"I'll Never Find Another You"

The Seekers

In 1835, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow observed that “music is the universal language of mankind.” Does this ring true in your experience? I’m sure that Longfellow, a very wise and learned man, understood that his was not an original thought so much as a simple statement of fact which could then and can now readily be observed in every part of the world. Well, perhaps not in quite every part of the world. It seems that the question of the universality of music across cultures was recently taken on as topic of study at Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, where a graduate student decided that the truth of this claim had never been empirically established. Five years later, he and his considerable team published the results of their investigation in Science (read here), and found that, indeed, “Music appears in every society [which their study] observed.” What an astounding discovery! In an interview with The Harvard Gazette, the student summarized his project in this way:

“As a graduate student, I was working on studies of infant music perception, and I started to see all these studies that made claims about music being universal. How is it that every paper on music starts out with this big claim, but there’s never a citation backing that up … Now we can back that up.”

So evidently all the observations on this topic by human beings since recorded time are insufficient without a “citation” to prove their validity. And now we have a citation. What a relief! Sorry to have taken you down that little rabbit hole that I fell into along the way to writing Sometimes a song.

And today I am very pleased to present to our Word & Song readers a very fine folk song which has, if I may say so without footnotes, universal appeal. Today’s song is “I’ll Never Find Another You,” by the delightful Australian pop group, The Seekers. It’s funny how popular music works, producing “overnight sensations” who seem to come out of nowhere but most often have a long background of training and performing behind them. Perhaps we should being today with the song itself, which was written by one Dionysius Patrick O’Brien, known in the music business as Tom Springfield. If the name “Springfield” rings a pop song bell, that may be because you have heard the music of Tom’s sister, Dusty Springfield, who first hit the American music scene singing in a trio with her brother. The Springfields recorded a Country and Western song from the 1950’s, “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” in 1962. That song became the first recording by a British group to break the top 20 in the US Billboard Top 100 Charts. A “cross-over hit, “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” remained popular throughout the 1960’s and 70’s, and was recorded by Skeeter Davis (also in 1962), Linda Ronstadt, on her debut solo album (in 1969), and again in 1974, by the Cowsills (in 1977), and by countless others.

Fortunately for The Seekers, who were just getting started as a group in the early 1960’s, Dusty Springfield decided to go solo, and her brother, Tom, set to work behind the scenes as a songwriter and pop music producer. So in Australia, a trained jazz singer, Judith Durham, agreed to work as lead singer, with three excellent and versatile musician/singers — Athol Guy, Keith Potger, and Bruce Woodley — in a brilliant folk combo that would produce hit after hit folk songs for the rest of the decade. The Seekers were a popular singing group in Australia, of course, but they wanted a broader audience. So they accepted a 12-month contract with a cruise liner as on-board entertainers, and literally worked their way to London. There they got a gig on the same bill with then headliner, Dusty Springfield, whose brother was managing her act. Tom wrote his first of six songs for The Seekers, our Sometimes a Song for today, and he became their producer. The Seekers recorded “I’ll Never Find Another You” in England in the fall of 1964, and shortly that recording reached the Top 50 there. By early 1965, the song hit the Number 1 spot in the UK and Australia, and Number 4 in the US.

Among his other hit songs for the Seekers, Tom Springfield wrote their biggest hit (and theme for the movie of the same name) “Georgy Girl.” That song reached the Number 2 spot on the Billboard Charts in 1966 and earned the Seekers a Gold Record in the US, selling 3.5 million copies the world over. “Georgy Girl,” as sung by The Seekers, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song of 1966, but lost out to the theme from the film, Born Free. (In those days Academy Award losses often resulted from an embarrassment of riches, too many great tunes. In a different year, “Georgie Girl” might well have taken home the Oscar.)

I could go on and on about The Seekers, whose music was formative for the likes of the young Paul Simon when his and their paths crossed in mid-60’s London. But let me save some stories for another day! For now, let’s listen to the song which Wikipedia wrongly has labeled “a gospel song” (yes, the article really says that!) — “I’ll Never Find Another You.” I know you won’t be able to resist this classic folk-style LOVE SONG.

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