“Bring It On Home To Me” by Sam Cooke

"Bring It On Home to Me" started life as a B-side, tucked behind "Having a Party" when RCA Victor put out Sam Cooke's single on May 8, 1962, and it went on to become a pop standard that singers of every stripe have taken a crack at. Cooke wrote both songs out on the road, touring for Henry Wynn, and first offered this one to Dee Clark, who passed. Then he phoned Luigi Creatore from Atlanta and sold him on the pair.

Creatore booked a Los Angeles session for two weeks later, with René Hall arranging and conducting and a crowd of invited friends in the room, and engineer Al Schmitt remembered it as a joyful day. You can hear it: Cooke pleads, Lou Rawls's voice rises up beside him, and strings and sax sway along. It reached number two on Billboard's R&B chart and 13 on the Hot 100, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame counts it among the 500 songs that shaped rock and roll.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.