Who recorded it first

Evil Ways

Not a Santana original — Willie Bobo cut it for Verve in 1967

“Evil Ways” is so completely Santana’s record that most people assume the band wrote it and cut it first. They did neither. It was written by the guitarist Clarence “Sonny” Henry and first recorded by the Latin-jazz percussionist Willie Bobo, at sessions on 20 and 27 July 1967, for his Verve album Bobo Motion ↗. Verve believed in it — they pulled it as a 45, then named a whole 1968 compilation after it — and it went nowhere both times; Santana recorded their version in May 1969 and reached no. 9 on the Hot 100 the following March.

The record

Who recorded it first

The record
“Evil Ways” · Willie Bobo
First issued
Bobo Motion, Verve V6–8699, 1967 — sessions on 20 and 27 July 1967
Written by
Clarence “Sonny” Henry, who also played the guitar on it
The famous version
Santana, Columbia, single issued 30 December 1969 — no. 9 on the Hot 100

Released A track on Willie Bobo’s Bobo Motion (Verve V6–8699), cut at sessions on 20 and 27 July 1967 in New York and at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and produced by Pete Spargo and Teddy Reig. Verve also pulled it as a 7-inch single that year — “Evil Ways” backed with “Up-Up & Away,” catalogue VK 10550 — and then, in 1968, named an entire Willie Bobo compilation LP Evil Ways (V6–8781) after it.

Charted No chart placing on record. The song’s Wikipedia entry ↗ lists chart positions for Santana’s version and for Johnny Mathis’s 1970 cover, and none at all for Bobo’s original. That a label went back to the same track twice in two years is the tell: Verve kept trying, and the record kept not happening.

Hear Willie Bobo’s 1967 Verve recording — the first version of the song, before Santana existed on record www.youtube.com · An auto-generated upload on the “Willie Bobo - Topic” channel, described in its own metadata as “Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group” and carrying the line ℗ 1967 The Verve Music Group, a Division of UMG Recordings, Inc. — so it is the 1967 master licensed by the rights holder, not a later re-cut. It runs 2:39, against 2:41 on both the Bobo Motion track listing and the MusicBrainz recording and 2:35 printed on the Verve 45 label, which places it inside the spread of catalogued timings for this one recording. Then compare Santana’s 1969 Columbia debut version — the hit single that turned Willie Bobo’s Latin-jazz cut into a rock standard. www.youtube.com · Auto-generated upload on the “Santana - Topic” channel; description carries “Provided to YouTube by Columbia/Legacy” and “℗ 1969 … Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment”, with a release date of 1969-08-30 (the Santana debut LP). Runtime 237s; MusicBrainz gives 236,933ms (3:57) for the Santana recording — a 0.1s difference. A second Topic upload of the same track (YiNME8msrzg) exists at 238s but is tagged to a 2014 reissue, so I took the 1969-dated one.

How we traced it

July 1967 — Willie Bobo cuts the song for Bobo Motion ↗ (Verve V6–8699), with the writer, Sonny Henry, playing guitar and sharing the arranging credit with Bert Keyes.

1967 — Verve pulls it as a 45, “Evil Ways” backed with “Up-Up & Away,” catalogue VK 10550 ↗. It does not take.

1968 — Verve tries once more, naming a whole Willie Bobo compilation LP Evil Ways ↗ (V6–8781) after the track. Still nothing.

16 August 1969 — Santana play it second in their Woodstock set ↗, six days before their debut album arrives. The Columbia single follows on 30 December and hits no. 9 in March.

MusicBrainz: the Sonny Henry composition and every recording made of it
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Fact-check

What’s actually true

The song is one of the best-known things Santana ever recorded, which is exactly why almost nobody knows it arrived secondhand. Here is what checks out and what does not.

The beliefWrong

That “Evil Ways” originated with Santana

Santana recorded it in May 1969 and released it as a single on 30 December 1969. The song had already been recorded, pressed as a 45, and used as the title of a compilation LP before they got to it.

The originalVerified

Willie Bobo, recorded 20 and 27 July 1967

Issued on Bobo Motion (Verve V6–8699) in 1967 and as a Verve 45, VK 10550. MusicBrainz dates the recording’s first release to 1967 and ties it to that album, and no earlier recording of the song by anyone is documented.

The writerVerified

Clarence “Sonny” Henry

Credited as composer and lyricist on the MusicBrainz work entity and named as the writer by Wikipedia. He was also Bobo’s guitarist and co-arranged the album the original appeared on.

A stray dateAggregator error

Songfacts dates Bobo’s recording to 1965

It cites nothing for the year, and it is contradicted by the album’s documented July 1967 sessions, the 1967 Verve catalogue numbers on both the LP and the 45, and MusicBrainz’s first-release date. Treat 1967 as the year.

A stray creditLabel error

“Jimmie Zack”

First pressings of both Santana’s debut album and the single printed the songwriting credit as Jimmie Zack rather than Henry — a second, smaller way the record got the authorship wrong.

Written by Clarence “Sonny” Henry, first recorded by Willie Bobo in July 1967 for Verve, and made famous by Santana more than two years later.

Context

Why the cover swallowed the original

The interesting thing about “Evil Ways” is that the original was never buried. Verve released it three separate times — as an album track in 1967, as a 45 the same year, and as the title of a Willie Bobo compilation in 1968 — and each time it failed to find anyone. The problem was not obscurity but address. Bobo’s record is a tight two-and-a-half minutes of Latin soul aimed at a jazz audience, released by a jazz label, at a moment when American radio was pulling hard in the other direction.

Santana’s version arrived attached to an entirely different machine. Their manager was Bill Graham, who was pushing the band toward more conventional song shapes to give their improvising something to hang on; the band played Woodstock on 16 August 1969, six days before Columbia released their debut; and the single followed at the end of December, into a rock market that was ready for exactly this. Same tune, same changes, a vastly better delivery system.

The full chronology, step by step
  • 20 and 27 July 1967 — Willie Bobo records Bobo Motion in New York and at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, with Sonny Henry on guitar. “Evil Ways” is track seven, running 2:41.
  • 1967 — Verve releases the album as V6–8699 and pulls “Evil Ways” as a 45, VK 10550, backed with “Up-Up & Away.” No chart placing.
  • 1968 — Verve names a Willie Bobo compilation LP Evil Ways (V6–8781) after the track. Again, nothing.
  • May 1969 — Santana record their version at Pacific Recorders in San Mateo, California, with Gregg Rolie on lead vocal and organ.
  • 16 August 1969 — Santana play “Evil Ways” second in their set at Woodstock.
  • 22 August 1969 — Columbia releases the album Santana, which goes on to peak at no. 4 and spend 108 weeks on the chart.
  • 30 December 1969 — the single is released. It reaches no. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the week of 21 March 1970, the band’s first US Top 40 hit.
  • 1970 — Johnny Mathis records his own version, reaching no. 30 on Billboard’s MOR chart. By this point the song is understood as Santana’s.
The song wasn’t undiscovered. It was under-amplified.

The original recording artist

Willie Bobo

1934–1983 · American Latin jazz percussionist and bandleader

Born William Correa in East Harlem in 1934, Bobo was a percussionist’s percussionist: timbales with Tito Puente from 1954 to 1957, then work with Mongo Santamaría and Cal Tjader, then a Verve contract from 1965 and a run of Latin-soul albums under his own name. “Evil Ways” was a track on one of them, Bobo Motion, recorded in July 1967. Carlos Santana has credited him as one of the first musicians to genuinely fuse Latin music and blues on record, which is a fair description of what the original sounds like. Bobo died of cancer in 1983, aged 49.

Popularly credited as the original

Santana

American Latin rock band · San Francisco

Santana came together in San Francisco in the late 1960s around Carlos Santana’s guitar and Gregg Rolie’s Hammond organ, and their reading of “Evil Ways” is genuinely definitive — Rolie sings it and takes the organ solo, Carlos Santana takes the guitar solo, and the arrangement gives the tune a lift the 1967 version never had. Recorded in May 1969 and issued as a single that December, it became the band’s first US Top 40 hit and one of the songs that carried their Woodstock reputation into record shops. The only error in the popular memory is chronological: they made the song famous, they did not make it first.

The songwriter

Clarence “Sonny” Henry

American jazz and R&B guitarist · Willie Bobo's guitarist on the Verve albums

Henry was Willie Bobo’s guitarist, playing on a run of Bobo’s Verve records and sharing the arranging credit on Bobo Motion with Bert Keyes. He wrote “Evil Ways” and played the guitar on the first recording of it, which makes him the one person on this page present at both the writing and the original. He is thinly documented — no standard reference biography, and even his dates are hard to pin down — which is its own small comment on how credit gets distributed once a cover takes off.