My music playlist for today (February 2, 2012 edition)

I was thinking yesterday about what to do for a playlist for today, when my lovely wife may have unintentionally given me something herself.

Amy is a singer with a great voice (she should, that’s one of her specialties as a private music teacher and it’s her best instrument), and I don’t say that just because she’s my wife. She’s classically trained, but she can sing in many styles. She does “sultry” very well — she can do a version of “Santa Baby” (not the whiny, nasally one by Madonna, that one drives me nuts … I’m talking more Eartha Kitt sultry) that makes me melt, and she knows it.

She sang an arrangement of the jazzy spiritual “Rise Up Shepherds” at our church for Christmas that knocked people’s socks off. She can sing pop, she can sing jazz. The woman’s got some pipes, folks.

But there’s one song that she got a karaoke recording of that she’s been wanting to work on, she just needs to hear different versions of it to decide how she wants to do it. It’s a song I was listening to a lot before I traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area around New Year’s and talked about meeting Lester Chambers of The Chambers Brothers fame.

The song is “People Get Ready,” and The Chambers Brothers with Lester singing lead are one of the groups or individual artists who have made it so well-known through the years.

Amy’s been wanting me to send her links to different people singing the song in different ways. So, I’ll just do better than that. I’m making the different versions of “People Get Ready” my playlist for today. And maybe it’s appropriate to do this on Groundhog Day, except this would be more like a tribute to the movie “Groundhog Day” and instead of waking up to Sonny & Cher singing “I Got You Babe” all the time we just keep hearing a great song over and over in a variety of ways.

Here ya go, dear! A good, round, 15 different versions — from the man who wrote it, Curtis Mayfield (with The Impressions), to good ol’ Lester Chambers along with his brothers on through to Ziggy Marley and U2. Sing away, Amy! Just don’t try to sound like Rod Stewart, okay?