Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  Eddie, a born hustler, agreed—on one condition. He demanded the group axe the name Roosters. “Too country,” he said. My father heartily agreed. “We couldn’t get through a song after we told the audience the name,” he said. “They’d be crowing and making all kinds of barnyard sounds.” There was only one problem: no one had a better name. For a while everyone threw around suggestions, but they couldn’t make anything stick. It didn’t help that Arthur, Richard, and Sam didn’t want to change the name. “We’re gonna lose a lot of sales in Chattanooga,” they protested. “The Roosters are very popular there.” Eddie explained he had his eye on a much bigger picture. “I can’t see it on a marquee,” he told them. “I can’t see it at the Regal Theatre.” Besides, a publicist could alert fans of the name change once the group had something to promote.

  “What’s the new name then?” they demanded.

  They kicked around a few clunkers, but still nothing seemed to stick. After several failures, they wrote down ideas and threw them in a hat. Sam reached in and pulled out a scrap. He nervously unfolded it. Scrawled on it was one of Eddie’s ideas, conceived after recalling how impressed he had been the first time he saw the Roosters perform.

  “How about the Impressions?” Sam said, reading the paper.

  It stuck.

  4

  The Original Impressions

  “Taking all that he can take,

  Gambling with the odds of fate,

  Trying to get over.”

  —“SUPERFLY”

  April 5, 1958—The Hawk screeched through Chicago overnight, blanketing Hudson Street in sparkling snow. Dad woke to find drifts piled five feet high, glinting in the cold sunlight. Of all the times for a freak snowstorm, this one threatened to ruin the Impressions’ audition with Vee-Jay Records. Early that morning, they humped their gear through the not-quite-winter wonderland to Record Row, breath jetting out in steamy spurts, looking for a record deal or bust.

  They had endured this before, minus the snow. In previous months, the guys had taken “For Your Precious Love” to Savoy Records, where owner Herman Lubinsky suggested Jerry sing the lyrics rather than speak them. Jerry took his advice, but Lubinsky passed on the group. They had also solicited King Records, where Ralph Bass, head of Artists & Repertoire, passed as well. Bass had enough work breaking a young singer named James Brown. After that, Eddie set up an audition with an A&R man at Mercury Records who took the Impressions into a small studio, listened to their material, and said he dug the sound but couldn’t sign the group because his roster was already too heavy.

  He offered the Impressions an opportunity to do some background singing with a singer named Eddie Howard, which they happily took. “I had never heard of [Eddie Howard] myself,” Jerry said, “but for $25 an hour per side, I was willing to do some serious chirping.” Still, the gig didn’t represent the success they sought.

  Options dwindling, Eddie Thomas went to a tiny label called Bandera, where he met founder Vi Muszynski—a large woman in her forties with platinum blonde hair. “She talked very fast, squirmed in her seat, and smacked her lips when she talked,” Jerry recalled. “She always seemed too heavily made up to me. She was such a nice woman, though, that you tended to overlook everything else.” Around town, everyone knew Muszynski as “the record lady.” She wanted to the sign the Impressions, but Bandera lacked the funds to publish a record. The label’s pittance of publishing went through a much more successful label, Vee-Jay, and Muszynski couldn’t cut a deal without Vee-Jay’s approval.

  At that time Vee-Jay reigned over Negro music in Chicago. Its office was a sort of headquarters where everyone in the business went after hours, no matter where they worked during the day. As renowned Chicago producer Carl Davis recalled:

  Vee-Jay had an employee lounge that turned into a nightspot after working hours. Industry personalities would be up there trading stories and shooting the breeze, while others would be playing cards. The people who didn’t want to gamble would sit around the makeshift bar, which was really a lunchroom counter, and have a few drinks … Vee-Jay had the luxury of having everybody promoting Vee-Jay. Vee-Jay set the standard. Vee-Jay kept you in the know. We all took some pride in the fact that it was the black record company, and to even be indirectly affiliated with them gave us all welcomed credibility.

  Muszynski scheduled an audition for the Impressions with Vee-Jay’s A&R man, Calvin Carter, on April 5. With better intentions than taste, she selected several songs that were “an inch away from being country,” according to Jerry, and had the Impressions learn them. “We thought they were ridiculous, but we went along because we didn’t want to hurt her feelings,” Jerry said. “We … tried to make them as soulful as possible.”

  In one version of the audition story, when the Impressions arrived that snowy day, they knocked on the door at Chess Records first. They made eye contact with a security guard sitting inside but he didn’t let them in, so they crossed the street and went to Vee-Jay. While romantic, this version doesn’t square with the other facts known about that day. First, Eddie recalled unsuccessfully offering “For Your Precious Love” to Chess Records before meeting Muszynski, which makes a return to Chess unlikely. Second, Muszynski scheduled an audition at Vee-Jay, which makes a spur-of-the-moment drop-in at Chess equally unlikely.

  Regardless, when the Impressions reached Vee-Jay’s offices on Forty-Seventh Street and South Parkway they met label president Ewart Abner, a thin, dapper Negro with kind eyes and an immaculately trimmed moustache. He sat with his ever-present Great Dane slobbering by his side. Abner was a slick man, a charmer, and one of the most powerful men in the business. Trembling, the Impressions climbed the stairs to the rehearsal room and played a few of Muszynski’s numbers for Carter, who sat unimpressed. “Do you have any original material?” he asked. They played a few originals, which Carter liked better, but still not enough to sign the Impressions.

  The audition had just about reached its end, and it looked like another failure. My father put down his guitar and everyone stood in awkward, nervous silence. Carter said, “Gee, I really want to record you guys, but I don’t really hear that hit song.” Then, an idea struck him. “Sing something you’re ashamed to sing. Sing something you don’t usually feel like singing in public.”

  They only knew one other song, so Dad picked up his guitar, plucked a few chords, and Jerry let out a velvety blast, “Your precious love means more to me …” The group fell in behind him in perfect harmony, and by the time the song ended, Carter’s eyes beamed with the electricity of a man who suddenly believed. He shouted, “That’s it! That’s it! That’s the one! Abner, get me some contracts. Vi, you, Eddie, and Abner better talk.”

  My father stood in stunned silence trying to play off the bottle rockets of emotions shooting through him. Then, as if his mind wasn’t blown enough, Pookie Hudson and the Spaniels—one of his favorite doo-wop groups—walked into the room. “Hey, y’all, sing that ‘Precious Love’ song again,” Carter said to the Impressions. “I want them to hear it.”

  Just then, paranoia set in. Dad and the group had heard horror stories of crooked producers hiding tape recorders in their desks, stealing songs from unknown youngsters desperate for a break. “Here comes the rip off,” Jerry thought. “He likes our song and he wants [the Spaniels] to record it. That’s why they called them and told them to come over right away. This ain’t no accident. I’ll bet that bastard’s got a tape recorder in his desk.”

  They nervously played the song again. As soon as they finished, the Spaniels started slapping hands and telling stories about what the Impressions would go through when the record hit. The paranoia subsided. “We were very happy and very grateful,” Jerry said. “Mostly, though, we were very surprised that a group like the Spaniels, with all their success, would be that decent and down to Earth.”

  Muszynski and Abner drew up a contract signing the Impressions to Bandera for one year, with an option to renew within five days of its expiration. Vee-Jay would
distribute the records. The Impressions got two points, which in the music industry’s arcane lingo meant they’d earn 2 percent in royalties out of every 90 percent of records sold. Bandera didn’t have a standard contract form, so they borrowed one from Vee-Jay, crossing out the Vee-Jay masthead and typing Bandera’s below it. Everyone signed, and since my father, Richard, and Jerry were minors, their mothers also had to sign the contract.

  Saturday morning, the Impressions had their first professional recording date. They arrived early and stood outside Universal Studios on Walton Street, trying to stop their nerves from jangling. Finally, Arthur broke the macho facade, saying, “I ain’t gonna lie, I’m scared as hell.” Everyone burst out laughing and calmed down.

  They entered Studio A, “a huge room with the control room way up in the air, like an airport,” according to the recording engineer that day. The Impressions began with one of my father’s earliest compositions, “Sweet Was the Wine,” a song straddling the line between doo-wop and rock ’n’ roll, a genre just beginning to take the white world by storm in the form of a swivel-hipped dynamo named Elvis Presley. It took a few passes to warm up, but as Jerry remembered it, “Four or five takes later, we got into a good groove. My voice cracked on one note. [Carter] played ‘Sweet Was the Wine’ back a couple of times to convince himself it wasn’t too bad. Then he asked us to do ‘Precious Love.’”

  From the days rehearsing in Seward Park, the Impressions were used to singing a song again and again until they had it just right. But after half a dozen takes of “Precious Love,” it still sounded wrong. Due to union rules, my father couldn’t play guitar on the record, so two other players named Lefty and Guitar Red filled in. They might have been great session men, but with their standard tuning, they weren’t getting the sound. Carter, to his credit, recognized the problem.

  He told Curtis to grab his guitar. Taking Lefty and Guitar Red aside, he asked them to sit out without telling the union—such a breach could get Vee-Jay into an expensive legal battle. Carter returned to the recording console and told the Impressions to hit the song again. Two takes later, it was perfect. Carter wanted to send it to the pressing plant right away. In fact, he liked it so much he had several acetates, or test pressings, cut that day so he could take one home.

  Carter gave one of the acetates to his sister Vivian (as cofounder of the label, she was the “Vee” in “Vee-Jay”), who hosted a radio show in Gary, Indiana. She told the Impressions she’d play it that night. When the time came, the group huddled around a radio in the Brooks house aching with anticipation. Finally, Vivian introduced the song and Curtis’s opening guitar notes seeped from the radio’s speakers. Jerry recalled, “When we heard that song coming across that little box that was sitting there over in the corner, we started out jumping up and down on the bed, grabbing, hugging each other, and then we started to cry because it was overwhelming. And we didn’t really know how good it sounded until we heard it on the radio. Then people started calling, ‘Play it again.’ She must have played it five or six times.”

  The young Impressions had little time to bask in the glow of their radio debut. The next day, they returned to the studio to record two more songs, including another of Curtis’s compositions, “At the County Fair,” on which he sang lead for the first time.

  A few days later, official copies of “For Your Precious Love” arrived from the pressing plant, and Eddie drove the group to the Vee-Jay office in his Cadillac. This was the most important moment. Signing a contract, recording in a professional studio, and getting on the radio marked huge milestones, but nothing said success like seeing your name on the label of a record. That was something tangible, something permanent and undeniable.

  They tore open the boxes, passed around the records, and gazed at them the way a father looks upon his firstborn child. As they read the label, the room fell silent. Under the song title, it read “Jerry Butler” in huge letters. Beneath that, in tiny typeface, it read, “and the Impressions.” Without consulting the group, Vee-Jay had decided to put Jerry out front as the star that would outshine the nameless, faceless “and the Impressions.” The sting set in immediately. Jerry said:

  I knew that Curtis, Sam, Arthur and Richard didn’t like it one bit. Each of their faces was twisted into a half smile that did nothing to hide their hurt and envy. I finally spoke. “You’ll have to reprint the label so it reads ‘The Impressions.’ If you don’t, we’re going to have dissension in the group before we ever get started.” Sam and Arthur mumbled in agreement. Curtis and Richard just kept staring at the record and shaking their heads. Eddie was nervous. He hadn’t known about it either. Still, he remained silent. He later told us that, at the time, he thought it unwise for us to be raising questions at that meeting, when we were so close to getting things off the ground.

  Eddie had good reason to worry. Abner wasn’t about to take directions from a no-name kid whose career rested in his industry-savvy hands. When he replied to Jerry’s request, he spoke matter-of-factly, a hint of anger coloring his words. He explained how much it would cost to reprint fifty thousand labels and why the company chose to feature Jerry on the label. It would help them get more airplay, Abner said. Besides, Vee-Jay knew more about promotion than they did, and the company only had their best interests in mind. He promised Vee-Jay would not do anything to break them up. They simply couldn’t reprint the labels, and even if they could, it would take two or three weeks before they could get the record out. “By the time he got through talking, we were feeling sorry for feeling sorry,” Jerry said. “Abner was like that. He was one of those guys who could sell you the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it back five minutes later for half the price.” Abner’s speech worked for the moment, but tensions remained just below the surface. “The rift over the phrase ‘Jerry Butler and the Impressions,’ and later ‘The Original Impressions,’ was irreparable, and would remain even after forty years,” Jerry said.

  For Vee-Jay, the decision was pure business. Every label worth its salt had long realized that once a group had a hit, the company could multiply its money by separating the lead singer and creating two acts. It happened to Dee Clark and the Kool Gents, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, James Brown and the Famous Flames, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. After separating the front man from the group, the story usually ended the same—the lead singer soared to fame if he was good (and lucky) while his former band put out a few tepid records and faded into obscurity.

  The Impressions didn’t know that then. None of them expected such a thing to happen. They had made it this far together, and they intended to succeed or fail together. “You can understand all these fellows having worked and sacrificed evenly in trying to become somebody, for anyone’s name to be put out front was a sort of a blow,” my father said. “When disc jockeys played the record, it was ‘Now here’s Jerry Butler and “For Your Precious Love.”’ And of course the fan mail would come, which we got gobs of, to Jerry Butler.”

  Despite the hard feelings, success had a way of ironing out differences, at least temporarily. Within two weeks, “For Your Precious Love” sold 150,000 copies and charted in every city where it played. When rumors began swirling that the debonair R&B star Roy Hamilton planned to cover the song, Abner decided to set up a promotional tour for the Impressions. Hamilton had a string of smash hits like “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “Unchained Melody.” Abner could just see him driving women wild with “For Your Precious Love,” making it his song before the unknown Impressions could even begin making a name for themselves.

  To get the scoop on Hamilton and build the Impressions’ name, Vee-Jay and Eddie booked dates in Detroit, followed by an appearance on Jim Lounsbury’s Bandstand Matinee—Chicago’s version of American Bandstand—as well as stops in Philadelphia, Miami, and the prize of them all, Harlem’s Apollo Theater.

  Before leaving for Detroit, the Impressions went to Maxwell Street Market to buy uniforms. Known to many in the Negro community as Jew Town, the market feature
d “cigar-chomping hawkers in ramshackle kiosks, barking ‘Hot dogs! Polish sausages! Thirty-five cents!’” Jerry recalled, “The musky smell of grilled onions, mustard and sausages always hung in the air. Then there were the merchants who would literally force you into their dark dingy shops, insisting that you buy something.”

  The market also boasted Goldstein’s music store, Leavett’s—a popular bar where musicians hung out—and Smokey Joe’s. The latter was the primary purveyor of hip clothing in the city, its racks full of continental suits with narrow lapels and Dior dresses with the so-called New Look. The space surrounding the kiosks served as an unofficial stage where musicians could set up and plunk out their tunes for a few coins tossed into their open guitar cases or upturned hats. Once upon a time, a shopper could browse the market while the likes of Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, or Howlin’ Wolf provided the soundtrack. It had a festival atmosphere—between Maxwell and Fourteenth Street on Newberry, crowds gathered in an empty lot to listen to the music under a cottonwood tree, or dance in the streets to songs like Waters’s “Mannish Boy” and Wolf’s “Moanin’ at Midnight.”

  The Impressions left the market that day with matching suits—gray silk jackets, black pants, white shirts, black ties, and pocket scarves. Suits were the standard uniform for vocal groups at the time. The Spaniels wore them. So did the Dells, the Flamingoes, and just about everyone else trying to make it in show business. These suits were especially important for Negro entertainers wanting to project an air of debonair worldliness. Suits opened the door to the white supper-club scene, which meant serious money. They didn’t hurt with the ladies, either. Coming years would witness a generational divide regarding Negro performers dressing up for the white world, but for the time at hand, if my father and the Impressions wanted to work, they’d have to do it in suits. For a bunch of kids accustomed to hand-me-downs and whatever ragtag clothing their parents could afford, being forced into a sharp-looking suit wasn’t the hardest sacrifice to endure.