Remembering 'This Christmas'

DONNY HATHAWAY'S 'This Christmas' came together in Chicago before the talented soul musician's life came to a sad and premature ending

Remembering 'This': Hathaway's Classic Carol
BY DAVE HOEKSTRA Sun-Times Columnist

Chicago native Donny Hathaway co-wrote and recorded "This Christmas," the greatest holiday song composed by an African American. The traditional Christmas songbook is known for the likes of Irving Berlin, Gene Autry, Burl Ives and Mel Torme. Catch my snowdrift?

Released in 1970, "This Christmas" was a significant departure. The song endures through Hathaway's sweeping tempo changes, sweet vocal range ... and warm promise

The lyrics declare:

Presents and cards are here / My world is filled with cheer and you, ohh yeah / This Christmas / And as I look around / Your eyes outshine the town, they do ...

The song is a made-in-Chicago classic. It was written at Jerry Butler's songwriters workshop, 1402 S. Michigan. Nadine McKinnor put the lyrics to Hathaway's melody.

Butler's initial response? "Nobody wants a new Christmas song and nobody wants a new 'Happy Birthday' song," he said with a hearty laugh. "Well, 'This Christmas' has become one of the biggest songs ever."

Last year, the musicians' rights group ASCAP revealed its 25 most-performed holiday songs of the five years prior, based on radio airplay data tracked by Mediaguide. "This Christmas" re-entered the list at No. 25. ("Winter Wonderland" was No. 1.)

"This Christmas" was recorded in the autumn of 1970 at Audio Finishers Studio, a brownstone on Ontario Street that was an offshoot of Universal Recording Studios, 46 E. Walton. The song was released later that year as a single for ATCO Records, a subsidiary of Atlantic.

Hathaway had signed with Atlantic in 1969 and broke through in 1970 with the epic hit single "The Ghetto, Part 1" on ATCO. In 1972, Hathaway recorded an album of duets with Roberta Flack, whom he met while studying music at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Their million-selling pop crossover hit was "Where Is the Love," co-written by Ralph MacDonald, currently a percussionist with Jimmy Buffett.

By January 1979, Hathaway was dead. He was 33 years old. His body was found outside the Essex House hotel in New York City. His death was ruled a suicide.
Oft-covered tune

Hathaway's solo work was intense, experimental and sophisticated. His final release in 1973, "Extension of a Man," included "Someday We'll All Be Free," which Spike Lee used as the closing theme of his film "Malcolm X."

But Hathaway's "This Christmas" has grown in epic proportions.

It has been covered by Christina Aguilera, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, the Temptations, Harry Connick Jr. and Michael McDonald, who titled his new Razor & Tie holiday album after the song. "That's one of my favorite contemporary Christmas songs," the former Doobie Brother said from his home in Nashville, Tenn. "It has such a contemporary R&B jazz groove. We typically associate Christmas songs with church music or very languid melodies."

Read the Full Article @ The Chicago Sun-Times

TV-One's "Unsung" Tributes Forgotten Stars

from Vibe.com

CRITICAL NOIR
TV-One's "Unsung" Strikes the Right Chord
by Mark Anthony Neal

Like its predecessor Black Entertainment Television's, TV-One, the cable television networked owned by the Radio-One family, attempted to strike the right balance in terms of syndicated reruns and original series. TV-One, perhaps benefiting from BET's longtime decision to abandon middle-age audiences, has proved successful in at least locating a niche market of over-30 something African-Americans. Though the network has tried to put a fresh coat of paint on 15-year-old favorites like Martin and Living Single (the recent cast reunion of the later show being an example), it has proved far more capable than its competition to produce original programming. Though Baisden at Night is a mixed-bagged (it simply lacks the energy and cohesiveness of the drive-time radio program)shows like G. Garvin's Turn Up the Heat and Gospel of Music with Jeff Major are high points of the network's programming, though neither will have audiences forgetting the wealth of programming on the Food Network or the old BET stalwart, Bobby Jones Gospel. Fresh off of their live coverage of the Democratic National Convention, late last month TV-One unveiled what is perhaps its first legitimate original hit, the music documentary series Unsung.

The formula of Unsung is not original--it draws liberally on many of the conventions that made VH-1's series Behind the Music so compelling. Where Unsung succeeds in its ability to locate compelling human stories behind musical figures that are quite beloved among black music fans, though largely obscure to mainstream audiences. The Debarge Family, the Clark Sisters, Donny Hathaway and Phyllis Hyman are simply not figures that would register to traditional mainstream audiences and as such TV-One should be commended for the willingness to tell the stories of those who would not necessarily generate the kind of cross-over appeal that documentaries on the lives of well-known tragic figures like Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye or Otis Redding might have. And while the stories of the aforementioned artists deserved to be told and deserved to be told from a distinct African-American perspective, as TV-One's publicity for the series rightfully suggest, Unsung allows tribute to artists who simply aren't going to get the recognition that they deserve.

Read the Full Essay @

Lalah Hathaway: Soul Sister

Amid a sea of rump-shaking R&B starlets, Lalah Hathaway shines with herbrand of grown-woman soul.

Sister Soul
By Mark Anthony Neal | TheRoot.com

June 9, 2008--For much of her musical career and indeed her life, Lalah Hathaway's legendary last name likely mattered most to the people who encountered her. There was a novelty to Hathaway's debut recording in 1990-the daughter of a legendary soul singer makes good-though 18 years and four recordings later-Hathaway is a fully-grown woman who can stand on her
own musically. Self Portrait, marks Hathaway first recording since Outrun the Sky (2004) and also her first recording from the newly-revamped Stax recording label.

Given Stax's singular position as a great-if not the greatest-soul label, it is only fitting that the daughter of the late Donny Hathaway, whose music trafficked in a range of musical genres including gospel and blues, would find a recording home there. "It's really cool," Hathaway says of her relationship with the new Stax, "I'm excited just being mentioned in the same breath of such an iconic legendary label that is just synonymous with\ the concept of soul music all over the world."

On the new record, Hathaway pairs with producer Rex Rideout on most of the tracks. Rideout also produced Hathaway's earlier version of Luther Vandross' "Forever, For Always, For Love" which appeared on Outrun the Sky and the Forever, For Always, For Luther smooth jazz tribute to the late Vandross. Hathaway is quite happy with the work she did with Rideout noting that, "Right now for me, he's the cat." According to the singer, Rideout was able to "get things out of me that I did not know were there yet. And it's not by forcing or prodding-there was an ease working with him that I hadn't felt with a producer before."

Additionally as the recording's title suggest, Self Portrait, is the first recording that Hathaway has done in which she could control every aspect of the process. In that sense, the recording offers more of a glimpse into the woman, who as a little girl had access to one of the true geniuses of black music. "Absolutely," she responds when asked about the personal touch of Self Portrait, "more than any other record, just because of my involvement and that is at every level like choosing the producers and the musicians and the rooms that we mix in and the arrangements and writing and producing.and that's not to claim it and have it, but it's really a way to get it like I want it."

Read the Full Article @

And the Winner is....Donny Hathaway

And the Winner is...Donny Hathaway
by Mark Anthony Neal

I’ve spent better part of that last 20-years—what seems like a lifetime—trying to write about Donny Hathaway. It’s not as though I haven’t written about Hathaway, but Hathaway’s music, his Soul really, demands a level of emotional commitment that, frankly, overwhelms the logic of my vocation as a writer. I mean, after listening to Donny Hathaway sing and moan and hum and caress that piano/Fender Rhodes, what the hell else is there to write about?

Take for instance Hathaway’s “Giving Up”—a song written by the late great arranger Van McCoy (he of “The Hustle”). Beginning, something like a dirge—and with Hathaway that always seemed his way, the pace and timing of his ballads akin to some centuries old funeral hymn—the song’s second verse takes on s second musical life (or is it that a second sight) as Hathaway and his rhythm section, in seeming double-time, against the real-time of Hathaway’s voice, narrate the heart palpitations of a man on the brink of losing his mind. And you know he’s on the brink when he admits in the third verse, “whether she knows or not, she really needs me too,” only to bellow a sinister laugh in admission that he’s on the other side of his sanity. And then the song literally collapses into the familiarity of a fully-blown Blues groove.

“Giving Up” is a signature example Of Hathaway’s ability to summon the well-spring of black musical idioms and bring them in conversation with emotional darkness of his Soul. And it is perhaps that darkness that has led so many writers to take their own (critical) lives, in an attempt to capture the emotional depth of Hathaway’s art. This is what, in part, Ed Pavlic suggest in his brilliant and moving prose poem, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (University of Georgia Press).

Lacking the kind of archival material (beyond the music, of course) that has helped many a critic to bring Soul Men past alive on the pages of books and magazines, Pavlic, an award winning poet and scholar, was forced to use traces of Hathaway’s emotional DNA (provided by the music, of course) As Pavlic writes in the acknowledgments, “Much of this book is a kind of dance between what I needed to know and not know about Donny Hathaway in order to find out what I had to say...the basic truth of the book is what I’ve made from the sound of Hathaway’s voice, the rhythm of his work.”

According to Pavlic, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced started as an attempt to write a biography about Hathaway, but as Hathaway’s spirit seemed to stonewall attempts to get the story right/write, he gave in to the calling of the music. Winners Have Yet to be Announced traffics in all of the rumor and innuendo surrounding Hathaway’s life and tragic death (including his bouts with mental illness), but rather than read like a speculative fiction about the man, Winners have Yet to be Announced instead animates the traces of truth that Hathaway’s music revels in.

In one particularly compelling section called “Interview: Graveyard Shift: Carr Square Projects: July 20, 1980: St. Louis, MO”, Pavlic imagines a reporter traveling to the place where Hathaway grew up, querying residents about Hathaway’s legacy the year after his death. One resident recalls seeing Hathaway in concert:

“Women in the audience would call out to him when he’d pause/Other Women would answer them/Men didn’t say a word/I know I didn’t/The women’d have themselves a ball, a party, almost like they’re watching themselves on stage/Not the men/He’d take your life like you knew he took his own life/He’d wrap it around his fist and lay it up side your head”

Here Pavlic recalls those fabulous live recordings of Hathaway, in which the voices of the women in the crowd were always so audible—continuous “call and response” moments—and yet rarely do we hear the voices of the men. It is this attention to seemingly matter-less detail—what were these me thinking about, as Hathaway probed the very essence of their existence?—that provides Winners Have Yet to Be Announced so much of its—and I hate to use this word—authenticity or rather sincerity to borrow a thought from John L. Jackson, Jr.

Donny Hathaway remains an enigma among popular music audiences. His most well known songs, “Where is the Love?” and “The Closer I Get to You” are award-winning duets recorded with Roberta Flack. While those songs are brilliant in their own right, they capture little of the emotional and spiritual depth of Hathaway’s own recordings. Hathaway’s full length recordings like Everything is Everything (1969), Extensions of a Man (1972), and in particular Donny Hathaway (1970) demand a level of musical commitment, that there was little chance that he was gonna earned a popular following, even as giants such as Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Jerry Butler sang his praises.

Ed Pavlic’s Winners Have Yet to Be Announced shines a bright light on the legacy of a man, whose music has unfortunately been long removed to darkened corners of Soul’s yesteryear. The book’s title is taken from an obituary for Hathaway that appeared in the Washington Post: “the door to the room was locked and there was no evidence of foul play…He was nominated for a second Grammy in 1978. Winners have yet to be announced.”

Poet Ed Pavlic Reads from Winners Are Not Yet Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway

Wednesday, April 9, 2008 @ 7pm
@ the John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2204 Erwin Road

Poetry Reading and Discussion








Award-Winning Poet Ed Pavlic reads from his new collection of poetry
Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway


About Winners Have Yet to be Announced

This moving collection of prose poems about seventies soul singer Donny Hathaway presents a complex view of a gifted artist through imagined conversations and interviews that convey the voices, surroundings, and clashing dimensions of Hathaway's life.

Among mainstream audiences Hathaway is perhaps best known either as the syrupy voice singing with Roberta Flack in "Where Is the Love" or for his shocking death-he was found dead beneath the open thirteenth-story window of his New York hotel room in 1979 at the age of thirty-three. Less well known are the depth of his classical and gospel training, his wide-ranging intellectual interests, and the respect his musical knowledge, talent, and versatility commanded from collaborators like Curtis Mayfield and Aretha Franklin. Meanwhile, among listeners with special affinity for soul music of the 1970s, even almost thirty years after his death, no voice burns with the intensity of Hathaway's own in the great solo ballads and freedom songs such as "A Song for You," "Giving Up," "Someday We'll All Be Free," and "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black."

Winners Have Yet to Be Announced pushes poetry toward the rich characterization and depth of a novel. Yet it is the capacity of poetic language that allows the book to examine Donny Hathaway's vivid and remarkable life without attempting to resolve the mysteries within which he lived and created and sang.

Praise for Winners Are Not Yet Announced

"Ed Pavlic shapes the ineffable (some call it Duende, some call it Soul) into a language haunting the borders of the sayable and unsayable, the sung and unsung. He casts Hathaway as Orpheus searching 'for an opening between need and can't have and have and can't need.' Winners Have Yet to Be Announced is a meditation on our own between-ness: our wish to be rooted pulling against our wish to transcend. It is a visionary book."
—Terrance Hayes, author of Wind in a Box

"To capture the monumental paradoxes and prismatic genius of Donny Hathaway, one must have an epic imagination and a sense of language that flames in poetry toward transcendent truth. Ed Pavlic rises to the task admirably. Winners Have Yet to Be Announced is a book of breathtaking literary and intellectual invention, a searing, soulful exploration of the songs and silences 'and the unforgiving pains and desperations, and the demons and disharmonies too' that tracked Hathaway into sonic immortality. Finally Hathaway's musical and moral legacy is matched with a metaphoric intensity that honors the master's splendidly unique creativity." —Michael Eric Dyson, author of April 4, 1968

"Donny Hathaway traced the lonely line between gospel and the blues and tried to tell us that 'Someday We'll All Be Free,' though in the end he was perhaps unable to believe it himself. Pavlic's compelling meditation on Hathaway allows us to see how grace can grow in the cracks of city sidewalks and redemption may catch us even when we leap from its grasp."--Timothy B. Tyson, author of Blood Done Sign My Name

About Ed Pavlic

Ed Pavlic is associate professor of English and director of the MFA/PhD program in creative writing at the University of Georgia. His previous books of poems are Labors Lost Left Unfinished and Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue, which was selected by Adrienne Rich for the American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize. He has also published a scholarly work, Crossroads Modernism, on African American literary culture.

Sponsored by the “Center for the Study of Black Popular Culture” and the Department of English

The Soul Christmas Mix-Tape

The Soul Christmas Mix-Tape
by Mark Anthony Neal

As a child growing up in the “boogie down” Bronx in the early 1970s, there was very little illusion that Christmas Day would bring the snowy white scenes that were so often depicted on holiday greeting cards. I always understood that the toys and things that I peeped in the Sears and Spiegel catalogs were not gonna make it to my apartment come Christmas morning. Instead, so much of the joy I took from Christmas came from the music.

Now on the other side of childhood, calls for “joy” and “peace on earth” ring hollow when coming from some department store chain only a week after the beginning of autumn. But like my childhood, I never fail to become overtaken by the Christmas spirit the first time I hear Jermaine Jackson sing the opening lines of the Jackson 5’s version of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’ For those of you also suffering the doldrums of another disenchanted holiday season, here’s a soulful Christmas music roundup to lift your spirits.

'Merry Christmas Baby' -- Otis Redding

'Merry Christmas Baby' is a song that is forever linked to legendary rhythm-and-blues (not R&B) artist Charles Brown, but Otis Redding brought his own take on “down-home” soul to his 1967 version of the song.



‘White Christmas’ -- The Drifters

Perhaps lead bass Bill Pinkens was signifyin’ on Bing Crosby in his opening verses to The Drifters’ 1954 version of ‘White Christmas,’ but by the time the incomparable Clyde McPhatter literally soars in with that third verse -- “I, I, I, I, I’m dreamin’ of a white Christmas …” -- it’s clear The Drifters had made the song their own. A whole new generation of folk were introduced to this version of the song when it was featured in the film ‘Home Alone.’



‘Back Door Santa’ -- Clarence Carter

Clarence Carter is as nasty as they come -- his chitlin’ circuit favorite ‘Strokin’’ is a great example. With ‘Back Door Santa’ Carter made Christmas nasty, too. Years later, Run-DMC would sample the song for ‘Christmas in Hollis.’



‘Gee Whiz It’s Christmas’ -- Carla Thomas

The daughter of Rufus Thomas (he of ‘Funky Chicken’ fame), Carla Thomas was the first lady of the Stax label. ‘Gee Whiz It’s Christmas,’ a sweet little ditty about running into a long lost love, was co-written by Thomas with Steve Cropper of Booker T. and the MGs. The song was a riff off of Thomas best-selling ‘Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes).’



‘O Holy Night’ -- Vanessa Bell Armstrong

Arguably the most talented female gospel vocalist of the past 20 years, Vanessa Bell Armstrong brought us a sanctified Christmas on her 1990 album ‘The Truth About Christmas.’ The highlight was a God-fearing, heart-stopping rendition of ‘O Holy Night.’



‘Silent Night’ -- The Temptations

In 1970, the Temptations recorded ‘Christmas Card,’ which was one of the last albums that featured the most classic Temptations lineup. A decade later they recorded ‘Give Love on Christmas’ with Dennis Edwards, Glenn Leonard and Melvin Franklin’s booming bass giving ‘Silent Night’ a much needed Temptations update.



‘Let It Snow’ -- Boyz II Men

At the peak of their fame and artistry, Boyz II Men teamed with Brian McKnight on an original version of ‘Let it Snow’ that was penned by McKnight and Wanya Morris. The album it appeared on, ‘Christmas Interpretations,’ may be the best holiday album recorded by any contemporary R&B act.



‘At Christmas Time’ -- Luther Vandross

Years before Luther Vandross became Luther Vandross, the emerging soul singer recorded ‘At Christmas Time’ (1976). Given Vandross’ reputation as the greatest soul vocalist of his generation, that means that ‘At Christmas Time’ is indeed something special.



‘Hallelujah’ -- Handel’s Messiah

In 1992, Mervyn Warren and Quincy Jones brought together a veritable who’s who of black music to record ‘Handel’s Messiah: A Soulful Celebration.’ Included among them were Al Jarreau, Chaka Khan, Take 6, Jeffrey Osborne, Gladys Knight, Andre Crouch, Dianne Reeves, Stevie Wonder, The Boys Choir of Harlem, Vanessa Williams, as well as actors Clifton Davis, Charles S. Dutton, Phylicia Rashad and Kim Fields, many of whom appear on the album’s closing rendition of ‘The Hallelujah Chorus.’ Handel ain’t never sound so funky.



‘The Christmas Song’ -- Nat King Cole

In all honesty, you haven’t really experienced the Christmas season if you haven’t heard Nat King Cole doing his thing. Arguably Cole’s version of ‘The Christmas Song’ has surpassed even Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ as the quintessential American Christmas song.



‘This Christmas’ -- Donny Hathaway

Donny Hathaway is so deserving of the tag “genius” that it is somewhat ironic that ‘This Christmas” might be his most well known song. Nevertheless if black America has a clear-cut holiday anthem, it’s this Hathaway original. Like the man said, “Shake a hand, shake hand.”