BLACK MUSIC MONTH 2009
Chicago Soul Connection:
The Legacy of Jerry Butler’s Songwriters Workshop
by Mark Anthony Neal
Pop music history is filled with examples of singers who first honed their songwriting skills and offered those skills to more established acts, before making a name for themselves singing their own material. Most famously, Carole King was a staple at the famed Brill Building in New York City churning out pop confections with partner Gerry Goffin for the likes of The Shirelles, Little Eva, and Aretha Franklin, whose version of King and Goffin’s “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman” remains a Soul standard. After a decade behind the scenes, King stepped forward in the early 1970s with Writer (1970) and then Tapestry (1971), the latter which established King as one of the definitive singer-songwriters of the era. No less a famous example can be found in the case of Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, who toiled at Motown for nearly a decade creating classics like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “You’re All I Need to Get By” before becoming major stars in their own right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Contemporarily, there’s the case of Shaffer Chimere Smith, who offered his compositions to Marques Houston, Mario (“Let Me Love You”) and Christina Milian, before stepping out front as Ne-Yo. Singers need songs, and no one understood that better than the legendary song stylist Jerry Butler, when he created the Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop in Chicago in the early 1970s. Though few remember it Butler’s workshop would have an impact on Soul music throughout the 1970s eventually figuring in the rise of Natalie Cole as the first real challenge to Aretha Franklin’s status as the “Queen of Soul”
Jerry Butler began his professional singing career in the late 1950s as the initial lead singer for The Impressions. Butler was 18-years-old when the Chicago based group topped the pop charts with “For Your Precious Love” in 1958. Among those in the group was a 16-year-old songwriter and guitarist by the name of Curtis Mayfield, later to become one of the most recognizable singer-songwriters of his generation. Though Butler was with the group for only a short time, he and Mayfield forged a productive professional relationship that led to Butler’s success recording as a solo artist in the early 1960s. Recording with with the black-owned Vee-Jay Records with the Butler/Mayfield collaboration produced hits like “Need to Belong” and “He Will Break Your Heart.”
Butler also had access to the remnants of Tin Pan Alley—the cadre of New York based songwriters and producers that were at the heart of American popular music in the early 20th century—in this case, the aforementioned Brill Building where Butler scored hits recording tracks by Brill Building residents like Hal David and Burt Bacharach (“Make It Easy On Yourself”).
When Butler signed with Mercury Records in 1966 and was again in need of strong material, he turned to two young and unproven songwriters and producers named Leon Huff and Kenny Gamble. Butler’s work with Gamble and Huff coincides with the most productive and popular period of the Soul singer’s career with a string of hits including the ballad “Never Gonna Give You Up” (later covered by Isaac Hayes on Black Moses), “Hey Western Union Man” and “Only the Strong Survive,” which became Butler’s first Gold single and gave an early inkling of the uplift music that Gamble and Huff would become known for in the 1970s. Recalling his work with Gamble and Huff, which produced the legendary The Ice Man Cometh recording, Butler writes in his autobiography Only the Strong Survive: Memoirs of a Soul Survivor,
The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop did little to revive Butler’s career—though his second Gold single “Ain’t Understanding Mellow” with Brenda Lee Eager was a product of the workshop. By 1972 though, the workshop had generated $4 million in records sales and produced about 30 chart singles recorded by the likes of The Dells, Isaac Hayes, Aretha Franklin, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Betty Everette. Despite its modest success, the real story of the Jerry Butler Songwriter’s Workshop wasn’t what it produced, but the talent that came through its doors and went on to greater success. Workshop veterans include Terry Callier, who with fellow workshop participant Larry Wade, worked on The Dells' Freedom Means (1972) recording which produced their classic “The Love We Had (Stays on My Mind)” as well as Callier’s own brilliant Cadet recordings Occasional Rain (1972) and What Color is Love? (1973)—both produced by Charles Stepney, architect of the early Earth, Wind and Fire sound. Other veterans of the workshop were Len Ron Hanks and Zane Grey who wrote L.T.D.’s breakthrough hit “(Every Time I Turn Around) Back in Love Again”(1977) and later scored their own Disco hit “Dancin’” (1978) recording as Grey and Hanks.
The most successful veterans of The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop were the duo of Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy. Jackson, the brother of the Reverend Jessie Jackson, was an art director at Playboy Magazine when he joined Butler’s workshop. Yancy, was the musical director and pianist at his father’s Chicago Church when he met Jackson at Reverend Jackson’s Black Expo in 1971. The two made a musical connection and the initial fruits of their collaboration was the formation of the group The Independents which featured Jackson, Yancy (who preferred staying in the background) Helen Curry, Maurice Jackson (no relation), and later Eric Thomas, who was a member of Reverend Jackson’s Operation PUSH Choir. Recording with dual leads Curry and Chick Jackson, in the spirit of the deep Soul recordings of the Soul Children, The Independents produced a series of soulful, moody and gospel inflected mid-tempo and ballad numbers including “Leaving Me,” which sold over a million copies in 1973, “Baby I Been Missing You,” “The First Time We Met,” “In the Valley of My World” (later sampled on Jay Z’s remix of “Allure”) and the stirring “Let This Be a Lesson to You.”
Despite the group’s moderate success, Jackson and Yancy disbanded The Independents to seek other opportunities. Jackson and Yancy’s fortunes changed when they had a chance encounter with the daughter of Nat King Cole, who was performing at a local club in Chicago. Natalie Cole had been performing a collection of pop standards and soft rock songs, contemplating signing with a major label, but wary of being "exploited" as the daughter of a pop icon. That all changed when Jackson and Yancy took Cole into Curtis Mayfield’s Chicago studio and recorded the demo for what became “Inseparable.” As Cole told The New York Times Stephen Holden in 1976, “I went back to R&B with my producers who gave it a little extra sophistication.” That sophistication translated into Cole’s first album Inseparable (1975), recorded for her father’s longtime label Capitol. The album eventually spawned two chart-topping singles—the title track and “This Will Be”—and earned Cole two Grammy Awards in 1975 including the award for “Best R&B Performance, Female”—the first person not named Aretha Franklin to win that category in 8 years.
A year after the release of Inseparable, mainstream newspapers like The New York Times were publishing articles openly asking if Natalie Cole was the “new queen of Soul?” (November 21, 1976). If Cole seemed to have an affinity for Franklin’s style, it wasn’t an accident. Jackson and Yancy’s “You” was recorded by both Franklin and Cole in 1975 (it was the title track of Franklin’s 1975 album) and “This Will Be” was initially offered to Franklin. With musical taste changing, Jackson and Yancy (who was briefly married to Cole in the late 1970s) were able to package Cole with a pop-jazz sound, not unlike that of Cole’s father and Jerry Butler in the early 1960s, but with the Gospel sensibility that Jackson and Yancy were most familiar with. Cole alludes to this dynamic telling Leonard Feather in a 1976 Los Angeles Times piece, about her practices of overdubbing her own background vocals instead of using backup singers:
After the dissipation of her professional relationship with Jackson and Yancy and eventual divorce from Yancy (who was an emerging Gospel star when he died in 1985 at age of 35), Cole went through her well documented struggles with addiction, only to reemerge in 1991 as a major pop star by literally embracing her father’s musical legacy winning three Grammy Awards for Unforgettable…with Love (1991).
For Butler’s part, he was always clear about his investment in the songwriters workshop. As he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1973,
***
Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999) and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003). A frequent contributor to The Root.com (Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive), Neal maintains a blog at http://newblackman.blogspot.com. He is currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for NYU Press.
Chicago Soul Connection:
The Legacy of Jerry Butler’s Songwriters Workshop
by Mark Anthony Neal
Pop music history is filled with examples of singers who first honed their songwriting skills and offered those skills to more established acts, before making a name for themselves singing their own material. Most famously, Carole King was a staple at the famed Brill Building in New York City churning out pop confections with partner Gerry Goffin for the likes of The Shirelles, Little Eva, and Aretha Franklin, whose version of King and Goffin’s “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman” remains a Soul standard. After a decade behind the scenes, King stepped forward in the early 1970s with Writer (1970) and then Tapestry (1971), the latter which established King as one of the definitive singer-songwriters of the era. No less a famous example can be found in the case of Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, who toiled at Motown for nearly a decade creating classics like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “You’re All I Need to Get By” before becoming major stars in their own right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Contemporarily, there’s the case of Shaffer Chimere Smith, who offered his compositions to Marques Houston, Mario (“Let Me Love You”) and Christina Milian, before stepping out front as Ne-Yo. Singers need songs, and no one understood that better than the legendary song stylist Jerry Butler, when he created the Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop in Chicago in the early 1970s. Though few remember it Butler’s workshop would have an impact on Soul music throughout the 1970s eventually figuring in the rise of Natalie Cole as the first real challenge to Aretha Franklin’s status as the “Queen of Soul”
Jerry Butler began his professional singing career in the late 1950s as the initial lead singer for The Impressions. Butler was 18-years-old when the Chicago based group topped the pop charts with “For Your Precious Love” in 1958. Among those in the group was a 16-year-old songwriter and guitarist by the name of Curtis Mayfield, later to become one of the most recognizable singer-songwriters of his generation. Though Butler was with the group for only a short time, he and Mayfield forged a productive professional relationship that led to Butler’s success recording as a solo artist in the early 1960s. Recording with with the black-owned Vee-Jay Records with the Butler/Mayfield collaboration produced hits like “Need to Belong” and “He Will Break Your Heart.”
Butler also had access to the remnants of Tin Pan Alley—the cadre of New York based songwriters and producers that were at the heart of American popular music in the early 20th century—in this case, the aforementioned Brill Building where Butler scored hits recording tracks by Brill Building residents like Hal David and Burt Bacharach (“Make It Easy On Yourself”).
When Butler signed with Mercury Records in 1966 and was again in need of strong material, he turned to two young and unproven songwriters and producers named Leon Huff and Kenny Gamble. Butler’s work with Gamble and Huff coincides with the most productive and popular period of the Soul singer’s career with a string of hits including the ballad “Never Gonna Give You Up” (later covered by Isaac Hayes on Black Moses), “Hey Western Union Man” and “Only the Strong Survive,” which became Butler’s first Gold single and gave an early inkling of the uplift music that Gamble and Huff would become known for in the 1970s. Recalling his work with Gamble and Huff, which produced the legendary The Ice Man Cometh recording, Butler writes in his autobiography Only the Strong Survive: Memoirs of a Soul Survivor,
Huff would be on the piano , while Kenny and I would come up with lyrics. Huff and Kenny would come up with concepts and play some chords, and I started singing. That’s how we came up with ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.When Mercury Records balked at Gamble and Huff’s efforts to get a greater percentage of the profits from their production efforts with Butler, the relationship was dissolved in late 1969, though Butler would record two albums with the duo for Philadelphia International Records a decade later. Having worked with songwriters and producers like Gamble and Huff and Curtis Mayfield before them—folk who literally defined the sound of Soul music for more than a decade—Butler’s career was at a crossroads. Butler writes in Only the Strong Survive, “
I was in a terrible dilemma. Should I risk my professional reputation recording substandard material? Or should I use what I had learned over the years to lay the groundwork for developing songwriters who would supply me—and others—with quality songs for a life time. I chose the latter.Thus the Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop was founded in Chicago in January of 1970. A year later, the workshop became a joint venture with the Chappell music publishing company which made an initial investment of $55,000 for the project.
The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop did little to revive Butler’s career—though his second Gold single “Ain’t Understanding Mellow” with Brenda Lee Eager was a product of the workshop. By 1972 though, the workshop had generated $4 million in records sales and produced about 30 chart singles recorded by the likes of The Dells, Isaac Hayes, Aretha Franklin, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Betty Everette. Despite its modest success, the real story of the Jerry Butler Songwriter’s Workshop wasn’t what it produced, but the talent that came through its doors and went on to greater success. Workshop veterans include Terry Callier, who with fellow workshop participant Larry Wade, worked on The Dells' Freedom Means (1972) recording which produced their classic “The Love We Had (Stays on My Mind)” as well as Callier’s own brilliant Cadet recordings Occasional Rain (1972) and What Color is Love? (1973)—both produced by Charles Stepney, architect of the early Earth, Wind and Fire sound. Other veterans of the workshop were Len Ron Hanks and Zane Grey who wrote L.T.D.’s breakthrough hit “(Every Time I Turn Around) Back in Love Again”(1977) and later scored their own Disco hit “Dancin’” (1978) recording as Grey and Hanks.
The most successful veterans of The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop were the duo of Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy. Jackson, the brother of the Reverend Jessie Jackson, was an art director at Playboy Magazine when he joined Butler’s workshop. Yancy, was the musical director and pianist at his father’s Chicago Church when he met Jackson at Reverend Jackson’s Black Expo in 1971. The two made a musical connection and the initial fruits of their collaboration was the formation of the group The Independents which featured Jackson, Yancy (who preferred staying in the background) Helen Curry, Maurice Jackson (no relation), and later Eric Thomas, who was a member of Reverend Jackson’s Operation PUSH Choir. Recording with dual leads Curry and Chick Jackson, in the spirit of the deep Soul recordings of the Soul Children, The Independents produced a series of soulful, moody and gospel inflected mid-tempo and ballad numbers including “Leaving Me,” which sold over a million copies in 1973, “Baby I Been Missing You,” “The First Time We Met,” “In the Valley of My World” (later sampled on Jay Z’s remix of “Allure”) and the stirring “Let This Be a Lesson to You.”
Despite the group’s moderate success, Jackson and Yancy disbanded The Independents to seek other opportunities. Jackson and Yancy’s fortunes changed when they had a chance encounter with the daughter of Nat King Cole, who was performing at a local club in Chicago. Natalie Cole had been performing a collection of pop standards and soft rock songs, contemplating signing with a major label, but wary of being "exploited" as the daughter of a pop icon. That all changed when Jackson and Yancy took Cole into Curtis Mayfield’s Chicago studio and recorded the demo for what became “Inseparable.” As Cole told The New York Times Stephen Holden in 1976, “I went back to R&B with my producers who gave it a little extra sophistication.” That sophistication translated into Cole’s first album Inseparable (1975), recorded for her father’s longtime label Capitol. The album eventually spawned two chart-topping singles—the title track and “This Will Be”—and earned Cole two Grammy Awards in 1975 including the award for “Best R&B Performance, Female”—the first person not named Aretha Franklin to win that category in 8 years.
A year after the release of Inseparable, mainstream newspapers like The New York Times were publishing articles openly asking if Natalie Cole was the “new queen of Soul?” (November 21, 1976). If Cole seemed to have an affinity for Franklin’s style, it wasn’t an accident. Jackson and Yancy’s “You” was recorded by both Franklin and Cole in 1975 (it was the title track of Franklin’s 1975 album) and “This Will Be” was initially offered to Franklin. With musical taste changing, Jackson and Yancy (who was briefly married to Cole in the late 1970s) were able to package Cole with a pop-jazz sound, not unlike that of Cole’s father and Jerry Butler in the early 1960s, but with the Gospel sensibility that Jackson and Yancy were most familiar with. Cole alludes to this dynamic telling Leonard Feather in a 1976 Los Angeles Times piece, about her practices of overdubbing her own background vocals instead of using backup singers:
I imagine two group; I call the N sisters and the Colettes…the Colettes—they’re a commercial kind of group—and I’ve given them names like Jody, Betty and Suzie. But the Ns are gospel singers.The Cole, Yancy, Jackson collaboration would produce five albums and several million-selling singles including 1977’s “I’ve Got Love on My Mind” (from Thankful) and “Our Love” which was released later in the year on Unpredictable. At her peak in the 1970s, Cole music was the very definition of crossover pop music, though it was always steeped in the Gospel aesthetic that Aretha Franklin helped mainstream a decade earlier. As Cole told Feather,
I really didn’t think I could sing all that good until I began working with [Chuck and Marvin], but they can communicate to me exactly what feeling they think is right for a particular song.No doubt Jackson and Yancy’s time at The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop, contributed to them becoming better songwriters, but also helped them become much more adept at managing talent in the studio—something that is increasingly a lost art.
After the dissipation of her professional relationship with Jackson and Yancy and eventual divorce from Yancy (who was an emerging Gospel star when he died in 1985 at age of 35), Cole went through her well documented struggles with addiction, only to reemerge in 1991 as a major pop star by literally embracing her father’s musical legacy winning three Grammy Awards for Unforgettable…with Love (1991).
For Butler’s part, he was always clear about his investment in the songwriters workshop. As he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1973,
The idea for the workshop came out of self-interest. I had obligations to do thirty sides for Mercury…Tin Pan Alley, where you used to be able to go get a couple of songs, has died for all intents and purposes.” Butler added, “I knew Chicago was not the music center that it once was. But at the time, I knew there were a number of young cats in Chicago with a lot of songwriting talent, who just didn’t have any place to take it to. And even more important, nobody to encourage them. (quoted in Robert Pruter’s Chicago Soul).Butler’s comments are just a reminder that great artists need great material and as the popular recording industry has become more producer driven and given to star-gazing, the industry is far more interested in discovering the next Aretha Franklin or Beyonce, than the next Carole King or Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy.
***
Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999) and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003). A frequent contributor to The Root.com (Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive), Neal maintains a blog at http://newblackman.blogspot.com. He is currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for NYU Press.
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