- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Child Is Father to the Man has songs that flow from one into another covering rock, country, pop, jazz, blues, folk . . . there is even a fugue section.
The Greatest Music
Ever Recorded!
Blood, Sweat and Tears – Child Is Father to the Man (1968): Everybody knows about the numerous hit songs released by Blood, Sweat and Tears that feature lead vocals by David Clayton-Thomas: “And When I Die”, “God Bless the Child”, “Spinning Wheel”, “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”, etc. Most of them can be found on their self-titled album Blood, Sweat and Tears, which won Album of the Year honors at the Grammys over the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, among others. But that was actually the band’s second album, and David Clayton-Thomas was not one of the original bandmembers.
Blood, Sweat and Tears was founded by Al Kooper in 1967; he had been part of the backing band for Bob Dylan (he played the signature organ parts on “Like a Rolling Stone” for instance) and was also a member of a Greenwich Village band called the Blues Project, along with Steve Katz who became an important part of Blood, Sweat and Tears. Besides being one of the first rock bands to have a full brass section (there are also frequent strings plus an Ondioline, a precursor to modern synthesizers), Child Is Father to the Man has a classically based structure, with an “Overture” and an “Underture” and songs that flow from one into another covering rock, country, pop, jazz, blues, folk . . . there is even a fugue section. Despite having zero hit songs, the album is a delight from beginning to end. The album cover is one of the first that I can recall which has been “photoshopped”, as we would term it now. The numerous bandmembers posed with young boys on their laps, and then the heads of the bandmembers were shrunken slightly and superimposed over the children’s faces.