written by Dave McCabe, Russell Pritchard, Sean Payne,

Abi Harding, Paul Molloy and Boyan Chowdhury

produced by Mark Ronson

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Another alternative to a birthday tribute here today, this time for

Amy Jade Winehouse, whom we sadly lost a precise ten years ago

as of this writing. RIP Amy, 9/14/83 to 7/23/11.

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Amy was born in Enfield, London, into a Jewish family, the younger of two children. She grew up with an abundance of jazz music influence courtesy of her relatives—particularly Dinah Washington, Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan—and sang jazz songs as a mechanism of combat when she’d get in trouble at school. She bought her own guitar and started writing songs at 14. A few years later, a friend took a demo tape of hers and got it circulating.

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By 2003, Amy had secured a deal with Island Records. She took a dozen of original songs she co-wrote, as well as a jazz standard from the ’30s, and recorded them into her debut album Frank—named both for Mr. Sinatra and also as an assessment of her level of blunt and blatant honesty. It achieved the most success in Amy’s native UK, reaching #3 on the albums chart and selling over a million units there. Frank’s singles failed to make a splash, but that was okay, as three Octobers later, Amy would unleash the project that would set her career on fire.

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The fall of 2006 indeed saw the light of Back To Black, Amy’s sophomore album, and the home of five new singles (some charting better than others). But the only Back To Black single to reach the top 40 on every one—the album’s leading single and leading track—was the song that made Amy’s name a household one: “Rehab.” Back To Black crushed the charts at #1 left and right. Amy had also by now adopted her signature look, complete with the display of her array of tattoos, her swooping beehive ’do, and her trademark eyeshadow wings.

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Her fans were shattered by the loss of her battle with drug and alcohol addiction, as in the summer of 2011, she was found unconscious with a disproportionately high blood alcohol level, and pronounced dead shortly thereafter, making her a member of the infamous “27 club.” Her legacy, however, remained indestructible. Amy had become more than just a pop icon. Especially after her death, she was the subject of countless stories, pop culture references, features and retrospectives, murals, sculptures and other forms of street and public art, all over the globe. In the December following her death, Island Records released Winehouse compilation Lioness: Hidden Treasures, including a few previously unreleased songs the label proceeded to drop as singles.

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The song covered on this page, however, is not a Winehouse original treasure, nor is it hidden. In the very first page I made for this site—“Valerie” by Steve Winwood—I mentioned that Valerie is my favorite (traditional western/Anglo-type) girl’s name. So when I discovered this song, it of course caught my attention. Like many, I heard the Amy version first and didn’t realize until later it was a cover. In 2006, this song was first written, performed and recorded by The Zutons. Then Mark and Amy did it together a year later. Technically, it’s billed under Mark Ronson’s name, featuring Amy. It appears on his album Version, released in June of ’07. The Zutons’ version isn’t half-bad itself, and speaking of other versions of this song, it was performed on Glee a few years later by Naya Rivera, the actress who played the lone lesbian character, Santana Lopez. In something of an eerie coincidence, we also lost Naya at a very young age (33), when she went missing around the Ventura County, CA lake she frequented, and was officially presumed dead not long after. Maybe one day we’ll cover her version.

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So RIP Amy and Naya... Amy also made this song her own by recording a more mellow, laid-back solo version, which showed up on the deluxe edition of her Back To Black record. Additional versions and remixes were made of both. And while I (almost) hate to end on the obvious easy joke that I’m sure has been made hundreds of times already... I have to wonder just how many of Amy’s friends and fans continue to wish she’d said “yes, yes, yes” instead.

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Have notes to add? Let me know!

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YT:

full version

music video

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Mark’s official website

Amy’s official website