R.I.P. JERRY BUTLER

Jerry Butler passed on February 20 in 2025, from Parkinson. He was born in Sunflower County in Mississippi on December the 8th in 1939, but he and his family left for Chicago already in the winter of 1942. “My father was a share-cropper in Mississippi, and my mother has always been a mother and homemaker.” Jerry first experienced music at Sanctified Church of God In Christ in Chicago and began singing regularly in the Northern Jubilee Gospel Singers in 1953. He first tasted secular music in the nearby “wild life” Wells Street, and the first doowop group he started singing with was the Quails, followed by the Roosters in the fall of 1957 with his old gospel choir member, Curtis Mayfield, and Arthur and Richard Brooks and Sam Gooden.  The group soon changed its name to the Impressions

FOR YOUR PRECIOUS LOVE

  “I never recorded anything, when I was singing gospel.  There was a background record that we did for a singer named Eddy Howard, who was on Mercury Records, that my voice is on, but not in the lead capacity.  For Your Precious Love is the actual first song that I ever really had my voice featured on it in my whole life.” The single was released in April 1958 on Abner, a subsidiary of Vee-Jay Records out of Chicago, and it peaked at # 3 – rhythm & blues and at # 11 – pop on Billboard’s charts. For Your Precious Love has always been a special song for Jerry. “I still walk on stage every night and I sing this song.  It’s usually close to the final song, if not the very last one.”

  Initially at Vee-Jay the group auditioned for the company’s A&R man, Calvin Carter, and that’s whom Jerry kept mostly working with after breaking up with the group and launching his solo career in 1959. “He was kind of like an old brother, maybe even a father figure.  When I went to Vee-Jay Records in 1958, I was an old man of eighteen and Calvin Carter was maybe an old man of 34 or 35. So I leaned quite heavily on him for encouragement and for guidance and leadership.  He used to come to theatres and say ‘you know, Jerry, people like to hear you talk as well as sing.’ So that’s when I started to incorporate talking into my performances.”

MOON RIVER

  Jerry kept on recording for Vee-Jay almost until the end, close to the moment the company filed bankruptcy in 1966. His biggest hits for the label included He Will Break Your Heart, Find another Girl, I’m a Telling You, Make it Easy on Yourself and I Stand Accused. One single in 1961 was Moon River, a song for the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “Calvin brought Moon River to me and said ‘this will be a big song for your career.’ I fell on the floor laughing and said ‘you got to be crazy, it’s a waltz. Nobody wants to hear that kind of song in ’61 or ’62. He said ‘Jerry, listen to me, this is going to be a big song. The motion picture is going to be a big movie and you have the opportunity to be the first vocal on this thing, because Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini have given us a two-week jump on everybody else in the industry. Do this song, if you don’t do anything else.’ So, certainly we went into the studio and recorded just that one song, nothing else on the session, and in those days to spend 35,000 dollars just to record one song... (laughing). He really put his neck out there.” Jerry’s first vocal version of the song hit # 11 on pop charts.

  On Vee-Jay Jerry also teamed up with Betty Everett “I think we were both young and energetic and we made one album together (Delicious Together), but then it just got to be a problem. I mean, she was having problems and I was having problems, so we decided not to do anymore. But when I listen back to those records – Let It Be Me and Smile – there was really a very wonderful and warm marriage of the spirit and tone in our singing together.”

I’VE BEEN LOVING YOU TOO LONG

  We tend to forget that Jerry was also a prolific songwriter. He co-wrote For Your Precious Love and most of the songs during his superb “Iceman” period with Gamble & Huff in the late 60s. In one case he collaborated with Otis Redding, too. “We wound up doing a concert together in Buffalo in New York. After the show he and I went back to the Sheraton hotel and sat around.  He’d open up a bottle of J&B and broke out his guitar, and we started talking about the songs that we had started but never completed. I said ‘listen, I want you to listen to something I have started, but I can’t get pass the bridge to save my life.’ I played it for him and he fell in love with it.  He said ‘Jerry, this is a hit’, and at the time we both needed a hit real bad.  I said ‘look, if you believe this is a hit, you go and finish it and you have my blessings to record it.’ He called me about two weeks later and said ‘the song’s on the street and it’s a hit.’”

 In his long and prosperous career, there’s one era that is the dearest to Jerry musically. “I think it’s the period I was working with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff: The Ice Man Cometh album - Never give you Up, Only the Strong Survive, A Brand New Me, Western Union Man... That period was so short, but it was so spontaneous.  It was like a burst of fire and energy.  I mean, Leon being an Aries, Kenny being a Leo and Jerry being a Sagittarius, there was a whole bunch of fire in the room (laughing). Whenever we started on something, it just blew. All of those songs that were written for the first two albums were written probably in less than six months.”

  Jerry’s choice of his favourite album doesn’t come as a surprise. “The Ice Man Cometh (1968) has to be one of the all-time favourites for me. But then there was an album that I did at Motown called Suite for the Single Girl (1977), which I thought was not only a concept album but I thought really touched the heart of a lot of women. As a matter of fact, I remember Suzanne DePasse, who at the time was the vice president of the Motown, saying to me after she heard it ‘who gave you the right to write about my life?’”

  Right before those two marvellous albums – The Ice Man Cometh and Ice on Ice - in 1968 and ’69, on Mercury they released The Soul Goes On album in 1968, which contained many familiar songs from Sam Cooke’s, Otis Redding’s and Jesse Belvin’s songbooks. “I have mixed emotions about The Soul Goes On, because I was wanting to pay tribute to the guys I had worked with and who had all passed on - some tragically, some accidentally – and you kind of wonder, will people think that I’m really doing it because I appreciated their work; because no matter how many times you say it, underlying there’s always the concept, well this is business and this is money. But indeed it was one of the things that I really wanted to do and I just wish that I had done better job on some of those songs.”

AIN’T UNDERSTANDING MELLOW

  After Gamble & Huff split with Mercury in 1969, Jerry was in need of good songs and songwriters. Together with the company they created the Jerry Butler Songwriters Workshop. “When I was with Mercury, my contract called for me to make four albums a year, and although I always thought I was a pretty good writer of songs I never thought that I could write between 40 or 50 good songs a year.  I didn’t think I was that good.”

  “So the idea came to me, especially because my younger brother Billy was a songwriter and there was Terry Callier, who I had gone to grammar school with and who was a very fine songwriter and musician and singer in his own right. All these guys were either driving cabs or waiting tables. They were doing things totally unrelated to music. So I told the president of Chappell Music ‘look, if you will give me enough money so that I can give these guys a start, so they can come in and practise their craft, I think that we can get some really great songs and talent out of this workshop.’” Not only a songwriter and Jerry’s younger brother, Billy Butler (1945-2015) had a recording career of his own, too, and he’s best remembered for his two Okeh recordings, I Can’t Work No Longer (in 1965) and Right Track (in ’66).

  “Consequently everybody did do well, but most of them did well after they left the Workshop, or did so well they left the Workshop to start their own publishing firm (laughing). All of the students graduated, for the most part.  Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy, of course, went on to record Natalie Cole and, as a matter of fact, maybe three or four of their first hits came out of that Workshop. Ain’t Understanding Mellow came out of that Workshop, L.T.D. with Back in Love Again came out of that Workshop...  So, you see, it was a success. We just could not keep it going, because Chappell decided that they had put as much money into it as they wanted to put.  And the royalties from the things we had written had not started to come back to the company.”

  Ain’t Understanding Mellow was a # 3-soul and # 21-pop hit for Jerry and Brenda Lee Eager in 1971. “That was the first duet we ever had to go gold, so that has to be special, and also because she came out of the Songwriters Workshop, and folks kind of wrote that song for us.”

THELMA, DEBRA, PATTI...

  In 1976 Jerry joined the Motown label for three solo albums. “I enjoyed the Motown period, but I don’t think that I ever really struck the groove. I think by the time we got around to the Suite for the Single Girl album (1977), Motown had already made the decision that they are not going to re-sign the contract.  They guaranteed me 150 000 dollars a year, and I wasn’t making the guarantee. It was just cold business.”  On Motown, I Wanna Do It to You evolved into a small hit (# 7-soul, # 51-pop).

  Besides solo records on Motown, Jerry cut two duet albums titled Thelma & Jerry and Two to One.    “Thelma Houston, of course, was just a marvellous singer, and I think that the product she and I did together on Motown never really got the justice it deserves in terms of the Motown machine really getting behind that product, because I think there is some excellent product that she and I did together.”

  Jerry returned to Gamble & Huff and their Philadelphia International label in 1978, but only for two albums. “A couple of things happened there. I walked into the situation that already had Teddy Pendergrass and Lou Rawls, who were really big. And I think Kenny and Leon said that ‘well, if we get Butler over here, we’ll sit down and write one album with him, and he’s going to make all our money back on the first album.’ And when that didn’t happen I think they said ‘well, maybe it’s over for the guy, maybe he’s not so good as we thought he was, and maybe we shouldn’t go forward with this anymore.’ So we agreed to disagree.”

  One of Jerry’s singles in 1980 on PIR was a duet with Debra Henry called Don’t Be an Island. “She was the last lady that I recorded with at Philly International. I think she’s got to be one of the great soulful singers of all time, and just unfortunately she has never really reached what I think is her potential.”

  In 1983 they still released one more duet, this time with Patti Austin titled In My Life on CTI. “The stuff we did with Patti Austin – I’m a Patti Austin fan – even if they had said ‘we won’t pay you to do this’, I would have done it. Patti was with the jazz label, and they asked me if I would do just that one song with her to finish her album project they had started, and that’s how it happened. We were together in the studio.”

LITTLE RED SHOES

  In 1982 Jerry released an album titled Ice ‘N Hot on his own Fountain label, and after that has appeared as a guest vocalist on Stix Hooper’s and Theresa Davis’ records, and still in 1991 he released a beautiful Christmas song called Little Red Shoes on a compilation titled Street Carols on Street Gold Entertainment. It took, however, ten years for him to come up with his next album. “In the recording industry in America often times the artists who reach the ripe age of 53 kind of get passed up by the new modern superfunk and raps, and often times it’s difficult to come up with a recording company that is willing to do some product on somebody from my time and era.” Released on Urgent/Ichiban in 1992, Time & Faith is a delightful album with many new beautiful songs on it.

  Two years later on Valley Vue Records Jerry released an album titled Simply Beautiful.  “This album is actually a repackage of Ice ‘N’ Hot that I did on my own on Fountain Records in ’82, but there are three new songs that have never been released.” On DVD you’ll be able to watch Jerry Butler in Love Train, the Sound of Philadelphia, which was shot in 2008 in Atlantic City, NJ., and on Only the Strong Survive – A Celebration of Soul and a couple of other video compilations.

  The Impressions were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. “One of the real tragedies, more on the personal side, is that I tried to get Curtis and the Impressions, when we did our silver anniversary tour in ’83, to video the whole thing, because I didn’t think we would ever get a chance to do it again. And the show was really good. We even wrote some special music for the opening. I just wish that we had had the foresight to put it on film.”

  Since the mid-80s Jerry has also worked as a Cook County commissioner. “By law it’s a part-time job. The other times, like Fridays and Saturdays, I’m out singing and performing and enjoying myself.” 

© Heikki Suosalo