Song of the Week: "Sunny" by Bobby Hebb (1966)

For those of you living near Accordion Cityt’s weather system, I hope that you had a chance to enjoy the sun and nearly-summer-like temperatures. The Missus and I went out on a picnic in High Park on Saturday and had a relaxing time reading, people- and dog-watching and drinking ice tea at the nearby Starbucks patio on Sunday.

I decided to dig through the music library and look for songs with the word “Sun” in the title and found Bobby Hebb’s Sunny. This version has an intro and outro by Bob Dylan, who explains that Hebb wrote the song as a way of finding comfort after being devastated by the deaths of John F. Kennedy and his brother, who died within a day of each other. Wikipedia quotes Hebb as saying:

All my intentions were just to think of happier times – basically looking for a brighter day – because times were at a low tide. After I wrote it, I thought “Sunny” just might be a different approach to what Johnny Bragg was talking about in “Just Walkin’ in the Rain”.

Sunny reminds me of weather like this — not only for its name and its optimism, but also because it’s one of two songs that I played at my last recital at organ school, which happened during a rather memorable late spring. The other song I played was the one that got me kicked out of the Yamaha School of Music, and that’s a story for a later date.

(This song will be available for a week, after which it’ll evaporate.)