Is there any more romantic song than Stand By Me? It is one of the imperishable anthems of pop culture, an absolutely perfect distillation of human need: direct, elegiac and deeply emotional. When The Kingdom Choir sing it for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in St George’s Chapel, with all those towering, resonant gospel harmonies teasing out every nuance of longing and carrying it up towards the heavens, I doubt there will be a dry eye in the house.
It won’t be the first time it is heard at a wedding ceremony, and it won’t be the last. But it may well be the most memorable, the first time an American popular song will ever have been played at a British royal wedding.
Stand By Me was originally recorded by the late Ben E. King in 1960. It is a very, very simple song, credited to King and writing duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The 21-year-old Harlem vocalist had just left Doo Wop quartet the Drifters in a dispute over money, and persuaded Ahmet Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records, to try him out solo.
Ertegun put him in the studio with hitmakers Leiber and Stoller. At the end of a session recording Spanish Harlem, with time still on the studio clock, the songwriters asked King if he had any ideas of his own. King sang Stand By Me a capella, Stoller started adding the bass line and chords on the piano, Leiber polished up the lyrics, and the rest is rock and roll history.
The chord progression (1-6-4-5 for musos, starting in A) is actually a standard 50s doo wop sequence, heard in hundreds of songs, including Blue Moon, Chain Gang and Why Do Fools Fall In Love. But this is the song where it works with such perfect elegance musicians have come to refer to the chord sequence as “the Stand By Me changes”.
You know you are in the presence of magic the first moment you hear that elegant doo wop bass line and perfectly timed scratch of percussion. And then King’s voice comes in, relaxed and unhurried yet with a telling catch in his throat, sketching a psychological landscape with the simplest of lyrical brushstrokes: “When the night has come and the land is dark and the moon is the only light we’ll see …”
Into this darkness, King pours a bucketful of human desire. “No, I won’t be afraid, Oh I won’t be afraid, just as long as you stand, stand by me.” This is the voice of someone you want to believe in, someone you can count on. When he sings “So darling, darling” and spine tingling strings kick in, what heart could ever fail to melt?
Stand By Me was ranked number 25 on the Recording Industry Association of America’s list of Songs of The Century. It made Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time and the Telegraph’s 100 Greatest Songs. The BMI (British Music Industry) has declared it the fourth most-performed song of the 20th Century, with over 400 recorded versions and over seven million performances.
Ben E King Credit: Michael Ochs Archives
The Beatles used to play it in Hamburg, and John Lennon recorded a towering, raw throated version with Phil Spector in 1975. It has been sung by Otis Redding, The Isley Brothers, Tina Turner, Meat Loaf, Miley Cyrus, Florence and the Machine and U2 onstage with Bruce Springsteen.
In 2012, aided by the coming of age film of the same name, it was estimated Stand By Me had earned royalties over £17 million, making it the sixth highest earning song of all time. In 2015, King’s original was inducted into America’s National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”
Stand By Me is not a soppy ballad of fairy tale romance. It is a song about the deepest and toughest kind of commitment, a tender anthem expressing the kind of love that will face any hardship or challenge. That is what makes it an ideal wedding soundtrack.
When you need somebody you can count on, and you need to let that special somebody know they can always count on you, there is still really only one song for the occasion.
Editor’s Note: Alex Lubet is a professor of music at the University of Minnesota. Steven Lubet is a professor of law at Northwestern University. The views expressed in this commentary are their own.
CNN —
Even people who don’t care much about royal weddings were impressed by the way Prince Harry and Meghan Markle integrated Anglo-African and African-American elements into their wedding ceremony.
Far from glossing over Markle’s biracial heritage, the couple made a point of involving Rev. Michael Curry, the first African-American presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, as well as cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the first black performer to be named Britain’s Young Musician of the Year and a member of what Simon Cowell calls “the most talented family in the world.”
Then there was the gospel choir. As Salamishah Tillet described it in the New York Times, the “awesome power” of southeast London’s Kingdom Choir “showcased the sheer breadth of a trans-Atlantic black identity” in its “rollicking rendition of Ben E. King’s ‘Stand by Me.’”
She was right in her appreciation of the group’s performance, which moved all wedding attendees. But there is a backstory to the song that makes it even more appropriate for such an inclusive occasion. It was the product of one of the celebrated cradles of American popular music, a place where artists from different backgrounds collaborated in the creation of a now classic sound.
Tillet refers to “Stand by Me” as representative of the “African-American songbook,” and, of course, it was first released and made famous by Ben E. King in 1961. King shared the credits, however, with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, two songwriters working in New York City’s Brill Building.
Like most of the writers and producers in that legendary music industry mecca, Leiber and Stoller were Jewish, while many of the vocalists were black. Leiber and Stoller had already written several hits for King’s previous group, The Drifters, and, by 1960, they were working with him to develop his solo career. (Most of Leiber and Stoller’s songs were written for black artists, but they had also written hits for Elvis Presley and even Perry Como.)
The team had just finished recording “Spanish Harlem,” which would become King’s breakout success, and they used their remaining studio time to explore other possible recordings. King already had some lyrics in mind and the beginning of a tune, apparently based on an earlier “Stand by Me” (sometimes known as “Stand by Me Father”) by Rev. Dr. Charles Albert Tindley, the African-American “Prince of Preachers.”
Leiber and Stoller worked with King to fill out the melody and complete the lyrics, with Stoller adding the signature bass line at the beginning of the song. They would divide the royalties equally, with half going to King, and half shared by Leiber and Stoller.
Fittingly reflecting both the Christian and Jewish backgrounds of the composers, the lyrics to “Stand by Me” are clearly derived from Psalm 46 of the Hebrew scripture, by way of Tindley, a Methodist minister. As King, Leiber and Stoller memorably wrote it:
When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we’ll see
No I won’t be afraid, No I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me
If the sky that we look upon
Should tumble and fall
Or the mountains should crumble to the sea
I won’t cry, I won’t cry
No I won’t shed a tear
Just as long as you stand, stand by me
Whenever you’re in trouble, won’t you stand by me
Oh stand by me,
Oh won’t you stand now?
Stand by me
And here is the beginning of the Bible Psalm:
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;
Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.
In other words, “Stand by Me” embodies the very best of the American tradition, with artists from different backgrounds working together to create something uniquely wonderful and enduring.
It is hardly surprising that the song has been recorded by artists as diverse as Jimmy Ruffin, John Lennon and Mickey Gilley. There was even a spoken-word version by Muhammad Ali. It’s no doubt been played at countless weddings for couples of nearly every conceivable origin and upbringing.
After “Stand by Me,” King went on to crossover success, while Leiber and Stoller wrote a series of hits in multiple genres, including pop, R&B, country and rock. At a time when we increasingly hear complaints about “cultural appropriation,” we would all do well to remember the virtue of cross-cultural collaboration, which can bring us great art.
And, as the world has learned from the new Duke and Duchess of Sussex, it can also be the source of great romance.