Breakbeat is a type of groove that uses samples taken from classic funk recordings, loops them and reuses them as grooves for all new tunes.

If you map it through its subsequent subgenres, it's wild to think about how far some of those 60s funk recordings have gone.

Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music. I'm your host Kirk Hamilton and I'm so glad you've joined me to talk about break beats, progressive beats, big beat, acid breaks, and sometimes just plain old beats played by drummers.

Strong Songs is an entirely listener supported podcast which means that the only way I make money from the show is thanks to listeners like you signing up on Patreon.

If you want to support me making strong songs and get early access to new episodes, go to patreon.com slash strong songs to find out more.

On this episode we are tracking a single song through the decades as it undergoes two huge transformations going from an under-appreciated gem to a beloved classic to an even more beloved worldwide hit.

So let's strum our pain, let's sing our life and let's get it going.

If you were around in the 1990s and in particular, if you were young in the 90s, you probably have some strong memories associated with certain recordings.

And if you're anything like me, you have some very strong memories associated with hearing this particular singer singing this particular song.

Are you back there now? Can you see it? Can you feel it?

Lauren Hill's rendition of killing me softly with his song was one of the defining songs of my high school years and for a long time I thought that was as far as it went.

This was an interesting throwbacky R&B song that became a huge hit and that was the end of the story.

I did always think it seemed like an interesting kind of stripped down arrangement and it was only several years later that I learned that actually there was an earlier rendition of the song that was a more traditional 70s style jazz soul arrangement.

I first heard Roberta Flax version of the song when I was in college and I loved it.

A more fleshed out, harmonically lush rendition of a song that I thought for several years had been written in the 1990s.

But then I spent several years mistakenly thinking that Flax had written the song and that this version, her version, was the original recording.

Wrong again.

Only recently did I learn the full story of killing me softly with his song and of Lori Lieberman, the first singer to ever record it way back in 1971.

And that's what we're going to be talking about on this episode, this brilliant decade spanning genre hopping song.

Killing me softly with his song with its unforgettable melody and those irresistible lyrics sung three different times by three very different singers.

So that's what we're going to do.

We're going to take a look at the song itself as originally recorded in 1971 and then we're going to look at two subsequent reimagining of the song and the ways those reimagining reworked aspects of the song while staying true to all the things that make it great.

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