"Sanctuary"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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While I was transcribing "Sanctuary" from Out of the Shadows, I noticed that Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent do something similar to what Sam Cooke does in "Summertime."*

The last verse of "Sanctuary" is:

Will you be my sanctuary
There for me when all the world's in vain
Shelter me when I'm runnin' for cover
And open my eyes and help me to be once again

(The lyrics as printed in the liner notes are slightly different.  There are different line breaks at the end so that it's five lines [with "Be once again" as its own line], but I think it looks better as four.  And they have one line as "when I run for cover," but I don't think that's what Blunstone actually sings.)

After that, the same words from that verse are sort of shuffled into:

Will you be
There for me, my sanctuary

Sections of earlier lines are reconstituted so that now they rhyme ("be"/"me"), excepting that vocative "my sanctuary."  Sam Cooke does a similar thing in "Summertime."  I've written about this before, but basically, he takes the ends of the first two verses ("So hush, little baby, don't you cry" and "With your daddy and mommy standin' by") and combines them in a new way to get "They're standin' by so don't cry."

I'm not sure if Blunstone and Argent shuffled their lines like that because Cooke did, but they have mentioned him as an influence, so I suppose it's possible.

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*Or, at least, it's in one of Sam Cooke's versions of "Summertime."  I have two different versions on different compilation albums, so apparently he recorded it more than once.