The music industry this week mourned the death of another legend of soul music when representatives of 76-year-old Ben E King announced the singer passed away peacefully in hospital on Thursday (April 30). King had reportedly been suffering from a heart condition.
The news comes two weeks after another veteran of soul and R’n’B, Percy Sledge died of liver cancer.
Ben E King first came to prominence using his real name, Benjamin Nelson, as a lead vocalist with The Drifters in the late 1950s on hits such as ‘Save The Last Dance For Me’ and ‘This Magic Moment’. But his recording career with the group was short-lived – many of the filmed performances of the aforementioned songs show Charlie Thomas lip-syncing Kings lead – and it is his 1961 solo hit, Stand By Me, that will forever be associated with his silky tenor.
Sadly for King, singers of his ilk were about to fall prey to what American music insiders refer to as the ‘British invasion’ during which self-contained groups led by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones would change the course of music going forward.
To their credit, the groups that would come to dominate the charts in the mid-1960s ultimately acknowledged the influence Black American artists from previous decades had on their own output. Beatles lead singer and rhythm guitarist John Lennon would eventually become particularly vocal about his musical influences, which included African American blues, rock ‘n’ roll and R’n’B singers and White artists who were similarly influenced.
After The Beatles split, a solo Lennon charted on both sides of the Atlantic with a 1975 cover of Stand By Me, written by King in his Drifters days with finishing touches, including the signature bass-line, added by stalwart songwriting team Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.
1975 was also the last time Ben E King flirted with the UK Charts with anything new – Supernatural Thing Pt 1, a top ten hit in the US, received extensive airplay on niche UK radio stations and in clubs but underperformed commercially here. Nevertheless, he remained popular enough in the UK to have toured as recently as 2013.
In 1986, a hit movie of the same name and an iconic ad for Levi jeans saw Stand By Me re-issued and re-enter the UK Charts, peaking at number 1 in 1987. The track has since been inducted into the United States’ National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”, and was ranked 122nd on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In 1999, BMI named it as the fourth most-performed song of the 20th century, with about seven million performances.
Including genre-specific charts, King had five number-one hits on his own or with The Drifters in the US: “There Goes My Baby,” “Save The Last Dance For Me,” “Stand By Me,” “Supernatural Thing,” and the 1986 re-issue of “Stand By Me,” according to his website.
