The Iceman Writeth

 

If you're reading this blog then you will probably know that Jerry Butler was a member of the Impressions, a doo wop/soul group which also featured his childhood friend Curtis Mayfield. For Your Precious Love, which Butler cowrote and sang lead on, was a meld of doo wop and gospel which sounded as though it had been recorded in a cathedral; it was a big hit on Vee-Jay Records in 1958 and is now regarded as a doo wop classic. 

Butler was unexpectedly given top billing on that release, which created some bad feeling within the group and eventually led to his decision to go solo. Apparently the distinction had been made on the record because the company reasoned that having two acts on their books would be better than one, having already made what they considered a mistake by not giving Pookie Hudson top billing with the Spaniels. 

Only the Strong Survive describes in detail his initial struggle to establish himself as a separate act. Singing For Your Precious Love onstage by himself did not produce the whoops of ecstacy he'd become used to when performing with the group, and matters weren't helped when Curtis Mayfield refused the gig as his accompanist. As Butler tells it Mayfield wanted a contract before agreeing, which took him aback, given their friendship, but it seems Vee-Jay weren't keen on the proposal either. They did, however, work together later on some of Butler's most affecting Vee-Jay solo releases such as He Will Break Your Heart and Find Another Girl.After having such an inspired collaborator Butler was also lucky, after he left Vee-Jay in 1966 (the book contains a capsule account of the company's downfall), to work with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff at Mercury Records and found they made a good songwriting team, with Huff on the piano and Butler and Gamble working on the lyrics: "Huff and Kenny would come up with some concepts and play some chords, and I started singing. That's how we came up with Never Gonna Give You Up." 

When Gamble and Huff left Mercury in 1969 Butler was still contractually tied there. But he responded to this potential setback by becoming became more proactive about finding new material for himself and others, setting up The Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop and hiring fledgling writers via the music publishers Chappell, who were connected to Mercury. A space to work was found although the set-up seems to have been fairly free and easy, with writers coming in or working from home, as they pleased: "It wasn't a military thing at all ... What was important was that every two or three months there would be a demo session, and the writers would either perform their own tunes or have other artists perform them." The workshop lasted for around six years and brought out the talents of writers like Terry Callier, resulting in songs for the Dells and others. 

One striking aspect of this book is how careful Butler is to give credit to, and often provide potted histories of, those he has worked with or been inspired by over the years: in additiion to the writers he helped to nurture there are mini-portraits of a range of artists along the way. There's no false modesty in these pages about his own achievements but equally he has no illusions about his luck in encountering so many people who taught him so much. 

Early on, for example, he doesn't think a great deal of Johnny Mathis until pressed to see him perform live - and the experience proves a revelation: 

It wasn't just singing; it was something else ... believability - the ability to deliver a song with such intimacy, such emotion, that the people in the audience forget that they are in a nightclub, forget about going to work in the morning ... and become Maria - or in my case the guy who romances Maria ... Years later, when I played the Copa, I remembered the lesson of that night: Don't ever cheat your audience. Do everything with conviction, with style. And most of all, make it believable.

There are many such moments of epiphany along the way. But the book is also, as Ebony magazine puts it, "a glimpse at the political and social climate of the times which shaped the life of one man." This is elaborated upon in the introduction, in which cowriter Earl Smith advises that the book is not a tell-all about Butler's personal life but "tak[es] into account the political, social and personal forces impacting his life as well as the world around him." While planning the book he and Butler came to realise that 

What we were really up to was writing a book about our generation ... African Americans experienced altogether different awakenings and crises than their white counterparts ... black teenagers were awakening to the realization that the music they had invented was no longer theirs, and, importantly, they could not profit from it [though white artists could] ... we did not set out to write a book about race relations in America [but] As with most things in America, race seems to color everything. It definitely is unavoidable when discussing or writing about America's musical heritage.

Even a chapter about Vietnam and the perceived racial bias of the draft has a musical aspect: the records which formed the soundtrack of the war were rock for white troops, and soul (including Butler's Only the Strong Survive) for black troops: "like most things American, the airways and clubs in Vietnam were segregated." 

Butler is also frank about his declining fortunes as a recording artist, describing his disappointments when he moved to Motown, then no longer in Detroit but Hollywood. He opted to stay in Chicago, only going to Tinseltown to record, which might have contributed to the modest impact he made on that label, but he also writes of his growing realisation that by 1972, when Berry Gordy was becoming more and more involved in film-making, Motown might have had "The same name and some of the same people, but not the same spirit."

His songs might not have been as directly political as some of those by Curtis Mayfield but - once again in proactive mode - in the 1980s Butler made the decision to enter politics in middle age, winning a seat on the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 1985 in an effort to lessen discrimination for African Americans in Chicago, fearing that the then Chairman intended to fill the seats with his cronies. He had no qualms about utilising his celebrity during his campaign but it certainly wasn't a publicity stunt: he served until 2018, almost two decades after the publication of this book. 

Buying music memoirs sight unseen is always, as Groucho might have quipped, a gamble and a huff, but however duties were divided between Butler and coauthor Earl Smith Only the Strong Survive is very well written and considered. Some online reviewers have objected to the amount of space taken up by those sections in which the spotlight isn't on Butler himself, but the introduction quoted earlier makes the book's approach quite clear. 

I don't know whether Only the Strong Survive is still in print but at the time of writing there are a fair number of inexpensive secondhand copies available from online booksellers. 

I don't normally advise about the content of future posts but next time I'll probably be reviewing another book, this one written by someone who has worked as a backing musician and MD for the Cadillacs and others. Based on what I've read so far, it's a good 'un, so watch this space. It makes for an interesting comparison with a book about the G-Clefs by their guitarist, which I wrote about earlier, here.