By Jim Fusco:

I suppose I should’ve done a song today to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of “The Day the Music Died”.  You know, maybe a Buddy Holly tune, or something from the Big Bopper or Ritchie Valens.  But, I decided to honor their memory in a different way…by completely forgetting to do a song by them until I just started writing this post…

Sorry Buddy, Bopper, and Ritchie.

Well, I am happy to bring you a new artist to the music video blog tonight, anyway.  And this person’s still alive (and apparently still putting on some great concerts)- Frankie Valli!  He and his group, the Four Seasons, had so may hits in the sixties (and even a couple big ones later on in the disco era) and I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to do one of their songs.

Apparently the Spinners had a big hit with “Working My Way Back To You” in the early eighties, but I’ve always known this original version from 1966 that went all the way to #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.  It was a nice challenge to recreate the vocal abilities of Frankie Valli, as he’s always been known for his whiny falsetto.  I don’t necessarily have that kind of falsetto, but I think it gets the sentiment across.  In fact, if you read my post from last Tuesday, you’ll see my comments about how falsetto voices are very hard to reproduce.  That’s because everyone’s voice goes into falsetto at different notes up the scale.  So, you’ll notice in this video that I tend to only do a few notes in falsetto during that last chorus.

I was mentioning to Becky earlier that you can always tell when a song was done by a group that doesn’t write their own songs.  Rock music songwriters usually won’t go out of their way to add a key change for the last, repeating, chorus.  But, as with showtunes and more “vocalist” acts like the Temptations, the Four Tops, and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, they take songs from these “serial songwriters” that just write (and not perform) songs for a living.  So, they try to make these big productions out of their songs, which usually includes a key change.  Go back and listen to some of the more “lounge-singer” type acts from the sixties like Johnny Rivers- you’ll hear exactly what I mean.

It’s always fun to bring you another great acoustic cover song music video here on Jim Fusco Tuesdays on the Laptop Sessions music video blog.  Since I brought you the past two Original Wednesday posts, I’m going to take tomorrow off and hope that Chris and/or Jeff will step in.  We’re excited again today because the blog reached 304 views- our NEW best view count for a day!  Thank you to all of the new fans of the Laptop Sessions and especially to those that always come back to see my videos on Tuesday.

Have a great week and I’ll be back again for Jim Fusco Tuesday next week on the greatest (and now, most popular) music video blog ever created!