"Someday We'll All Be Free" by Cassietta George
A stunning gospel cover of a Donny Hathaway classic.
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The late Cassietta George was a talented songwriter and vocalist in the gospel genre. She penned many songs for gospel legend Albertina Walker’s group The Caravans and was also a group member. George eventually pursued a solo career with great success and continued to record and write prolifically from the late-1960s until her death in 1995. Her Discogs page notes 15 solo albums and 54 writing & arrangement credits.
1977 saw the release of Signs, a project that finds George adding gospel flavor to several popular secular numbers. Running eight songs and just over half an hour in length, Signs is a short, powerful listen. George utilizes every second of recording time to maximize the emotion of the music.
The album starts with an excellent rendition of Leon Russell’s often-covered “A Song for You.” The instrumentation is outstanding and George sings beautifully, further aided at the song’s conclusion with powerful backing vocals from Cleo Kennedy, Josephine Howard, and Mattie Davis. In a true testament to how much amazing music there is in the world and how little metrics matter, her cover has a mere 542 views on YouTube despite being uploaded nearly a decade ago.
George is at her best while covering Donny Hathaway’s classic “Someday We’ll All Be Free” from his heralded 1973 album Extensions of a Man. Though “Someday” started as a very personal song, it took on a deeper meaning and became a civil rights anthem for Black Americans in the years following its release. (There’s a quote online attributed to the song’s co-writer Ed Howard that indicates the lyrics were about Hathaway’s struggles with paranoid schizophrenia, but I can’t seem to find the original source and am hesitant to include it here until I do.)
Covering such a powerful piece of music is risky business and could easily miss the mark in the hands of a less skilled performer. George handles it like a true pro. She captures the power of the original and adds her own musical dimensions to it. Simply put, her version is gorgeous. It’s a shame that it has limited traction with modern audiences. I hope that changes with time.
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