It Was 50 Years Ago Today: “A Taste of Honey” by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass
November 24, 1965
“A Taste of Honey” by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass
#1 on the Billboard Easy Listening Singles chart, October 30 – December 3, 1965
Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play A Taste of Honey tells the story of Jo, a working class teenage girl from Salford in the North of England. Jo’s mother Helen takes little interest in her daughter’s life, and her financial instability frequently forces the pair to move, preventing the formation of any lasting friendships and other personal attachments. The title of the play refers to a fleeting period of happiness in Jo’s dreary life, in which she falls in love with a black sailor, and, pregnant and alone, experiences her first taste of true family life with gay roommate Geoffrey. A Taste of Honey reflects the growing trend toward earthy realism in British theater of the era, often referred to as kitchen sink drama, and derives its power from its starkly bittersweet undertones.
When A Taste of Honey debuted on Broadway in 1960, songwriters Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow contributed a new instrumental theme to recur throughout the play. The haunting, English folk-influenced melody became wildly popular, and Scott and Marlow would win a Grammy Award in 1963 for Best Instrumental Composition. A version by Billy Dee Williams, who played Jo’s boyfriend in the Broadway show, added lyrics, followed by wider-known vocal covers by Lenny Welch, Barbra Streisand, and The Beatles. The most successful interpretation of “A Taste of Honey,” however, bears little resemblance to its predecessors, and indeed little indication of its gritty origins.
Herb Alpert — trumpeter, songwriter, and co-founder of A&M Records — scored his first hit as a performer in 1962 with the instrumental “The Lonely Bull,” credited to Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. In fact, Alpert himself had overdubbed all the horn parts, but popular demand for a touring edition led to him recruiting a band. The Tijuana Brass’s popularity exploded in 1965 with the release of Whipped Cream and Other Delights, which became the only non-soundtrack album in 1965 to go to top Billboard LPs chart not by Elvis, The Beatles, or The Rolling Stones.
The biggest hit pulled from Whipped Cream and Other Delights was the Tijuana Brass’s radical reinterpretation of “A Taste of Honey.” A listener who is familiar with both Alpert’s arrangement and the Beatles’ version on Please Please Me may not even recognize the two as the same song. Rather than the brooding melancholy of previous iterations, the Tijuana Brass opts for a jazzy, jaunty groove, trading waltz time for 4/4 time and minor key for major. Whether this is a desecration of the original’s fragile beauty, or an exciting take on a contemporary standard, is for the listener to determine.
At any rate, Alpert’s sonic facelift made the record a massive success. At the 1966 Grammys, “A Taste of Honey” won four additional awards on top of its 1963 Best Instrumental trophy, including Record of the Year. The single topped the Easy Listening charts for five weeks straight, and climbed to #7 on the Billboard Hot 100. Its parent album, Whipped Cream and Other Delights, ruled the albums charts for eight weeks, interrupted briefly by Rubber Soul.
A solid chunk of these sales could be attributed to its racy-for-the-time LP cover, a shot of a woman apparently dressed in nothing but whipped cream, that has been widely referenced and parodied in the decades since. Mostly, however, the sound of the Tijuana Brass spoke to a significant, albeit underserved, audience. It was music for adults that was hip, energetic, and had a sense of humor, dusted with Latin accents that felt mildly exotic without veering too ethnic. “A Taste of Honey” may have betrayed its bittersweet, uncompromising roots, but it was exactly the breath of fresh air easy listening audiences needed in the mid-’60s to compete with the electricity of rock and roll.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
