Thoughts on the black-American-music aspect of last weekend's royal wedding

You have to do a bit of scrolling and putting in of keywords to get to the real story about "Stand By Me."

That is, of course, the 1960 Lieber-Stoller-Ben E. King composition that was a huge hit for the latter of these and which has, in the intervening years, shown up in a number of cultural contexts, including being the song that provides the title and the thematic hook for a 1980s coming-of-age movie.

Last weekend, it was part of the wedding ceremony when Prince Harry wed Meghan Markle. A south-London choir comprised of singers who are black performed and undeniably fine rendition of it prior to the vows.

It created quite a buzz, most of it having a strong identity-politics odor. (Markle is half-black, as well as a lifelong US citizen.)  BBC News tries to make it seem like it's directly derived from a 1905 by Charles Albert Tindley.   Huffington Post tries to make a big deal out of its role in civil-rights activity over the years. Popsugar mentions the fact that that Ben E. King did the original version and that people got all teary-eyed at the performance at the wedding.

Interestingly, you apparently have to, if you're going to use Yahoo to do your searching, go to a September 2013 article in the left-leaning UK Guardian to find even a mention of the fact that the main composers of that song were Jerry Leiber an Mike Stoller, much less an account of the process of creating it:

Of all the songs I wrote or co-wrote in my career, this is my favourite. It came at a strange time, though. I'd just left the Drifters and had to plead with Ahmet Ertegün, the president of Atlantic Records, to find a place for me. He put me to work with legendary songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It was like a schooling for me – a kid from Harlem who knew nothing about anything.

There's been some debate about how the song was conceived. But, as I recall, we'd some time left over at the end of a session, and I was asked if I had any songs in my head. I'd originally intended Stand By Me for the Drifters. The song we eventually recorded wasn't so different from what I'd come up with. Jerry may have changed the lyrics in places, but not by much.

It was 1960, but in my vocal I think you can hear something of my earlier times when I'd sing in subway halls for the echo, and perform doo-wop on street corners. But I had a lot of influences, too – singers like Sam Cooke, Brook Benton and Roy Hamilton. The song's success lay in the way Leiber and Stoller took chances, though, borrowing from symphonic scores, and we had a brilliant string arranger in Stan Applebaum.

But Jerry Wexler, a producer at Atlantic, was unimpressed. He hated it because we'd gone into overtime in the studio with an expensive orchestra. I wasn't trying to make a hit with Stand By Me, though. I was just thrilled one of my songs was being recorded at a time when there were so many great songwriters around, people like Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King.

Wexler, obviously, came around.

The main point is that it was a corporate effort. It was an Atlantic Records creation. Ahmet Ertegun, the son of a career Turkish diplomat, Jerry Wexler, the son of a Polish Jewish immigrant window-washer, the legendary engineer Tom Dowd, string arranger Stan Applebaum - and, of course, the great songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller.

The whole Leiber-Stoller story is worthy of a deep dive. The shorthand version is that each came from Jewish families on the east coast that, coincidentally, moved to the west coast around 1950, where the respective boys finished high school at Fairfax, the main Jewish high school in Los Angeles. The two guys found each other, discovered their mutual love of black American music - jazz, blues, gospel - and started writing songs. Their first big success was "Hound Dog" by Big Mama Thornton, followed by "Smokey Joe's Cafe" by the Robins, which led to the string of stories-in-a-three-minute-format hits for The Coasters. Hits for others, including "Jailhouse Rock" for Elvis Presley, soon followed.

The point is that what we consider black American music involves contributions by a considerable number of white Americans, often of eastern European Jewish ethnicity. Consider the importance of Irving Mills to the career of Duke Ellington. Or the role of Lester Melrose in putting Chicago blues on the map in the 1930s. Or what Cincinnati's Syd Nathan, founder of the King label, did for the advancement of black music in the 1950s and 60s.

The point here is that this music is much richer than the identity-politics, feel-good goop-peddlers would have you believe. It may be easily-grabbed shorthand to call it "black American music," but a whole lot of people of various demographic classifications were involved in composing it and getting it recorded and distributed.

Let's be sure that is part of the record.