Reether's Version of Today I Sing the Blues

Reverend Franklin wanted his daughter to make music that would cross over to the white pop market. He was aiming for the same kind of audience that Nat King Cole or Harry Belafonte had, and he wanted a recording standards like Over the Rainbow. This showed a lack of understanding on Reverend Franklin's part of how such crossovers actually worked at this point. Columbia didn't know nothing about crossing over. But Hammond knew they had to make a record quickly, because Sam Cooke had been working on RCA records, trying to get them to sign a reether. And so they came up with a compromise set of songs which satisfied nobody, but did produce two R&B Top 10 hits