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.”
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.”
