Ashford and Simpson: The Soundtrack to Black Love
by Mark Anthony Neal
Some forty-plus years after it’s release, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” may be the most recognizable Soul duet ever recorded. It’s easy to think that the song’s timelessness has every thing to do with the musical bond that Gaye and Terrell shared, in the studio and on stage, but in reality Terrell recorded her vocals for the songs months before Gaye did; The duo were not in the studio together for the recording of the song.
While Gaye and Terrell did find studio magic on tracks like “Ain’t Nothing But the Real Thing,” “You’re All I Need to Get By,” and “Your Precious Love,” the one constant on those recordings was the song-writing and production team of Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson. The duo was in their early twenties when Motown head Berry Gordy entrusted them with some of the label’s marquee acts, begining a more than 40-year career, where their songs, have served as the soundtrack to Black love.
Valerie Simpson was 17 and Nick Ashford 21, when they first met at White Rock Baptist Church in Harlem in 1963. While they were musically drawn to each other—Simpson, a trained pianist composes the music and Ashford provides the lyrics—it would be some time before the two connected romantically; They were more than a decade into their professional partnership, when they finally married in 1974.
Hungry for the kind of Brill Building fame that marked the New York songwriting scene in the 1960s, Ashford and Simpson starting writing songs for the Wand/Scepter label. They recorded their first song, “I’ll Find You” in 1964 as “Valerie and Nick” on the Glover label. Their big break though, would come two years later, from an unlikely source; when Ray Charles recorded the duo’s “Let’s Go Get Stoned”—as in high—it was his first #1 R&B song in four years. The song caught the attention of Gordy, who signed Ashford and Simpson as songwriters.
The initial hits the duo wrote for Gaye and Terrell in 1967, like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Your Precious Love” were actually produced by Johnny Bristol and Harvey Fuqua. It would another year until Gordy allowed Ashford and Simpson take control behind the boards, creating and producing classic tracks like “You’re All I Need to Get By” and “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing.”
Gordy came to trust Ashford and Simpson’s song writing and production skills so much that he charged them with producing Diana Ross’s first post-Supreme’s solo albums. Ross’s first solo album Diana Ross, produced two of her signature tunes, “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)” and her six-minute rendition of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Ashford and Simpson clashed with Gordy over “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” as the label head preferred the song to open with a chorus, as opposed to the song-writers’ vision, where the chorus doesn’t appear until four minutes into the song.
Perhaps at the root of the developing tensions between Ashford and Simpson and Motown, was their desire to be artists in their own right. Nevertheless Simpson recorded two well received, though under promoted, solo albums for Motown, Exposed (1971) and Valarie Simpson (1972). Simpson also appears on Quincy Jones Gula Matari (1970), where she sings lead on “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and Smackwater Jack (1971)
When Ashford and Simpson appear on Ells Hazlip’s legendary Soul! in October of 1972, they talk of a duet recording they were working on, covering the songs they had written for others. Sadly that album remains in a can at Universal, and when the duo’s contract was up with Motown in 1973, they signed a deal with Warner Brothers as Ashford and Simpson.
Beginning with I Wanna Be Selfish (1974) , Ashford and Simpson released seven studio albums for Warner Brothers including the brilliant So So Satisfied (1977), which featured the proto-Disco classic “Over and Over” which was covered the same year by Sylvester. Even as Ashford and Simpson were finding moderate success at Warner Brothers, Gordy still reached out to them to produce two albums for The Dynamic Superiors, most well known for the sweet ballad “Shoe Shoe Shine” and their flamboyant and out lead singer, the late Tony Washington.
By the time Ashford and Simpson finally have a major commercial breakthrough with Is It Still Good To You (1978) and the single “It Seems To Hang,” they were in top demand as producers lending their talents to projects by Teddy Pendergrass, Diana Ross’s comeback The Boss (1979) and most famously “I’m Every Woman” which was featured on Chaka Khan’s first solo release in 1978. Earlier in her career, Khan sang lead on Rufus’ cover of Simpson’s “Keep It Comin.” They also contributed the title track to Quincy Jones’ Sounds…And Stuff Like That (1978), where Khan and Simpson share lead vocals.
The decade of the 1970s closed with Ashford and Simpson having their most successful single, “Found a Cure” which married the gospel harmonies that they perfected a in the early 1960s at White Rock Baptist Church with the pulsating rhythms of the Disco. But Ashford and Simpson’s biggest success was still in front of them, after they signed with Capitol Records in 1982.
Their first album for Capital was a concept album called Street Opera, which dealt with the struggles of love and money, perfectly pitched for the period’s economic recession. Despite having written big time hits for many legendary acts, it wasn’t until 1984’s “Solid” that Ashford and Simpson earned their first #1 R&B hit and top-20 pop hit—twenty years after they recorded their first single. The song came back into favor three years ago, when they recorded a new version in support of Barack Obama (“solid as Barack’).
Given the continued influence of those original Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell recordings, it’s hard to imagine Black romance over the last forty-five years without the compositions of Ashford and Simpson playing in the background. As much as Marvin and Tammi set the bar for musical duets, Ashford and Simpson set an even higher bar with regards to song craft and emotion. More amazing than their thirty-five-plus years of marriage is that 45-years of musical partnership—a partnership that earned them induction in the Song Writer’s Hall of Fame in 2002.
Perhaps the best evidence of the value of Ashford and Simpson’s music was their securing of “Pullman Bonds” in 1998, where financier David Pullman guaranteed the duo eight figures drawn from future royalties on their 250-song catalogue. A reminder perhaps that good music is timeless, and for Ashford and Simpson, nothing has been more timeless that Black love and romance.
