Trapped in Motown's Closet

Was Motown also the “Sound of Gay America”?

Trapped in Motown’s Closet

by Mark Anthony Neal

Nearly 35 years before the release of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, a Gospel singer turned Disco star, recorded a song bearing the same title, which became one of the era’s most important Gay anthems. That a Baltimore bred, African-American man, who came of age during the height of Civil Rights movement could so seamlessly wed the Gospel impulses of this nation’s most affecting social movement, with the nascent impulses of the GLBT movement—“Yes I’m gay/tain’t a fault ‘tis a fact/I was born this way”—should not be surprising. That Bean did so recording for Motown Records, a company that symbolized the push for Black integration and respectability in the 1960s and 1970s, should elicit some wonder. Bean was not alone; in the mid-1970s the Motown roster also included the vocal group the Dynamic Superiors, whose lead singer, the late Tony Washington, was an out and flamboyant homosexual. Though the musical legacies of both acts, have been largely obscured over the years, their connection to, arguably, the most prominent Black brand of the 20th Century speaks volumes about how inclusive Berry Gordy’s vision was with regards to what he called the “Sound of Young America.”

Whenever the subject of Black music and homosexuality is broached, the figure of Sylvester, the groundbreaking Disco and Dance artist, is immediately recalled. While the Dynamic Superiors and Carl Bean where contemporaries of Sylvester, it is important to remember that both acts had already broken through to the mainstream before Sylvester released his influential classic Step II in 1978. As a solo artist committed to drag performances, Sylvester became the quintessential example of Black artists who successfully challenged the boundaries of race, sexuality and gender. Sylvester was indeed peerless, but not without precedent, if you consider artists such as Billy Strayhorn (Duke Ellington’s longtime contributor), Nona Hendryx, and Bessie Smith.

Not surprisingly, even Sylvester owed some debt to Motown for his success. Sylvester’s 1977 solo debut Over and Over was produced by Harvey Fuqua, founding member of the doo-wop group the Moonglows and one-time Motown record executive, who was responsible for bringing Marvin Gaye to the label. The title track of Sylvester’s solo debut was a cover of a Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson song, featured on their 1977 album So So Satisfied. Ashford and Simpson, of course, were the well known  song-writing duo behind the great Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell recordings of the late 1960s; they were also responsible for the songwriting and production on the first two Dynamic Superior recordings, their eponymous 1974 debut and Pure Pleasure (1975).

Products of the Washington DC housing projects, the Dynamic Superiors began singing with each other as high school students in the late 1960s. Their big break came when they performed at a music industry showcase in 1972 and were spotted by Motown executive, Ewart Abner, most well known for his work as President of Black owned Vee Jay Records which featured acts like Gene Chandler and Jerry Butler and distributed the initial American releases of The Beatles. The group was quickly signed by Motown and their first album The Dynamic Superiors was released in 1974. The lead single, “Shoe, Shoe Shine,” was in the vein of the popular harmony groups of the day like the Stylistics and Blue Magic, and as lead singer, Tony Washington’s falsetto was every bit the match of Russell Thompkins, Jr. and Ted Mills, respectively.

Yet, Washington exuded something more—a something more that can be easily recognized on the cover art from that first album. For a label that years earlier released an Isley Brothers album with a picture of a White couple on the cover in order to enhance crossover and in the late 1970s released Teena Marie’s debut without a photo in order to obscure her White identity, Motown's willingness to even visually suggest Washington’s queerness is striking. Whatever curiosities arose in response to that album cover would be put to rest when the group began, rather famously to perform a cover of Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones,” in concert with Washington clearly singing “Me and Mr. Jones.” Such performances quickly had the Black Press describing the Dynamaic Superiors as a “gay” group, as was the case when a 1977 feature on the group in the New York Amsterdam News was titled “Dynamic Superiors Lead ‘Gay’ Music Crusade,” of course begging the question, what exactly is “gay’ music and what crusade was it a part of? (questions that the paper had no intention of answering in 1977).''

The group didn’t make much of such descriptions; in a magazine article in 1977 (New Gay Life), simply Washington suggested that “I guess it’s because it’s me myself. The fact that I’m the lead singer. I don’t hide it on stage.” Washington’s brother Maurice, also a member of the group adds in the same magazine piece, “It was always there. We just brought it out. Tony was just another member of the Dynamic Superiors…He never did hide.” In an era when no one talked openly about Black queer identity, Maurice Washington suggests that his brother’s willingness to be “out” on stage was empowering to some audience members: “there are a lot more homosexuals there than we think. But, they don’t care to let it out. Quite often after the show they want to meet Tony and want to thank him for being as open as they wish they could be…Tony’s a great inspiration.”

However progressive Tony Washington’s band mates may have been in their views about homosexuality—it was in fact his voice that made the group so distinct—audiences were not always in sync. As Washington admitted to The Advocate in 1977, “I guess I was trying to push the clock ahead, though I wasn’t that flamboyant in the beginning…I tried to ease it on them, bit by bit. I thought to myself, man, my makeup is part of the program, so why not accept it.” Washington often made the point, as he did to the Baltimore Afro-American in 1977 that “we are everyday people…we are proud and excited about what we do, but we still have our same friends in Washington.”

The Dynamic Superiors released four albums for Motown between 1974 and 1977. Trying to find just the right musical touch, Motown hired Ashford ands Simpson to do production on the first two albums, despite the fact the duo had departed the label in 1973, in part, because the label never saw them as a viable group (Valerie Simpson recorded two solo albums for the label in the early 1970s). On those first two albums, one can hear the embryo of what would become Ashford and Simpson’s late 1970s sound; heavy indebtednes to the Motown assembly line and deeply steeped in the Black gospel tradition that formed the foundation of the couple’s professional relationship in the mid-1960s. Washington and Ashford share similar vocal traits, so a song like the dramatic “Cry If You Want To” sounds like classic Ashford and Simpson, as does “Leave It Alone,” which was later samples by Noel Gourdin on “Better Man” from his debut After My Time.

It wasn’t until their second album, Pure Pleasure (1975) that the group began to broach queer themes in their music. Packaged in the guise of the personal freedoms that marked the 1970s, their cover of the Ashford & Simpson penned Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell classic “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” (a male duet of a song most known as a male/female duet) or a song like “Nobody’s Gonna Change Me,” became anthems for all those working on the margins. 

The subsequent decision to gear The Dynamic Superiors towards disco was prescient, if eventually limiting for a group that got its start as a vocal harmony group. The Dynamic Superiors didn’t really reach their audience, in this regard, until their fourth (and last) Motown album, Give and Take, which features with a Disco cover (again) of Martha and the Vandella’s “Nowhere to Run.” The song succeeded in part, because, the dancefloor became one of the primary sites where sexuality was being negotiated in the 1970s; seemingly the Disco was the only place where folk had the freedom to come out, given the rampant homophobia of the era, which was manifested in thinly veiled “Disco Sucks” rhetoric. 

At the time that “Nowhere to Hide,” was released, Motown was heavily invested in Disco music, if only because Berry Gordy was always conscious of the money flow. If Disco was going to dominate the radio, and Philadelphia International Records (PIR) was building an empire, in part because of its role in creating the building blocks for Disco, Motown was, literally, going to be in the mix. Like PIR, Motown was influential in the formative years of Disco; Eddie Kendricks’ “Girl You Need a Change of Mind” (1972) is often cited as the first Disco record and his “Keep On Truckin’” (1973) was one of the label’s biggest singles in the early 1970s. The solo careers of David Ruffin, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 were all re-booted in the mid-1970s with Disco tracks, such as Ruffin’s “Walk Away from Love,” (1975) Ross’s “Love Hangover,” (1976) Jackson’s “Just A Little Bit of You” (1975) and The Jackson 5’s “Forever Came Today” (1975). Indeed the future trajectory of Michael Jackson post-Motown career was largely shaped by his desire to find his own voice within the Disco idiom.

Given the label’s commitment to Disco—even Marvin Gaye released “Got to Give It Up”—it would seem that Motown likely placed little significance on Carl Bean’s “I was Born This Way.” In fact, Bean’s version was the label’s second go-round with the song. The song, which was written by Bunny Jones, was initially recorded by an artist named Valentino and released independently by Jones. As the song topped the dance charts in England, Motown purchased the rights from Jones. When Motown botched the song’s promotion—and understandably so—Valentino’s version died, only to be resuscitated a year later by Bean, on a recording that featured veteran PIR and MFSB guitarist Norman Harris and Ron Kersey, who was a member of the Trammps (“Disco Inferno”), in an effort to give the song that PIR sheen.

Carl Bean was not new to the music industry; as an already out Black man, he began his professional  career in a Gospel troupe led by legend Alex Bradford. With the group, Bean had the opportunity to perform on Broadway in shows like Your Arms Too Short to Box with God and Don’t Bother Me I Can’t Cope. By 1974 was fronting a group called Universal Love that was signed to the ABC/Peacock label. The group faltered, as Bean explains in his recently published memoir I Was Born This Way, because the group was “ahead of the curve. I was part of a movement looking to erase the line between R&B and gospel.” (175) 

 Nevertheless, Bean showed up on Motown’s radar because of Universal Love. According to Bean, in his first meeting with Motown executive Gwen Gordy, she admitted that her brother Berry thought “Bean would be perfect. It’s a message song with a gospel feel. Bean will tear it up.” (193) Besides Harris and Kersey, Motown brought in Tom Moulton for an extended mix, that was marketed directly to Discos, since Black radio stations were unlikely to support the song, even from a valued label like Motown. In the book, The Fabulous Sylvester, DJ Leslie Stoval tells author Joshua Gamson that Sylvester was “informally blacklisted because he was gay…they weren’t ready to give this gay man his place. They didn’t want to deal with it.” (127) Such was the environment that Motown and Bean faced. Nevertheless, without the support of radio, “I Was Born This Way” became a major club hit, that placed Carl Bean on the precipice of major success.

With “I was Born This Way,” Carl Bean was in position to became everything that Sylvester became, and to their credit Motown was ready to make Bean its next major start, but with a caveat. After Bean signed with the label, he was given the opportunity to record an album that was initially intended for David Ruffin. As Bean recalls in his memoir, the “tracks were smoking-hot R&B. And the lyrics were all about love and ex—love and sex between a man and a woman.” As label executives promised Bean that he could become the next Teddy Pendergrass, he choose to walk away from the deal rather record as an heterosexual.

Bean eventually found another calling, one that led him back to the church and into the role as a prominent AIDs activist. The founder of the Unity Fellowship of Christ Church in Los Angeles (which was featured in the Marlon Riggs’ groundbreaking documentary Black Is, Black Ain’t), Archbishop Carl Bean has been an important advocate for many communities, providing one of the few Christian-based safe havens for Black LGBT communities and founding one of the first AIDs hospices in the country. For Bean, his sexual identity and faith were never at odds, as he explained in a 1978 magazine article that “it’s God’s way of making a statement through me…it’s something that should have been said a long time ago.”

One wonders if Carl Bean and Tony Washington ever crossed paths at Motown; Washington is rumored to have died from AIDs, after the Dynamic Superiors broke up in 1980. Bean and Washington's legacies will forever be linked, reminding folks of the time when Motown was not only the “sound of Young America,” but perhaps the “Sound of Queer America.”

***

Major h/t to Queer Music Heritage for their postings of article about Tony Washington and Carl Bean.

The Business of Soul

Classic J5

Branding Soul? 

Considering The History of Black Music and Big Business

by Mark Anthony Neal | The Atlanta Post

The recent departure of Sylvia Rhone, from her position as President of Motown, received much attention, in part, because Erykah Badu’s cryptic tweet “Motown folded.” The subsequent obituaries and premature obituaries for the label, seemed odd, if only because Motown has for decades existed as little more than a shell of the company that Berry Gordy founded in 1959, living off the fumes of one of the most impressive back catalogues in all of American pop music—managed by Universal Music. Motown, for all intents “died” when it was sold to MCA in 1988, though Gordy wisely kept control of the Jobete Publishing company, which has proven more lucrative that the label ever was.

Instead the emotional reaction that many had to the potential “death” of Motown, speaks volumes, not only about the role of Soul music in the lives of many Americans, but also the cultural meanings that were assigned to record labels like Motown, Stax and later Philadelphia International Records (PIR), whose songs served as the soundtrack to Civil Rights struggles and post-Civil Rights era ambition.

Berry Gordy had a hustler’s instinct that was emblematic of the immediate years after post-World War II in American culture. The American hustle was to sell the good life to as many buyers as possible. The expansion of advertising culture, as evidenced in Mad Men’s throwback glance at the 1960s, went hand-in-hand with the institutionalization of corporate popular culture. Gordy learned his hustle from every other self-made business “man” of the 1950s, including record execs like Ahmet Ertugen, Jerry Wexler, and Don Robey (a loose inspiration for The Five Heart Beats’ “Big Red”).

Gordy may have loved music—he wrote hits for Jackie Wilson before founding Motown—but he was clear that Motown was, above all, a business. Gordy’s genius was linking that hustling ethos to the assembly-line production he witnessed first hand working in Detroit’s automobile factories. In creating Motown, Gordy was also establishing a brand; he called it “The Sound of Young America” and was intent that young Americans—particularly, young White Americans would enjoy leisurely summer trips to the beach listening to Motown artists such as the Temptations, The Four Tops, Mary Wells, Marvin Gaye and most famously the Supremes.

With attention to detail, which included etiquette classes for artists, highly choreographed stage performances and a structured recording environment that even included an elaborate quality control process, Motown earned a reputation for hit records that were polished and crisp.

Read the Full Essay @ The Atlanta Post

Black Music Month 2011 | High Negro Style: The Motown Visual Effect

Motown’s impact on American music is well known, but the label was also significant for introducing to the world to “High Negro Style”

High Negro Style: The Motown Visual Effect

by Mark Anthony Neal

When Berry Gordy founded Motown records in January of 1959, his efforts were little more than a hunch and a hustle. At the time Gordy could not have imagined that his little Detroit-based record company would go on to produce some of the most timeless music of the 20th century. For all of the two-and-a-half minute classics that came off the label’s automobile-like assembly line, there is perhaps no more endearing tribute to Motown than the image of upscale sophistication that so many of the label’s artists embodied during the 1960s. Motown’s “High Negro Style” as former Motown President Andre Harrell would term it, is on full display on the recent release Motown the DVD: Definitive Performances.

Harrell took over the helm of Motown Records in 1995 when the label was well removed from its peak as one of the premier record companies in the country. Harrell was faced with the daunting, and ultimately unsuccessful, task of making the label relevant to an industry that had long passed it by. For many, the label had become strictly a back catalogue brand, most valuable for the potential of endlessly repackaging Motown’s many classic recordings and artists. Though the label boasted the talents of the platinum selling group Boyz II Men on its roster at the time—Harrell’s tenure with the label coincides with the beginning of the group’s descent from the top of the pop charts—the label’s most notable commodity was its tradition and that back catalogue.

To his credit, Harrell understood the value of that tradition and began to place his own stamp on the aging brand as an example of what he called “High Negro”—upscale, urban, urbane and just enough ghetto to remind you that the Detroit housing projects supplied Motown with more than enough talent in the early 1960s. “Ghetto glamour,” as Harrell described “High Negro” style in a 1995 cover story for New York Magazine,” would have been incomprehensible for those audiences who flocked to Motown performances in the 1960s. There’s no denying though, that just below the sheen of respectability and mainstream acceptance that Gordy craved, were the gritty realities of the social world that made his hustle palpable.

Motown the DVD opens with the music of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Streets,”—a song which co-writer Marvin Gaye always felt had broader political implications in light of the Civil Rights Movement—amid footage of young white Americans on the beach and in their cars listening presumably to the “Sound of Young America” as Gordy often described the label’s sound.

In the 1960s as television had emerged as a particularly volatile site for representations of blackness, images of black civil rights workers clashing with southern segregationists often competed with images of uplift like Dianne Carroll’s Julia, a nattily dressed Nat King Cole and the athletic grace of Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. Gordy understood these dynamics better than most, so for many of those first generation of Motown acts, the label, was among other things, a finishing school. In addition to the intricately choreographed Cholly Atkins stage routines, there were etiquette classes. As critical as the rhythm tracks laid down by the Motown’s famed backing musician, The Funk Brothers were to Motown’s success in the 1960s, was making White people comfortable with the Black bodies that emboldened the brand was as critical to Motown’s success

Motown the DVD captures some of the tensions that accompanied Gordy’s attempts to conquer the pop music world. The Contours 1962 appearance on The Hy Lit Show is instructive. Singing “Do You Love Me?”—a song that would be prominently featured twenty-five years later in the film Dirty Dancing—the quartet seems particularly challenged not to engage in the very “dirty dancing” that the song inspired. Only a few years after Elvis Presley’s swiveling hips would court controversy on television, America was not quite ready to see black men doing the same. In comparison, the Temptations’ tightly choreographed routines during their 1964 performance of “My Girl” on Teen Town is a lesson in restraint. “My Girl” was the group’s first major pop hit, and Gordy was understandably cautious in his approach.

When the voluptuous Brenda Holloway appeared on Shivaree in 1964, it was the camera that seemed confused. The camera was still focused on the white Go-Go dancers that were featured weekly, while Holloway was well into the first verse of “Every Little Bit Hurts,” seemingly reluctant about presenting Holloway in her sleeveless leather cat suit. Even when the camera finally settles on Holloway’s figure, albeit briefly, it seems confused as to whether to present a head-shot or a full body view, Holloway’s rather ample hips in tow.

Many of the performances included on Motown the DVD, were lip-synced, highlighting many of the technical issues that producers were faced with when trying to present musical performances via the still evolving medium. Not all of the teen music programs in the era, for example, had production budgets that would allow them to feature live musicians and alternately, many of the fledgling records labels of the era couldn’t afford to hire musicians for one-time appearances. For Gordy such canned performances were useful, because they helped guarantee that the label’s artists would reproduce the very performances that record buyers were familiar with.

The performances of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and The Supremes on The Ed Sullivan Show—the premiere weekly variety show throughout the 1950s and 1960s—and The Mike Douglass Show offer a contrast to the many of the lip-synced performances. Despite having a reputation for possessing a rather saccharine voice, Supremes lead Diana Ross more than makes up with her star power during the group’s performance of “Back in My Arms Again.” And none of made the Motown sound “pop” was lost when the Vandellas donned full-length gowns in front of Sullivan’s house orchestra.

Motown the DVD includes additional footage of the company picnic in 1970, that is as notable for the moments it captures the label’s biggest stars—Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye and a young Michael Jackson—alongside the rank-and-file types that were the essence of the operation as it is for the comical narration of then Motown staffer Weldon McDougal III. For all of the label’s achievements, the footage of the picnic is a reminder that above all else, Motown always saw itself as a family.

Always Supreme: Diana Ross

from the News & Observer

Always Supreme
by Mark Anthony Neal
Friday, March 11, 2011

Diana Ross was never the prettiest girl in the room. She was never the sexiest women on the screen. Ross was never the best singer on stage.

Yet for nearly 50 years, Diana Ross has been the epitome of American glamour and a role model for generations of R&B and pop divas trying to negotiate the pitfalls of celebrity and ever fickle audiences.

Ross brings her singular presence to a sold-out show at the Durham Performing Arts Center tonight.

Born Diane Ross in 1944, the singer grew up in the housing projects of Detroit. While still in high school, Ross joined a group called the Primettes (later renamed the Supremes) with Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson. The group was a sister group of the Primes, whose members would later become the legendary Temptations.

Ross' career was nurtured by Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records, where the images of black racial uplift were as much required as the fine tunes that Smokey Robinson and Holland-Dozier-Holland produced in the 1960s. Gordy called his label the "Sound of Young America." The Supremes, with Diana Ross singing lead, was Motown's flagship product.

Ross' legacy as one of the most important vocalists of the era would have been cemented had her career ended with her last hit recording with the Supremes ("Someday We'll Be Together") in 1969 and the group's 12 No. 1 Billboard 100 songs. But Ross and Gordy had greater designs. Ross' solo career, which began with the signature hits "Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)" and "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" (both written by Ashford and Simpson) set the standard for pop divas.

Ross set her sights on Hollywood, earning Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for the biopic "Lady Sings the Blues," and later starred in "Mahogany" and a film adaptation of the musical "The Wiz."

In 1980, with her recording career treading water, she collaborated with producers Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic to produce one of her greatest albums as a solo artist. Titled "Diana," the album produced hits including "I'm Coming Out," which became an anthem for gay and lesbian audiences.

Ross soon left Motown Records, signing with RCA, with one of the most lucrative contracts in the music industry at the time. She continued her success with a remake of Frankie Lymon's "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" and the song "Muscles," which was written by her close confidante, the late Michael Jackson.

One enduring image of Ross from that period was her performing in New York's Central Park in 1983 during a torrential rainstorm - the perfect representation of the old adage that the show must go on (though Ross did cut the show short, and returned to do a show the next day).

Over the past 20 years, Ross continued to record and tour, though her legacy is perhaps best represented by the success of her children. Daughter Tracee Ellis-Ross starred in the popular sitcom "Girlfriends" (2000-2008), and her son Evan, is earning rave reviews for his role in the film "Mooz-lum."

***

Mark Anthony Neal is a professor of black popular culture in the department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University.

Ashford and Simpson: The Soundtrack to Black Love

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.