"Dinah stands alone that mountaintop"

A couple of weeks ago I posted Dinah Washington singing This Bitter Earth in a collaboration with contemporary composer Max Richter and raved about it. Well, a dear and cherished friend wrote to me from New York admonishing me for not putting the original up, especially how it was used in the sequence in the movie Killer of Sheep made by Charles Burnett back in 1978. She wrote – I appreciate your enthusiasm for the chamber piece you posted for This Bitter Earth but the original song, that performance, is at the very top of my pantheon and drops me to my knees every time, as it does in Charles Burnett’s “Killer Of Sheep.”  I feel the Max Richter version drew too much attention to itself. Dinah stands alone on that mountaintop. 

Now, I am not saying I completely agree with this – they seem to have different objectives, really – but please watch the piece of footage below. It is really quite extraordinary and, well, I just thought you all might like to see it and, I don’t know, just swoon.