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Unchained Melody
Words by Hy Zaret, 1955; music by Alex North, 1955
In 1954, the film composer Alex North was hired to score a modest black-and-white prison picture called Unchained, shot inside the men’s prison at Chino, California, and built around an inmate weighing escape against serving out his sentence and going home to his wife and children. The studio wanted a theme song, so North telephoned an old friend, the Tin Pan Alley lyricist Hy Zaret, and asked him for words. Zaret turned him down. He was busy painting his house. North kept after him, and Zaret eventually sat down and wrote a lyric about waiting, and longing, and time passing — then flatly refused the producer’s request to work the word “unchained” into it anywhere. That is how one of the most beloved love songs of the century ended up named after a movie almost nobody remembers.
In the film it is sung by Todd Duncan, the great baritone George Gershwin had personally chosen as the first Porgy in Porgy and Bess. He plays a prisoner, accompanied by another inmate on guitar, while the men around him listen. That performance earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song; at the 1956 ceremony Harry Belafonte sang it, and the award went to “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.”
The song did not need the Oscar. In 1955 three American recordings crowded the Top Ten at once: Les Baxter’s choral version topped Billboard’s airplay chart, Al Hibbler’s reached number three, and Roy Hamilton’s went to number six on the pop side and all the way to number one on the R&B list. In Britain, four different versions — Hibbler, Baxter, Jimmy Young, and Liberace — sat in the Top Twenty simultaneously, a record no other song has matched, with Young’s holding number one for three weeks. There is a small joke buried in all this: Baxter’s arrangement opens with his chorus chanting the very word Zaret had refused to write.
Then came 1965 and the version most of us hear in our heads. Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers each got one solo turn per album, both wanted this song, and Hatfield won the coin toss. Phil Spector, their producer, couldn’t be bothered with album tracks and left it to Medley, who built the arrangement and played the Wurlitzer piano himself. It went out as the throwaway flip side of a single called “Hung on You” — and disc jockeys ignored the A-side and played the B-side instead. By Medley’s account, Spector was so incensed that he began calling radio stations to ask them to stop. They didn’t, and it reached number four. Later pressings of the single carried Spector’s name as producer.
Twenty-five years later the film Ghost made it a hit all over again. Two Righteous Brothers versions charted at the same time in 1990, the reissued original and a new re-recording, and for eight weeks both sat on the Billboard Hot 100 — the first time any act had two versions of one song in the Top Twenty at once. In Britain the reissue went to number one for four weeks and became the best-selling single of the year.
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