The 1960s File Feature
Fly Me To The Moon
Fly Me To The Moon: Bobby Womack and a Soul Reading of a Jazz StandardA Song with Many LivesBefore Bobby Womack brought his particular gifts to it, Fly Me to…
01 The Story
Fly Me To The Moon: Bobby Womack and a Soul Reading of a Jazz Standard
A Song with Many Lives
Before Bobby Womack brought his particular gifts to it, “Fly Me to the Moon” had already accumulated a remarkable history. Written by Bart Howard in 1954 under the original title “In Other Words,” the song had been recorded by dozens of singers across the 1950s and early 1960s before Frank Sinatra's 1964 recording with the Count Basie Orchestra transformed it into one of the defining jazz standards of the century. Sinatra's version, arranged by Quincy Jones, was so authoritative that it effectively claimed the song in the public imagination. Any singer approaching it afterward was working in the shadow of that recording, navigating the gap between homage and originality. Bobby Womack approached it anyway, and what he produced in 1968 was a genuinely distinct artistic statement rather than a pale imitation or a straightforward tribute.
Bobby Womack at the Crossroads
By 1968, Bobby Womack occupied an interesting position in American music. He had come up as a member of The Valentinos, a family gospel group whose song “It's All Over Now” the Rolling Stones covered on their way to international stardom. Womack had written prolifically for other artists, including Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett, and worked as a session guitarist of considerable reputation in multiple cities. His solo career was developing, but he had not yet achieved the commercial breakthrough that his talent warranted. His recording of “Fly Me to the Moon” was a demonstration of range: an attempt to show that his voice could carry material associated with the cocktail sophistication of Sinatra while rooting it in the earthier soul tradition that was genuinely his home territory.
A Soul Reading of a Jazz Classic
What Womack did with the song was find the ache underneath its romantic surface. The lyric is about desire and wonder, about wanting to travel to celestial places with someone you love. In Sinatra's reading, the dominant feeling is confident romantic authority: the singer knows what he wants and expects to have it. Womack's reading is warmer and more openly vulnerable, carrying the specific emotional coloring of the soul tradition, where longing is worn honestly and the voice is permitted to show the effort of feeling. The arrangement that frames his vocal gives the song space to breathe in ways its jazz incarnations had not previously explored. The difference in emotional temperature between the two versions is instructive about the distance between those two musical worlds.
The Chart History
The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on August 17, 1968, debuting at position 100. Its climb was measured and deliberate: the song spent weeks consolidating its audience rather than sprinting through the chart, eventually reaching its peak of number 52 on October 26, 1968. It remained on the chart for 13 weeks in total. That peak position reflects the inherent challenge of claiming a song so thoroughly identified with Sinatra: even a genuinely distinctive interpretation faced the uphill work of establishing itself as something new rather than merely familiar. Still, thirteen weeks on the Hot 100 represented a solid commercial performance for a soul artist covering jazz-era repertoire at a crowded moment in American pop.
The Long Afterlife
Womack went on to build a catalog that eventually earned him recognition as one of the great soul voices of his generation. The 2012 album The Bravest Man in the Universe, recorded near the end of his life and produced by Damon Albarn and Richard Russell, introduced his work to listeners who had missed his earlier recordings entirely. His 1968 “Fly Me to the Moon” remains a reward for those willing to hear a familiar song through different ears and a different emotional register. With approximately 40 million YouTube views, the recording has found an audience patient enough to let Womack show you what he heard in Bart Howard's melody. Put it on. His vocal entrance will tell you everything you need to know about why he recorded it.
“Fly Me To The Moon” — Bobby Womack's singular moment on the 1960s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of “Fly Me to the Moon”: Romance, Wonder, and the Desire to Leave the World Behind
A Lyric Built on Celestial Longing
Bart Howard wrote “Fly Me to the Moon” in 1954, and its central image is romantic love figured as escape velocity: the desire to leave ordinary earth behind and travel to the most remote places imaginable. The moon, the stars, Jupiter and Mars are invoked not as scientific objects but as the furthest reaches of a lover's imagination, the most extravagant geography available to describe the scale of wanting. The lyric asks to be taken there; alternatively, it offers to take the beloved there. The direction is interchangeable because the point is the gesture, the magnitude of desire rather than any literal plan of celestial travel. The song understands that love in its full intensity always feels like this: too large for the available world.
The Language of Total Devotion
At its core, the song concerns wanting to be in love completely and wanting the beloved to understand that completeness. The celestial imagery serves this purpose by establishing scale: ordinary vocabulary for affection feels insufficient, so the singer reaches for the most extravagant geography available. This is the tradition of the hyperbolic love lyric, which extends from Renaissance poetry through the American Songbook and into soul, R&B, and pop. The tradition understands that exaggeration, when deployed with genuine sincerity, is not deception but a different kind of honesty: a truer account of what love feels like from the inside than a measured, proportionate statement could ever provide.
What Bobby Womack's Interpretation Adds
The soul tradition from which Womack emerges had its own relationship to romantic longing. Where the Great American Songbook tended toward elegant containment, the soul music of the 1960s allowed the voice to be more nakedly expressive, less defended, more willing to show the strain of feeling deeply. Womack's reading foregrounds vulnerability rather than confidence, which shifts the song's emotional register considerably. The request at the heart of the lyric sounds less like an offer from a position of romantic power and more like a genuine plea: take me somewhere extraordinary, because ordinary life is insufficient for what I feel for you. That shift in power dynamic opens new emotional territory within familiar words.
The 1968 Context
By 1968, real moon landings were less than a year away. The cultural significance of lunar travel had saturated American consciousness throughout the decade; the space race was a national drama played out on television screens and in newspaper headlines every week. For listeners in that specific moment, “Fly Me to the Moon” carried a particular charge: the celestial was no longer purely metaphorical but was becoming literally achievable by human beings within a historical eyeblink. The song's romantic fantasy intersected with the era's grandest technological ambition in ways that no writer in 1954 could have anticipated, giving the familiar lyric an unexpected resonance in its new context.
Romance as Antidote to the World
In a year defined by assassinations, urban unrest, and an increasingly unpopular war, a song about wanting to escape with someone you love to the most remote reaches of the imaginable universe offered listeners a form of emotional relief that was not trivial or frivolous. The escapism of great romantic music creates a temporary alternative space, one where the dominant feeling is not fear or grief but desire and wonder. That function is valuable in any era, and it was particularly valuable in the specific climate of 1968. Womack understood that. His voice in this recording carries all the weight of the world that the lyric promises, however briefly, to leave behind.
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