.
In all, the effect of the song is like some kind of late 1800s military field drill as recast by a South Side Chicago blues band after one too many shots of Wild Turkey.  It's loud, menacing, and sonically perfect in every way.

"Bo Diddley" (Bo Diddley)

It takes a special brand of audacity to name a song after yourself.  Then again, Ellas McDaniel (a.k.a. Bo Diddley) had every reason to be audacious.  He was a multi-instrumentalist, who knew how to play everything from classical violin to trombone, in addition to guitar.  He invented and built the rectangular-shaped instrument that became his calling card.  And, most importantly, he found a way to bridge the electric blues from the South Side of Chicago where he was raised with the intricate polyrhythms and harmonies he'd grown up hearing in church, laying the foundations of rock & roll.
He was indeed "The Originator" (a title he gave himself).
The song "Bo Diddley" was one of those rare tunes that my dad would crank up whenever he'd hear it on oldies radio.  Its easy rhyme scheme, a take-off on the traditional lullaby "Hush, Little Baby," appealed to me as a kid because I could sing along.  So I always associate it with Sunday drives out in the country or camping trips with him in the South Carolina foothills.
For as simple as the song sounds, it actually was pretty groundbreaking.  The "shave-and-a-haircut"/3-2 clave rhythm that drives the track was pretty unusual for pop music in its day.  It's derived from the rhythm of the West African juba dance, where one uses the body to create percussion.  The dance basically got transformed into the hambone here in the U.S., which also incorporates slapping your knees/thighs/chest/etc. to create a beat while singing or speaking rhyming couplets.  Long story short, the so-called "Bo Diddley Beat" became one of the pillars of rock and roll, with everyone from Buddy Holly to The Clash referencing it in some way over the years.
The guitar effects on the song are also pretty notable because no one else at the time (1955) was attempting anything quite like it.  Diddley's whacked out tremolo, which warbles in perfect syncopation with the drums, points the way to the kind of guitar effects and distortion that Jimi Hendrix would make part of his sound more than a decade later.

"Susie Q" (Dale Hawkins)

If you grew up in a household where your parents listened to a lot of Creedence Clearwater Revival (like mine did), you’re no doubt familiar with the song "Susie Q" (or "Suzie Q," or even "Suzy Q," as it's sometimes spelled).  CCR's 1968 9-minute jam version is the most famous take on the song.  But the 1957 original by Louisiana-born vocalist/rhythm guitarist Dale Hawkins has a raw charm all its own.
Although Hawkins kind of gets lumped into the "rockabilly" genre, there's a lot of Rhythm & Blues in his music, especially if you compare his stuff to contemporaries like Gene Vincent or Carl Perkins.  The influence comes through bell clear on "Susie Q" with its heavy backbeat and syncopated percussion.
Hawkins recorded "Susie Q" at a radio station in Shreveport with fellow Louisianan/session guitarist James Burton, who provides the signature riff and raunchy (for 1957) lead guitar solos after each verse.  The single initially saw local release on the small Jewel Records label.  But the moment it was a regional hit, Jewel's enterprising owner/operator, Stan Lewis, took it to Chicago's Chess Records to get a national distribution deal.  Thing was, Chess (via its subsidiary, Checker Records) had released a novelty single from Hawkins called "See You Soon, Baboon" (1956), an answer to the Bobby Charles R&B song "See Ya Later, Alligator." And it flopped.  So Chess balked at putting out another Hawkins record.  Undefeated, Lewis took it to New York's Atlantic Records, where producer Jerry Wexler decided it was destined to be a hit.  But instead of taking Wexler's deal, Lewis went back to Chess and used Atlantic as leverage, getting a better deal and distribution through Chess/Checker.
But the story isn't over yet.
In exchange for Lewis's wheeler-dealing, Hawkins relinquished his sole writing credit on the song, giving one third to Lewis and another third to Nashville-based R&B DJ Gene Nobles (under his wife's name, Eleanor Broadwater), who helped break the song to record-buying audiences.