We’re starting out a week of instrumental songs of the day (or is that songs of the days?) with an instrumental you know but probably didn’t know it had words. I’m talking about “The Horse” by Cliff Nobles & Co., which was released in 1968, sold a million copies in its first three months of release, and went all the way to #2 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Billboard R&B charts.
Everybody who’s ever been to a high school football or basketball game has heard “The Horse.” Every high school pep band and marching band in the United States for the past 55 years has played “The Horse” at least once, if not dozens or hundreds of times. We played it when I was in pep band at Ben Davis High School in the mid-70s. I’m sure they’re still playing it at ol’ BD today.
The reason “The Horse” is so popular with high school (and some college) bands is that it’s simple and easy to play. It is not a hard chart. It’s also got a good, driving beat, it’s fun to play, and it gets the crowd fired up. What more do you want?
Interestingly, Cliff Nobles himself is not present on the recording. That’s because Cliff Nobles is a vocalist and “The Horse” has no vocals. It’s an instrumental. So why is it credited to Mr. Nobles?
The reason is simple. The song started out as a vocal number called “Love is All Right.” You can sense it when you listen to the instrumental version, especially that long bit in the verse where nothing at all happens except for the bari sax going “doo-doop, doo-doop,” over and over on a two-chord (Bb to Gm) vamp. There’s supposed to be a melody there but, in the instrumental version, there isn’t. (The bari sax on the record was played by a cat named Mike Terry. That’s right, Terry on bari—it rhymes!)
Here’s the way it went down. A group of studio musicians was in the studio recording backing tracks for Mr. Noble’s latest record. (Cliff himself wasn’t present—they were just recording the instrumental tracks.) During a break in the proceedings, the rhythm section—Philly musicians Bobby Eli and Norman Harris on guitars, Ronnie Baker on bass, and Earl Young on drums—were jamming and came up with a funky little groove. Arranger Bobby Martin added horns to create the basic track, then producer Jesse James wrote some lyrics and brought in Mr. Nobles to record the vocals. The result was a would-be soul shouter called “Love is All Right,” which was released as the A-side of a single on Phil-L.A. of Soul records, a Philadelphia-based label.
For the flip side, Mr. James did something unique. He wiped Cliff Nobles’ vocals and left the original instrumental track, which he for some reason retitled “The Horse.” It was that B-side that disc jockeys around the country glommed onto, because they could use it to lead into their top-of-the-hour news segments and not have to worry about cutting off any lyrics if the timing wasn’t right. “The Horse” got a ton of airplay and almost immediately became part of our common culture. It’s one of the few songs that everybody, no matter where or when they grew up, knows.
The horn section on “The Horse,” dubbed the James Boys (after producer Jesse James), went on to fame and fortune as founding members of MFSB (Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, Brothers), the house band for Philly-based Sigma Sound Studios and Philadelphia International Records. You know them from their playing on all the big Philly Soul hits in the ’70s, as well as their own instrumental hit, “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia),” which I’ll feature as a Classic Song of the Day later this week.
As to Mr. Cliff Nobles, he released a few more instrumental singles, trying to cash in on the success of the hit track on which he didn’t appear, without notable success. When he left the music industry he worked in construction and later the electricity generation industry. He passed away in 2008, aged 67.
