So fascinating the intersections that exist within the realms of popular music! Case in point: the Burt Bacharach-Hal David song “Walk On By,” now considered a contemporary classic as much as a result of the original 1964 recording by Dionne Warwick as by Isaac Hayes, whose twelve-minute and three-second 1969 version undoubtedly contributed to catapulting his breakthrough “Hot Buttered Soul” LP into public consciousness.

The song itself has much personal meaning for me, virtually responsible (almost single-handedly) for my ‘conversion’ from British pop to American soul: unashamedly, I had preferred Liverpudlian Cilla Black (managed at the time by Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, and a future fixture on British television) version of Dionne’s unrequited opus “Anyone Who Had A Heart,” fiercely defending my choice because I didn’t like the muted trumpet in the Warwick recording! “Walk On By,” another homage to the brokenhearted among us – I was pining over Marilyn Wolfe, a number of years older than me who had rejected in favor of teenagers older than her tender sixteen years of age – was the song that got me through the angst and pain of puppy love…

It was also my introduction to Aretha Franklin. In a somewhat radical departure from the jazz and pop material which had been the standard fare for her previous five Columbia albums, the late 1964 “Runnin’ Out Of Fools” contained her own distinctive readings of a number of current hits of that year (including Brenda Holloway’s “Every Little Bit Hurts” and Nancy Wilson’s “How Glad I Am”). I heard Aretha’s gospel-styled reading of “Walk On By” during an outing of the Dionne Warwick, Shirelles and Scepter-Wand Appreciation Society members in Littlehampton, a British beach town, on a portable record player and vowed to find out exactly who this Aretha Franklin singer was. But that’s another story…

Many years after the release of Dionne’s “Walk On By” (which brought her immediate international fame and recognition and remains the most popular song in her repertoire among Brits and other European audiences), I found out in a rare interview session with the late Florence Greenberg (the founder and owner of Scepter Records for whom Dionne recorded her classic Bacharach-David material) that the song was originally intended as a “B” side. Florence preferred the more bossa-nova-flavored “Any Old Time Of Day”: undecided, she asked popular New York disc jockey Murray The K to run an on-air contest so listeners could vote for their choice. Needless to say, “Walk On By” won hands down and Dionne was rewarded with a massive hit single…

While I don’t confess to know what motivated Isaac Hayes to choose “Walk On By” and turn it into an acknowledged musical masterpiece (with horns, strings and a ‘nasty’ funky guitar!), I do know that he transformed it into a veritable showcase for his skills as an outfront recording artist. Moving from the backroom as one of Stax Records’ key producers and songwriters along with partner David Porter, Ike reportedly recorded his first Stax LP (1968’s “Presenting Isaac Hayes”) because Stax needed one more album to fill out a major sales campaign the company was doing with its new G&W distribution deal.

Soul connections being what they are, Isaac and Dionne would tour together some seven years after the release of “Hot Buttered Soul” when both were undergoing career challenges, she near the end of a frustratingly unsuccessful six-year tenure at Warner Brothers Records and he finishing a short-lived association with ABC Records via his own Hot Buttered Soul imprint. Recorded in Atlanta in 1976, an album named after the tour (“A Man And A Woman”) was released in early ’77 on HBS and included, naturally, “Walk On By” sung by the duo as part of a medley that also included another Bacharach-David classic, “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself.” The LP has never been issued on CD due to uncertainty over ownership although we can confirm that tapes for it exist in the UMG vaults! Until such time as someone somewhere concludes it’s worth reissuing, we can content ourselves with the two vastly different of the song without which I might never have taken the soul music path that I’ve been on all these many years… You can hear a shortened version of Isaac’s “Walk On By” on the Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration 2-CD set.

David Nathan
Aka the British Ambassador Of Soul
Owner, www.soulmusic.com

Jean Knight: “Mr. Big Stuff”
From the album: Mr. Big Stuff
Released March 1971
#2 Pop single, #1 R&B single

By 1969, Stax producer Al Bell had bought out Estelle Axton and essentially co-owned and co-operated the label with Jim Stewart. Bell, a Stax employee since 1965, expanded the label’s vision and operations, for better or worse, far past the Memphis city limits. One way Bell accomplished this was through distribution deals, where other labels piggybacked onto the industry network grown from the solid Stax record of solid hit records. These included Luther Ingram’s soul-searching masterpiece “(If Loving You is Wrong) I Don’t Want to be Right,” which was recorded for another small, local label (Koko Records) but rose to #3 Pop single and sold more than one million copies through the Stax distribution network.

Another way Bell expanded the Stax sound was to simply cherry-pick and purchase promising but unreleased masters made available by other labels, of which Jean Knight’s “Mr. Big Stuff” was perhaps the most successful.

Jean Wright was born in New Orleans. Early in the 1960s, while still a young singer, she recorded in and around her hometown, including sessions for Huey Meaux, who had also produced one of the city’s leading musical mojos, Dr. John. In 1970, Wright traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to cut a track at Malaco Studios for songwriter / producer Wardell Wuezergue.

The resulting “Mr. Big Stuff” sounds nothing at all like Memphis, but bumps and grinds with the bottomless, elastic, thick and spicy Crescent City funk of New Orleans. Producer Wuezergue yanks the rhythm section - bassist Vernon Robbins and drummer James Stroud - all the way up to the front of the mix, making their strong, syncopated rhythm even stronger. Wright struts and preens, her rhythmic pauses and tumbles toying with their beat, while a local, uncredited horn section stabs out counterpoint hot and lusty as those Memphis Horns. (Dorothy Moore, who also recorded her biggest hit - “Misty Blue” - for Malaco, was one of the backing vocalists.)

It wasn’t quite as explosive as Aretha’s declarative stomp in search of “Respect,” but close enough: “Mr. Big Stuff” stayed at #2 for two weeks on the Pop singles chart, and for five weeks at #1 on the R&B singles chart, in the hot summer of 1971.

Sometimes news can travel very quickly, and at other times it doesn’t travel quickly enough.

I’ve just learned that singer / songwriter Luther Ingram passed away on March 19, succumbing to heart failure after years of battling diabetes and related kidney disease. He was 69.

You won’t find any Luther Ingram records in the Stax library, and to tell the truth he never actually recorded for the label. But Ingram left specific, indelible fingerprints on Stax, both as a songwriter and a singer. So even though he never signed a Stax contract, he might be considered one of the label’s most important “first cousins.”

Luther Ingram was born in 1937 about one hundred miles from Memphis in Jackson, Tennessee. After formative years singing in a family vocal group based in Illinois, then working with rock & roll pioneers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in New York, he headed back home. He bounced around a few small independent labels and wound up on KoKo Records, based near Memphis.

Ingram connected to Stax when Koko Records signed a deal for Stax distribution in 1969. He hooked up with Stax in-house songwriter Sir Mack Rice, who already had a hit to his credit with Wilson Pickett’s hard-driving “Mustang Sally” (and later penned “Cheaper to Keep Her” for Johnnie Taylor). Their partnership produced “Respect Yourself,” one of the Staples Singers’ - and Stax’s - biggest hits.

In 1972, Ingram recorded his masterpiece “(If Loving You is Wrong) I Don’t Want to be Right.” It sold over one million copies through the Stax distribution network and climbed to #3 on the Pop singles chart. It proved so popular that Stax made sure it appeared in both the Wattstax movie documentary and accompanying soundtrack even though Ingram didn’t even perform at the Los Angeles benefit concert, by arranging to record Ingram singing on a soundstage before an appreciative audience. “If Loving You Is Wrong” was subsequently covered by soul legends like The Drifters, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Isaac Hayes and Percy Sledge, but even up against such heavyweights, Ingram’s smoldering original remains the definitive version.

I’ll be the first to admit that this blog entry reads and feels somewhat hollow. But I keep coming back to this: Luther Ingram’s performance of “(If Loving You is Wrong) I Don’t Want to be Right” has moved countless hearts, including and especially my own. Writing about Mr. Ingram now is at least something, and something is almost always better than nothing. If the life of a soulful songwriter and singer cannot be honored here, then where? If not us, by whom? And if not now, then when?

I’m sorry this came so late, Mr. Ingram, too late for this to do you any good, but thank you so very much for such a great, great song.

One of the most rewarding aspects of the Stax catalog has always been the depth and breadth of black music it encompasses and with the changeover in 1968 from ‘blue’ to ‘yellow’ labels (coincident with the switch in distribution and ownership), the company extended its roster beyond mostly Memphis-based artists to include the likes of The Emotions and The Staple Singers (both based in Chicago) and The Dramatics (from Detroit)…and Little Milton, a native Mississippian who came to prominent national attention after signing with Checker Records in 1961. A guitarist known more for his soulful vocal sound than his nonetheless skills as a musician, Milton’s presence at Stax demonstrated the company’s commitment to including all forms of black music, from R&B to gospel and blues.

Prior to Checker, Milton had co-owned his own label (Bobbin Records) whose line-up of artists had included such luminaries as Fontella Bass (a future Chess artist) and Albert King (a future Stax labelmate); at Checker, Little Milton was a regular R&B chartmaker thanks to his 1965 anthemic classic “We’re Gonna Make It” and a string of other hits such as “Who’s Cheating Who,” “Feel So Bad” and “If Walls Could Talk.”

While he only recorded for the label for approximately four years, Milton’s Stax years included some truly outstanding performances, a highpoint of which is arguably a scorching recording of “Walking The Backstreets And Crying” included on a 2004 reissue, “Wattstax: Highlights from the Soundtrack” which as the title implies was culled from the famous 1972 Los Angeles festival which featured almost the entire Stax roster. A live album released by Stax (apparently culled from Milton’s performance at a local L.A. club around the same time as the Wattstax event) includes this amazing cut along with his reprise of a 1969 Checker hit “Grits Ain’t Groceries,” itself a remake of (brother of Stax soul sister Mable John) Little Willie John’s “All Around The World” . The song was memorable for its lyric line, “Grits ain’t groceries, eggs ain’t poultry and Mona Lisa was a man!” and was later recorded by Van Morrison, to whom Little Milton paid tribute on a 2003 album entitled “Vanthology.”

Although he wasn’t a high charting artist for Stax (scoring seven R&B singles during between 1971 and 1975), Little Milton’s presence on the label bespoke the afore-mentioned determination by the company to ensure that black musical culture, with all its richness, was fully represented through an all-encompassing roster. After his Stax experience, Milton went on to record for Henry Stone’s TK family of labels in Florida before making his home with Malaco for him he made over a dozen albums until his passing in 2005. You can hear one of Little Milton’s Stax hits, “That’s What Love Will Make You Do” on the Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration 2-CD set.

David Nathan
Aka the British Ambassador Of Soul
Owner, www.soulmusic.com