Every ten years it occurs to me to learn this tune, and then I come up against the fact that it’s in E-flat minor, I get discouraged, and I give up. Well, not this time! This time I decided to take the coward’s way out: I put the tune in Ableton and transposed it up to the much more guitarist-friendly key of E minor.
Yusuf Roahman plays shaker and Sheila Wilkerson plays bongos and güiro, and Stevie plays everything else: piano, (synth) bass and drums. I assume that Stevie put down the piano first and then they overdubbed everything on top?
Here’s a live version from 1974. The clothes and hair are to die for.
There are lots of covers out there. Understandably, all of them leave out the Spanish gibberish at the beginning. The Tori Kelly version from Sing is… fine. The John Legend version from Hitch is a precise recreation of Stevie’s original, which is an impressive accomplishment, but then makes you wonder why it was necessary to begin with. Don’t even talk to me about Jacob Collier’s version; he loads it up with chromaticism and Coltrane changes for no good reason, and it gets on my nerves.
On a more positive note, I very much enjoy this 90s-tastic version by Incognito.
It’s a bit sad that the drummer in the video has to mime along to an obviously programmed drum track, but what are you going to do.
“Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing” has become a minor jazz standard. People usually play it as lounge-y smoothed-out Latin jazz. My favorite version is by Cal Tjader and Carmen McRae, because it has Carmen’s characteristic tartness.
Thad Jones and Mel Lewis do some nifty reharmonizing in their chart.
The weirdest cover I’ve heard is this chiptune version.
There are lots of charts of the tune out there. They seem to be evenly split between D-sharp minor and E-flat minor. Both keys are hard to notate. If you write it in D-sharp minor, then you have six sharps in the key signature, and the second note in the tune is C-sharp-sharp. No thanks. If you write in E-flat minor, then there are six flats in the key signature, and you have to deal with a bunch of F-flats and C-flats and B-flat-flats. The Real Book version solves this problem by writing in E-flat minor and simply writing all the enharmonics incorrectly: B-natural instead of C-flat, E-natural instead of F-flat, A-natural instead of B-flat-flat. Jazz musicians will always choose simplicity over accuracy. In twelve-tone equal temperament, what’s the difference anyway?
For my chart, I chose E-flat minor, because, why not. The note spellings are mostly right, but I did write some E chords rather than Fb.
Like I said at the top of the post, I did my transcribing by shifting the recording up a half step to the much friendlier key of E minor.
Here’s how I’ve been playing it on guitar.
I’ll do all my analysis of the tune using the E minor version. If you want to think in the original key, just add a flat to everything below.
The intro uses a line cliche on Em, a descending chromatic bassline from E to C-sharp. This two-bar phrase repeats ten times while Stevie shouts Spanish-sounding gibberish and brags about his world travels.
||: Em Em/D# | Em/D Em/C# :||
The line that Stevie repeats several times is “todo está bien, chévere.” This literally translates to “everything is good, cool.” It’s not idiomatic Spanish, but it sounds good.
The verse begins similarly to the intro, but with full chords over the descending bassline. After the first two bars there’s a key change from E minor to C major via a nice jazzy iii – V/ii – ii – V progression. The four-bar phrase repeats, and the second time there’s an extra bar on the end, occupied by an extremely hip Fmaj9 chord. It’s the IV chord in C major, so it’s a perfectly logical chord in context, but it makes you wonder how Stevie is going to get back home to E minor from there.
| Em B7/D# | Em/D A7/C# | Dm7 G9 | Cmaj7 B7(#5) |
| Em B7/D# | Em/D A7/C# | Dm7 G9 | Cmaj7 | Fmaj9 |
The chorus surprises you by not returning to E minor at all, but instead going to G major. Stevie interrupts the resolution from G9 to C with a B chord. Sometimes he plays it as Bm and sometimes as B7; I split the difference and wrote it as B7(#9). The chorus returns to E minor at the end via a very crunchy altered B7 chord; you could think of it as F/B if you wanted.
| G | G9 | B7(#9) | C(add9) |
| A(add9) | D9sus4 | G(add9) | B7(b5 #5) |
The second verse is the same as the first. The second chorus starts the same way as the first, but it ends two bars early and jumps straight into the the bridge. This part is rad!
||: G7sus4 G7 F#7sus4 F#7 | F7sus4 F7 E7sus4 E7 |
| Eb7sus4 Eb7 D7sus4 D7 | G(add9) :||
As each sus4 resolves, the third of the chord becomes the sus4 of the next chord a half step down. It’s such a simple and elegant harmonic idea, laid out in a breathtakingly hip syncopated rhythm. My least favorite aspect of Jacob Collier’s version is that he obfuscates this part with a lot of unnecessarily “interesting” chords. Interesting is not the same as good.
The second part of the bridge (“Don’t you worry ’bout a thi-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ing”) begins like the intro, but after the bassline descends, there are two bars of a splendidly dark and funky F6/9(#11) chord. You could also think of it as Am11 with F in the bass.
| Em Em/D# | Em/D Em/C# | F6/9(#11) | % |
| Em Em/D# | Em/D Em/C# | F6/9(#11) | B7 |
This leads into verse 3, which is multiply overdubbed scat singing (“Ba ba ba ba ba…”). Then we have chorus 3, which is the same as chorus 2. There’s another bridge, the first half only, which goes straight into verse 4. This is followed by chorus 4, the same as chorus 1. There’s the second half of the bridge, doubled in length. The backing vocals are singing “to-do ‘stá bien chéééééévere” in a hip broken rhythm. Finally, there’s the outtro groove, which is the first half of verse 3 with the scat singing, while the “to-do stá bien chéééééévere” backing vocals continue. Stevie is economical, deploying the same musical idea over and over with different arrangements on top. Every section has some fresh musical interest, but you are never overwhelmed with too much information.
In the Song Factory class, we talk about the question of whether to write lyrics first and then set them to music, or whether to write music first and then fit lyrics to it. Like Lennon and McCartney, Stevie is a music-first songwriter. He writes by jamming on the piano or some other keyboard instrument until he discovers something good, and then develops from there. (One exception is “Superstition”, which he wrote from the drums upward.) As a result, his melodies and harmonies and grooves are rock-solid and flawless, and then the words are just kind of… there. This is not necessarily a problem! It just means that Stevie’s music is more about music than about textual messages. If the music is this strong, it almost doesn’t matter what the words are.
Update: check out this response post from Wenatchee the Hatchet with an excellent contrapuntal analysis of the tune, picking up on several details that I missed.