Working with Try A Little Tenderness
The credits on the standard session charts show three names: Jimmy Kennedy on lyrics, Michael Garvey and Nat Shilkret on music. The song was written in 1932 and first recorded that same year by the Paul Whiteman orchestra with Al Bowlly on vocals. That Shilkret credit is the one most people miss when they look this up, because he was primarily known as an arranger and bandleader, not a songwriter. He co-wrote it to give Al Bowlly something that sat between a ballad and a blues, which was a weird space at the time. I ran into this when a friend asked me to transcribe the vocal line for a cover project. The problem was that the original melody has a lot of licensed notation that varies between the sheet music and what Al Bowlly actually sang. The published version softens some of the melodic turns. If you're going off the sheet music alone, you'll play it straight and it will sound wrong compared to the recording. I ended up cross-referencing the 1932 Victor release with the later Ole Knudson arrangement to figure out where the discrepancies were.
Who Wrote Try A Little Tenderness and Why It Matters for Arrangers
Knowing the actual writers matters if you're doing a cover or a session read, because the three of them had different priorities. Kennedy wrote dense, narrative lyrics that don't always follow a simple metric pattern. Garvey and Shilkret built a chord structure that shifts more often than a typical pop song from that era. The bridge moves into a key that isn't where you'd expect it, and if you're reading a lead sheet that simplifies those changes, the harmony sounds flat. Another thing beginners get wrong is assuming the song is in a single key. It starts in a major tonality and then pivots through several relative positions, especially in the bridge section. I've seen pianists lock themselves into one key signature and then struggle through the middle eight because the chart didn't indicate the modal shift. The workaround I use is to mark the chart with temporary key signatures at the measure where the shift happens rather than trying to notate everything in one key. It adds a few extra sharps or flats on the page but it stops the whole performance from sounding like you're playing the wrong chords. There's also the matter of tempo and feel. The original recording is mid-tempo with a relaxed swing. The Oscar Wright version slowed it way down, and the Rolling Stones version sped it up into something else entirely. When I'm arranging this for a band, I ask the drummer what their natural pulse is before I decide on a click. If the drummer can't lock into the tempo I wrote on the chart, the arrangement falls apart regardless of how accurate the notes are.
The song has been covered by probably two hundred artists at this point. The copyright holders have been litigious about mechanical licensing, so if you're planning a commercial release you'll need to clear the publishing through the appropriate rights organization. The basic split is Kennedy's estate gets the lyrical share and the Garvey/Shilkret estate shares the musical side. Don't skip the license check. I learned that the hard way when a demo I made circulate online and got flagged for uncleared composition rights, which slowed the release by about six months while we sorted out the paperwork.
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