Two weeks prior to the Drifters' "On Broadway" reaching its chart peak, the group returned to the studio to record another song by the same four co-writers, but not before it had undergone a revamp. Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the same year in which police dogs were trained on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama and Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway of that state's University in an attempt to block the entrance of the school's first black pupils. [A sidenote, from John McPhee's 1969 book about Arthur Ashe: "Wallace is beautiful. He's doing his own thing. He's actually got a little bit of soul. What I worry about is people who say one thing and do another. Wallace is in his bag, and he enjoys it." - ed.] Sympathetic to the Civil Rights cause, Barry Man and Cyntia Weil wrote for the Drifters a protest song, "Only in America," the lyric of which included the lines "Only in America, land of opportunity, do they save a seat in the back of the bus just for me/Only in America, where they preach the golden rule, do they start to march when my kids try to go to school...." When Mann and Weil played [a draft of the song for Leiber and Stoller], the producers opined that it needed humour, suggesting a rewrite from the opposite viewpoint. Thus, the song was remodelled from a WASP perspective and recorded by the Drifters on the very same day that Martin Luther King was placed in solitary confinement in Alabama. Atlantic's Jerry Wexler felt that whether percieved literally or with irony, the track had little airplay potential and could in fact cause trouble for his company and the group, nixing its release.

Labels: alex, hip-hop, pop, soul