“Sunny one so true, I love you.”

Sunny, yesterday my life was filled with rain.
Sunny, you smiled at me and really eased the pain.
The dark days are gone, and the bright days are here,
My Sunny one shines so sincere.

Sunny one so true, I love you.
Sunny, thank you for the sunshine bouquet.
Sunny, thank you for the love you brought my way.
You gave to me your all and all.

Now I feel ten feet tall.
Sunny one so true, I love you.
Sunny, thank you for the truth you let me see.
Sunny, thank you for the facts from A to C.
My life was torn like a wind-blown sand,
And the rock was formed when you held my hand.

Sunny one so true, I love you.
Sunny, thank you for the smile upon your face.
Sunny, thank you for the gleam that shows its grace.
You’re my spark of nature’s fire,
You’re my sweet complete desire.
Sunny one so true, I love you.

Sunny, yesterday my life was filled with rain…

[tubepress]

The funniest things happen with getting older. Those things of our youth, our history. They take on a such a different meaning and in some cases a much deeper worth.

Sunny was recorded in 1966. It is the earliest song that we remember. We were a toddler around the time the song was released. And many of our life memories are washed over with the audio of this song in the background.

Especially the bittersweet memories of our heart which encompasses a lifetime of emotional surrender and re-surrender to all that we do not and never will understand. Sunny is there right with them. It is the melody of our unseen agonized and ecstasied self, morphing and merging, retreating and back again.

Yes. Ecstasied is a word.

While we consider ourselves music enthusiasts—historians even, particularly when it comes to classic R&B and soul, for some explicable reason we never bothered over the years to find out who was the artist who originally recorded Sunny. Even we think that’s weird. There have been many artists over the years who have laid down their own imprint on the classic—Jay Kay of Jamiroquai, Dusty Springfield, Ella Fitzgerald, Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops…both Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye as well have knelled at Sunny’s alter—these two geniuses coloring with their own crayons in reworking Sunny for their groove waves. So many other artists have touched Sunny in some form or fashion. Some good. Some cheezy. The list of artists and recordings is endless.

But there are only two artists however who OWNED Sunny that we know of: Mr. Jose Feliciano. And the godfather of soul himself, the unstoppable James Brown.

Feliciano took his musical contemporaries to school with his working of the song. Strumming that guitar flamenco-style and swaying and rocking like he does Feliciano sings that song so tenderly yet so candidly as though his life depends on it. His is a quiet masterpiece of simplicity and jubilance so familiar yet so completely foreign to the children of Black people in its execution and its reach. His is a session in soul we’ve been seeking out in other cultures and their noise sounds high and low ever since we heard his take on Sunny.

And then there’s good brotha James.

James Brown worked Sunny up and down in recordings and live performances so much over the years that in 2002 a club remix of Brown’s original Sunny recording topped the underground club dance charts.

So yes, we’re familiar with the various excellent renditions of the song. Yet all these years and all this time, we never knew who actually wrote and originally recorded it—-who it came from. We found out this week. By happenstance we came across an article on the News One Website about the death of an artist who was previously unknown to us up til that moment. His name was Bobby Hebb. It was he wrote and recorded Sunny back in 1966—-the version that is so much a part of our DNA and the emotional soundtrack of our lives that we never even bothered to tag an owner to it. It just didn’t seem necessary.

But now we know.

And the truth is, our heart is broken. We weren’t ready to know this, it feels like. Maybe this is why all these years we never attempted to find out who originally recorded the song.

Sunny was supposed to live forever.

Bobby Hebb July 26, 1938 – August 3, 2010

RIP