José Feliciano - Behind This Guitar (Deluxe Edition) (2020/2021)

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José Feliciano - Behind This Guitar (Deluxe Edition) (2020/2021)

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The title track on José Feliciano’s latest album Behind This Guitar sums up, with uncanny accuracy, the still-unfolding career of this remarkable and singular figure in American musical culture of the last half-century. Puerto Rican by birth, a New Yorker (Spanish Harlem) from his childhood, José Feliciano has been a fact of American musical life since his breakthrough at the height of the Sixties – the golden age of American pop and rock music.

Feliciano’s new album on the Anthem label is more than the latest turn in an uncommonly long and steady performing and recording career.

Behind This Guitar brings the singer/guitarist full circle with producer and old friend Rick Jarrard, whom RCA Victor assigned to produce the very young Feliciano in the late 1960s. It was Jarrard who convinced Feliciano to record The Doors’ “Light My Fire” for their album Feliciano! – the record that made him a household name in 1968. Two years later, in the midst of recording a Christmas album, it was Jarrard who told Feliciano they needed a new song and encouraged Feliciano as he virtually improvised the enduring classic “Feliz Navidad”.

Together again for Behind This Guitar, artist and producer have rediscovered their rhythm, in collaborating on the first album Feliciano has ever recorded in Nashville.

Born blind in Puerto Rico, the fourth son of a large family that moved to New York’s Spanish Harlem, José Feliciano served notice, as little more than an infant, of his insatiable desire to make music and an emerging talent. He was 9 years old when his life changed forever – the day his father handed him a paper bag that contained his first guitar. Largely self-taught, from listening to guitarists as diverse as Andrés Segovia and Wes Montgomery, Feliciano became a singer/guitarist. (Ray Charles and Sam Cooke inspired his vocal style.) He began performing, with the kind of success that helped support his family and began to upend the grim fate that awaited most blind people at that time.

The title song from Behind This Guitar might well have been written directly from Feliciano’s experience, though it wasn’t – like so many things in his life and career, an improbable and even more remarkable result of how phenomenal will and a unique, focused artistry can make luck and timing possible.

By the time he was a teenager, Feliciano was turning heads as a singer/guitarist across the country in the folk club/coffeehouse scene – “a 10-fingered wizard,” a critic for the New York Times hailed him. He was signed by RCA Victor, where his early successes established him through his virtuosic guitar-playing and uncommon ease in drawing on the sounds of folk, pop, soul, and rock, filtered through the Latin sensibility in which he learned music. In the Spanish-speaking world – where, after he visited Argentina in 1966, he began to virtually reinvent the possibilities in the classic boléro form – he was a top-selling recording star by the time he was 21.

Feliciano already had a distinctive international career when “Light My Fire” catapulted him to real pop superstardom. It was a song no one much wanted him to record except Jarrard. It was even the “B” side of the single from Feliciano! (“California Dreamin’” was the “A” side). The rest is history. The recording won Feliciano a 1968 Grammy Award® for his performance, the same year he won the Grammy for Best New Artist of the Year.

To date, José Feliciano has won nine Grammy Awards including Lifetime Achievement honors, plus multiple other nominations. He has released more than 60 albums in both English and Spanish, on a variety of labels, collaborating with an extraordinary array of artists. He toured the world (and continues to), maintaining a vibrant presence in the Latin music world, and even became a fixture in American television with the theme song he recorded in 1974 for the hit series Chico and the Man. In 2000, Feliciano was named a Grammy Legend and, a decade later, “Feliz Navidad” entered the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Throughout the year 2018, Feliciano celebrated the golden anniversary of his breakthrough and of the way his music, his artistry and his personal integrity have been woven into the American experience. In 2018, he returned in triumph to his native Puerto Rico and also performed for Pope Francis I at the Vatican. Feliciano began 2019 with a notable return to Puerto Rico with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda to perform a benefit for the island’s recovery from Hurricane Maria. The year before, he recorded a very special single, “En Mi Viejo San Juan,” for Miranda’s charity – a recording, straight from his soul, destined to be a classic. In the spring, the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The memories were not all golden: 2018 was also the 50th anniversary of the fury and outrage that resulted by Feliciano’s uniquely styled interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before Game 5 of the 1968 World Series – the first artist (Jimi Hendrix and Woodstock were almost a year in the future) to put a contemporary, personal, multicultural stamp on the National Anthem.

History made José Feliciano a hero, however, and gave him the last laugh. In 2018 he delivered the keynote address on Flag Day at the Smithsonian Institute – standing adjacent to the flag that inspired the writing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” – and he also made a gift to the Smithsonian’s permanent collection of the guitar he played in the controversial 1968 performance. Even sweeter, a few months later, he returned to Detroit to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” once again for a Detroit Tigers game. This time, exuberant cheers and thunderous gratitude drowned out the anger and bigotry of half a century earlier.

Still to come are Feliciano’s autobiography and a new documentary film about his life and career, Icon: Jose Feliciano. And – in another uncanny trick of fate – his classic cover of “California Dreamin’” was selected by director Quentin Tarantino for his circa-1969 soundtrack for his acclaimed film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

In many ways, José Feliciano’s new album Behind This Guitar really is business as usual. He looks forward to the album’s release, then to touring the world singing these new songs, and he hope his fans, old and new, like what he has recorded. Yet the album’s title song reveals something else – more, certainly, than Phil O’Donnell, Casey Beathard and Don Sampson could have imagined when they wrote it. Quietly, with contentment and grace, the song tells you everything – the very meaning of a life lived to the fullest when José Feliciano sings and plays it.