Sammy Davis Jr leads Max Harris’ ‘Dee Time’ orchestra in an utterly-unrehearsed version of the then-new Bacharach/David number ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’. The band is sight-reading, Sammy’s winging it, and the result is magic.

‘Dee Time’, hosted by Simon Dee, was a British variety show that aired in the late 1960’s.

Watching this clip tonight revived my love for Sammy. I read ‘Yes I Can’ as a kid and Sammy, along with James Brown and Chuck Berry, was one of the Black cats who really shook up my cracker ass. I grew up in the South at a time when most my white friends hated “niggers”.  I didn’t. Whitebread American suburban life in the sixties deadened my soul. Rock and roll and rhythm and blues changed all that. Sammy Davis Jr. was accused by some of being an Uncle Tom, a sellout to the man. But, for kids like me, seeing Sammy on hipster TV like ‘Laugh In’ was the beginning of a process of breaking down age old racial barriers that reached its apotheosis with the powerful energy of Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Huey Newton and Martin Luther King. I didn’t give a shit what anybody said, Sammy Davis was a god.

This video is sublime.

I’m seein’ Andre 3000 in a biopic of Sammy’s life. Right?