Ray Stevens audio track: "Sophisticated Lady"...

One of the great performances by Ray Stevens on his Melancholy Fescue album is his rendition of "Sophisticated Lady". I liked the song from the moment I heard it...and the first time I'd heard the song was this past spring when I purchased Melancholy Fescue. The song's origins go back to 1932...written originally as an instrumental by Duke Ellington. It was released as a single in 1933 and it became a hit song. Mitchell Parish wrote lyrics to the song soon after and shares credit with publisher, promoter, and artist manager, Irving Mills. The song became a jazz standard...the lyrical rendition of the song being covered by so many recording artists over the decades and the instrumental rendition also becoming a jazz standard. An irony about "Sophisticated Lady" is, while the lyrical rendition has appeared on numerous albums by both pop and jazz artists, the 1933 instrumental by Duke Ellington remains the only rendition to have appeared on a weekly music popularity chart. 

I intentionally haven't listened to any other lyrical version of "Sophisticated Lady" but based on the Ray Stevens recording the song has some unusual phrasing but the melody is great and of course the Bluegrass flavor adds to the fun...but lyrically the song tells a much different story as we're told about a woman who fell out of love with someone in her past, perhaps out of selfishness, and now she's attempting to find someone else...and we're told that this "Sophisticated Lady", in private, cries about her earlier actions and we're left with the mental picture of some woman lonely as a result of an earlier relationship decision she made. It's a somewhat clever and different variation of the torch song...traditional torch songs would lyrically tell stories of women begging, sobbing, torn up over a lost love. Yet here we're told of a woman who still has strong feelings for a former flame but publicly she hides it...in her guise as a "Sophisticated Lady". The Bluegrass flavor of the recording is incredible and, yes, it invites toe-tapping and it creates a positive, cheery atmosphere masking the sadness of the lyrics. I wrote a blog entry about this recording back in the spring but I decided that I wanted to highlight it again...and I'll more than likely include a link to the audio track or embed it another blog entry soon.