It's interesting to see how a musician can "cross generations" ... Quite a few comments I've read and heard this week tend to refer to his music from that movie, for which, I believe, he won a big award. But that's what one might call "younger generation" stuff ... it all came after his second "musical revival".
For me, his greatest musical performances came from the late 1960s through the 1970s. And to my mind, his exceptional ability was that he---a white guy living in England---managed to develop a real understanding of the African-American idiom---especially the
soul---and then channeled it into performances that became quite popular. Two that stand out for me, and he performed them on numerous occasions: his version of the jazz staple "
Bye Bye Blackird"; the other is
"With A Little Help From My Friends", a Beatles tune that he turned into a sort of white-man's blues: