One song at a time - 26. Unnidathil Ennai Koduthen

Last week I spoke about some lovely songs not getting their due because of being overshadowed by other hit songs from the same movie. That is atleast better. Many a times artists don't get their due because they are overshadowed by other artists of equal stature who are more popular. If the overshadowed artist has the required quality, he / she will have to keep working hard and wait patiently for their time to come. And come it will.

Whatever I said above, applies to many artists but the person I had in mind was S.Janaki. She was an extremely talent singer but during the 60s and for most of the 70s, she was in the periphery as far as Tamil and Telugu films were concerned. She did have a decent run in Kannada and Malayalam films but success in Tamil and Telugu films eluded her. The most dominant music directors of those days, Vishwanath-Ramamurthy and later Vishwanathan in Tamil and Rajeshwar Rao, Pendyala, K V Mahadevan in Telugu all swore by P.Susheela. To her credit, Susheela with her honey dripping voice delivered big time and has left behind a canon which is hard to beat. MSV, first with Ramammurthy and later alone, called Susheela for all the melodious songs and L R Eshwari for the 'fun' / 'club' songs. Later Vani Jayaram would be added to the mix but Janaki would continue being in the periphery. Whenever she was called, Janaki did deliver superbly but she wasn't called often. She had to wait till the late 70s for the advent of Illayaraja, who tuning suited her voice well. She gave the precise expression needed by Raja and ended up dominating the 80s along with Chitra.

The song I feature today tells you why it is just a matter of being in the right time, right place and right partnerships matter. I have chosen the song specifically because I feel this is a type of tune which has been designed for Susheela. You can easily see how Susheela could have sung this song as well. In other words, a typical Susheela tune, if I can call it so, is delivered perfectly by S Janaki. In other words, except for the difference in voices, skill wise there was very little to differentiate between them. Yet, the sweetness of Susheela's voice was preferred by music directors over Janaki's voice. As I said earlier, sometimes you just need to wait for your time to arrive.

This song can also stand as an example for the excellent partnership between Sridhar and MSV. They had partnership which has given Tamil Film Music some unforgettable classics. Sridhar definitely had a good ear for music. His movies always had great songs. While there have been many directors who had a good ear for music, what I find striking in Sridhar is the fact that he made a lot of movies over different decades and yet ensured his music quality never went down.

So let's go ahead and enjoy 'unnidathil ennai koduthen'. The only youtube link I could get was with the translation of the song. I will leave it to you to decide if you want to risk reading the translated lyrics!!