Recently, I learned the Fender Rhodes part at the beginning of Argent's "Sweet Mary." (What I have is probably not entirely accurate, but it's pretty close, at least.) It's well beyond my level of notational ability, so I made a video in order to have some record of it.
I used one of the Rhodes sounds (EPiano Rd2) on my Hammond SKX, which I got a few months ago.
Yester-day, I listened to Ring of Hands (and All Together Now), and I noticed a small feature in "Sweet Mary" that I've commented about in a few others songs already. In the backing vocals, there's the line "All alone when I wanted you so bad." "All alone" alliterates, and since the two words begin with the same sound, there's a sense of that singularity.
According to Russo's Collector's Guide, fifty years ago to-day (15 March 1971), Argent's "Sweet Mary" (edited) b/w "Rejoice" (Epic 5-10718) was released in the U.S. and Canada. The album Ring of Hands (Epic E 30128) was also released.
I listened to Argent's Ring of Hands a few days ago, and the bass part for "Sweet Mary" sounded pretty easy, so I learned some of it. I'm fairly certain that the keyboard part that precedes this includes at least part of this bass line, but I haven't tried it yet.
Interestingly, it's sort of the opposite of the bass part in "This Will Be Our Year." At one point, this goes chromatically from E to A (ascending), where the bass part in "This Will Be Our Year" goes chromatically from A to E (descending).
Additionally, the rising chromaticism helps to musically portray the line "Take me higher." Although, as "This Will Be Our Year" is a pretty optimistic song, I don't think you could apply the same sort of programmatic aspect to that chromatic bass line. That is: just because it's descending doesn't mean that it isn't a happy song.
This is a new one in the catalogue, but I don't know enough of it to really feel satisfied yet.
