Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers reflects on his legacy and his current and former partners
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Soul and inspiration: Bill Medley (right) and his duet partner Bucky Heard breathe new life into the Righteous Brothers’ classic hits.
A few years ago, Bill Medley confronted the near-impossible task of replacing his longtime singing partner Bobby Hatfield.
Previously, he didn’t think he’d ever reform the legendary blue-eyed soul duo the Righteous Brothers. But that was before he heard former Broadway singer Bucky Heard perform at the Dick Clark American Bandstand Theater in Branson, Missouri, eight years after Hatfield’s death in 2003.
“He invited me to see his show, said he was doing a couple of Journey songs,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Journey? Jesus Christ. Steve Perry is one of the greatest singers.’ And he just crushed these songs. When I heard Bucky, I said, ‘Wow. If I’m ever going to do this, he would be the guy.’ He’s a great singer and, almost as important, he became a good friend — somebody I really liked and cared about.”
Medley recruited Heard and reformed the Righteous Brothers in 2016, and speaking with the Inlander from Nashville, he reflects on the special connection he shared with Hatfield.
“I’ll tell you, man, Bobby had a phenomenal voice,” he says. “The cool thing Bobby and I had going was that we weren’t in competition with each other. He sang so different from me, and I sang so different from him, we just had a ball singing together.”
One notable exception is Hatfield’s hair-raisingly powerful solo performance on the duo’s version of “Unchained Melody,” which was originally the theme for a 1955 prison film called Unchained.
“There were only so many duets we could come up with,” Medley recalls of the recording session. “So, usually Bobby would do a song by himself, and so would I. ‘Unchained Melody’ happened to be the …
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