Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  Sometime during the whirring blur of that week, the Impressions also appeared on a local TV show hosted by Alan Freed. Freed was famous for coining the term “rock and roll,” and his show gave Negroes a great chance to cross over to the white market without teetering off the tightrope. In fact, although he was white, Freed had recently tripped on that same rope, in the opposite direction. In 1957, he hosted The Big Beat on ABC, a weekly music show that was canceled after Negro singer Frankie Lymon danced with a white girl in the studio audience after his performance. Such was the state of racial progress in America.

  Still, the Impressions needed the show. “We had sold only so many records with Jocko and the other black deejays playing our song,” Jerry said. “With Freed playing it, we potentially could sell 200,000 copies in New York alone.”

  The TV appearance flashed by like lightning. The Impressions rode in a limousine to the television studio, met Freed, and strode on his stage dressed in pink after-six jackets, crisp white shirts, jet-black pants, black bow ties, pocket scarves, and patent-leather shoes shined to shimmer. Curtis slung his guitar around his neck, although like most television shows at the time, the musicians didn’t perform live. Canned music started from the control room, the floor man swiveled his finger at the Impressions signifying they were on, and they mimed along as “For Your Precious Love” played. Two minutes and forty-seven seconds later, the crowd screamed, clapped, and whistled, and the Impressions left the stage and stepped into another limousine that sped through Central Park and deposited them back at the Apollo. It almost didn’t seem real.

  Freed and Georgie Woods did the trick. A few days later, Abner got a call from Red Schwartz, one of Vee-Jay’s top promotion men. “Turn on American Bandstand,” Schwartz shouted into the phone. “Why?” said Abner. “They’re gonna play ‘For Your Precious Love,’ that’s why,” Schwartz huffed. “Somebody go across the street and get a TV!” Abner yelled, almost dropping the phone. “Dick Clark is playing our record!”

  Dick Clark was the channel to the white market, bar none. His acceptance plugged a Negro artist into white American youth culture, and that brought money. In essence, Clark’s approval was a badge—these Negroes are safe. It was a stupid, racist game but it was the only one going.

  Racism in the country remained strong while the movement briefly floundered. Whites across the South violently battled desegregation using the old tricks—racist judges, economic intimidation, and terrorism in the form of homemade bombs chucked through windows in the dead of night, or rocks flung at protestors’ heads, or guns cocked and pointed at a line of marchers. As local governments in the South met the movement with open hostility, the federal government dragged its feet, offering the same old platitudes. King met with President Eisenhower seeking federal action, but Ike wasn’t about to mar the last years of his antiseptic reign with the stain of Negro rights.

  Vice President Richard Nixon seemed more willing to help, but nothing came of it. King said, “Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere … he almost disarms you with his apparent sincerity. If Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.” King wouldn’t live to witness the irony of his words.

  King rallied supporters with high oratory. “This is the creative moment for a full scale assault on the system of segregation,” he said. “We must practice open civil disobedience. We must be willing to go to jail en masse. That way we may be able to arouse the dozing conscience of the South.”

  Dad listened to these words. He felt an increasing sympathy with the movement as the situation for Negroes in Chicago became more desperate. The State Street Corridor between Cermak and Fifty-First Street, where Negroes had crammed since before Annie Bell arrived, could hold no more. The only other option was the growing West Side ghetto, where conditions were even worse. Racist whites made easy targets for blame, but these conditions existed and thrived with the approval, unspoken or otherwise, of the Negro power structure, which depended on de facto segregation to retain its power. It was a thorny, impossible mess of a problem. Curtis wouldn’t live in Cabrini much longer, and he could escape these problems on the road, but his mind would never stray far from them.

  For the moment, my father’s life had become too exciting to focus on any hardship for long. By the time the week in Harlem ended, the Impressions had smashed the Apollo’s box-office records. It was estimated that upward of five thousand people lined the streets each night to see them—the Apollo could only seat fifteen hundred, leaving many fans disappointed. At the same time, “For Your Precious Love” rode near the top of the charts, hitting number eleven pop and three R&B. The rest of the tour went well except for occasional flare-ups about the billing, but as Jerry said, “We were making more money than any of us had ever made in our lives, and going places that we had only read about or seen pictures of. A place that had once seemed alluring suddenly became just another town that never quite compared to what the pictures and postcards and books had led us to believe.”

  The Impressions returned to Chicago at the end of July 1959, and my father and Jerry went back to Cabrini-Green as heroes. Royalty checks started coming in, the first containing $332.69 for each member. For a kid who was once thrilled at getting a couple of quarters playing in the back of Uncle Charles’s car, Curtis could hardly comprehend making so much money off of one song.

  The first thing he did was buy matching furniture for the house on Hudson. “We never had decent-looking furniture,” Aunt Carolyn says. “We had different odd pieces here and there. When Curtis bought Mom some furniture, Mom was at work, and he and I were playing, running all over the new furniture. We were sword fighting and just having a good time because he had been gone all this time.” Picturing my father jumping across the furniture, playing make-believe with his sister, it is impossible to forget he was little more than a child at the time. If not for the money and success, he would have been a sophomore in high school.

  For Jerry, the homecoming didn’t feel quite as sweet. “All of a sudden, the smells we used to ignore—the pee in the elevators and on the stairs, wine bottles and junkies suddenly become too much to bear,” he said. Worse, the Chicago Housing Authority informed Jerry’s mother she could no longer stay in Cabrini-Green. According to the city, because of Jerry’s success, she now had too much money. Little did the city know, while one hit single could raise a person’s social status, the long-term financial picture didn’t change. What the Impressions needed was another hit.

  Dad was about to learn another important lesson on the rough road to stardom, though—one hit does not guarantee another. The Impressions followed “For Your Precious Love” with “Come Back My Love,” a retread of the former that went to number twenty-nine on the R&B chart and missed the pop chart. At that session, they recorded two more similar ballads—“The Gift of Love” and “Love Me.” Neither had much impact. “Love Me” marked the last time my father, Jerry, Sam, and the Brooks brothers recorded as the Impressions.

  While home between tours, Curtis met Helen, a pretty, brown-skinned girl with a round, open face. “Helen used to come over the house and see me, but actually I think she was coming to see him,” Aunt Carolyn says. “When Curtis started going on the road, he’d just started courting her. He’d take her for walks.” Soon, he began dating Helen seriously, or at least as seriously as he could date anyone. The road offered temptations he couldn’t resist, and soon after recording “Come Back My Love,” Vee-Jay sent the Impressions on the road for thirty-one days with the Coasters and Clyde McPhatter—thirty-one days where every show ended with eager young girls wanting to touch success and my father only too happy to oblige.

  The groupies complicated his relationship with Helen, as they would with every serious relationship throughout his life. But they also eased the relentless physical, mental, and spiritual grind of one-nighters—endless car rides, a new city every day, a new venue every night, ramshackle boarding houses, and then back on the road where there was no place f
or a Negro to stop and eat or even go to the bathroom.

  Sometimes the Impressions engaged in a bit of trickery to secure a few warm beds in white-only southern hotels. Richard Brooks, who was “as close to white as we ever got to in our group” according to Eddie, would rent a room and let the rest of the group in the back door. The ruse fell apart one night, though, reminding them of the severe danger they faced. “We let Richard go ahead and check us into the hotel, and we came through the back way once he got situated,” Eddie says. “We were doing fine until Sam, with his dumb self, decided to go out and get ice cubes or something, and a white man saw him and said, ‘What is that nigger doing in here?’ The man called the desk, the desk called the police, the police came and told us to get packed and get out right away. I said, ‘We got to get out. These people will lynch you down here. They don’t play. The police will back them up and they’ll never find you.’”

  Of all the southern cities they toured in, Atlanta treated them best. The show’s promoter arranged for a crowd to greet the Impressions at the airport. Then he set up a motorcade to carry them all over Atlanta’s Negro community. The guys rode in sleek cars that had banners taped to the sides with JERRY BUTLER AND THE IMPRESSIONS emblazoned in bold red set on dazzling white paper. “Young girls, seeing the spectacle and recognizing the name, pointed at the car, screamed, and covered their faces in embarrassment,” Jerry said. “Prostitutes boldly yelled to us, ‘Y’all wanna have a good time?’ and patted their behinds.”

  The motorcade headed down Auburn Avenue, to WERD, America’s first Negro-owned radio station. Then they made the rounds to WAOK and met DJs Piano Red, Alley Pat, and Zena Sears. “They all interviewed us and made us feel at home,” Jerry said. “For the first time, I understood what people meant by Southern hospitality. Everyone wanted to feed us, take us wherever we wanted to go, and help in any way they could.” Thus began my father’s long love affair with Atlanta, where he’d spend the last years of his life.

  Tensions within the group continued to mount as the month-long tour slogged on. The fights usually centered on the billing—“Jerry Butler and the Impressions”—as well as the natural stresses and strains of five young guys forced to live together close as husband and wife for a month straight. In San Antonio toward the end of the tour, the Impressions could no longer hold their wounded egos in check.

  They had an appearance scheduled in Philadelphia the next day, but upon reaching the venue in Texas, they realized the money from the show wouldn’t cover their plane tickets. Butler called Abner and said the road manager refused to give them more money without Abner’s assent. “Okay, baby,” Abner said. “I’ll call and straighten it out. You’ll have the money tomorrow. You guys do well, and I’ll see you when you get back home.” The receiver went dead. Just then, Arthur asked to talk to Abner. Jerry explained Abner had just hung up. Arthur didn’t believe him.

  What happened next sealed the original Impressions’ fate. As Jerry described it:

  Arthur pitched a bitch, starting in again with that stuff about me wanting to be the boss and always wanting to do all of the talking for the group. “Well, we ain’t going on,” [Arthur] finally said, “and you can do all the singing!”

  “Who the fuck are ‘we’?” I asked, trying to stay calm. But I could feel my anger rising. “Me and my brother,” said Arthur. Richard said nothing, but Sam was quick to respond. “I ain’t going on, either,” he said. All eyes then turned to Curtis….

  “I’m goin’ on, man,” said Curtis, “because I want to get paid.” … Sam had second thoughts. “Well, if that’s the way it’s gonna be,” he said, “I guess I’ll go on too.” Arthur and Richard were obstinate. “Fuck you, man,” they said, mumbling to themselves and walking off from us….

  As I sang our first couple of songs, with Curtis playing guitar and him and Sam adding background voices wherever they could, I kept wondering if Arthur and Richard would cut out all of the bullshit and join us on stage. I didn’t realize how stubborn they could be.

  It occurred to me, as we went along that night that Arthur and Richard weren’t missed at all. Sil Austin’s horn section was playing their part. No one in San Antonio even knew they existed. It was then that I made my decision to leave the group.

  My father, true to form, had his eye on the bottom line. He wanted money more than he wanted to get tangled in some silly fight. During the tour he’d been sending part of his earnings to his mother and family in Chicago. With that money, Aunt Carolyn recalls, “[Mom] bought this great big freezer and filled it up. I think she bought a half of beef, and a half a pig, and filled it up, and boy did we have food then. I sent [Curtis] a letter thanking him for the food.” Dad needed the money for himself and his family—it was a desperate need. He refused to go back to poverty as intensely as he cared about music.

  For his part, Jerry cared about the music too, but Carter and Abner pressured him to go solo. “I found out later they offered him a brand new Mercury, a couple thousand dollars cash,” Eddie says. “Can you imagine, a kid from Cabrini-Green?” Jerry had little choice but to take the offer, especially since Abner planned to split the group anyway.

  After Jerry quit, the Brooks brothers returned, and the Impressions no longer had to worry about billing. Unfortunately, the tension they’d had with Jerry transferred to my father, who at sixteen years old stepped into the lead spot. No one else could handle the role. He was the only one who could write a song and the only one who had sung lead on any Impressions record other than Jerry. Before Jerry left, Dad didn’t mind taking a backseat—Jerry had been the lead singer since the Northern Jubilees, and it felt natural. With Jerry gone, Dad’s controlling nature came to the fore. He now led the group, and after assuming that role, he wouldn’t relinquish it for nearly twenty years. As a result, when the Impressions looked for someone to fill out the quintet, it had to be someone who sang backup.

  On a swing through Chattanooga, Richard, Arthur, and Sam stopped by Fred Cash’s house, the kid they knew from their days in the original Roosters. Fred had followed the Impressions’ success from Chattanooga. The first time he heard “For Your Precious Love” on the radio, he thought, “Hey, this a great record, but this can’t be the same fellas I used to sing with, because we couldn’t sing!” Still, the last thing he expected was to see them drive up the hill to his house in their green station wagon. “Hey, that looks like the fellas in there,” he thought as the green machine crested the hill and parked in front of his house. Then, out spilled his old buddies, everybody smiling, laughing, and slapping hands. Someone whipped out a big roll of money and held it up for Fred’s inspection. “Oh boy! What have I missed here?” Fred thought. He’d soon find out.

  Toward the end of 1959, Vee-Jay gave the Impressions—now featuring Fred Cash—a couple of records, playing out the usual script for vocal groups. True to that script, the Impressions couldn’t buy a hit. They recorded one of Curtis’s compositions, “At the County Fair,” and even though Herb Kent put his considerable powers into breaking the song, it never got out of Chicago. “We scuffled some,” my father said. “For a time we would do gigs as the Impressions, but nobody was really aware of the Impressions. So it was quite hard for us to get gigs.”

  For a few months, they scraped by with small gigs in what my father called “the lowlands, like down in Mississippi, just in little night spots,” often billing themselves as Jerry Butler and the Impressions and letting Sam sing “For Your Precious Love,” since no one knew the difference anyway.

  As 1959 ended, Vee-Jay dropped the group. Chief among their reasons was that my father couldn’t come up with another hit. Also, Carter never felt excited about Curtis’s falsetto voice, and he felt less excited about butting heads with a teenager over royalties and song ownership. Even at such a young age, Dad understood the importance of owning himself. Once he took over the group, he often argued with Abner and Carter about his rights. “There were so many fights,” he remembered. “They couldn’t understand it. ‘He
wants his publishing!’ they would say to each other. Like it wasn’t mine to have.” He might not have finished high school, but he was no fool. Nobody could dupe or bully him into giving away a single cent. Unfortunately, that attitude left him out of a job.

  After the Vee-Jay deal fell through, Eddie couldn’t get the Impressions another contract. Defeated and deflated, they took whatever menial jobs they could find. Around this time, my father began a working relationship with a guy he knew from high school, Major Lance. Major had become a featured dancer on Jim Lounsbury’s show, Time for Teens, and wheedled his way into a one-off single on Mercury Records. He couldn’t write songs, so he turned to the one man he knew who could. “He was always coming round and looking through my bag for songs that I’d written but didn’t want to do with the Impressions,” Dad said. “He was pretty good at picking them, too.” Unfortunately, the first one he picked—a middling doo-wop number called “I’ve Got a Girl”—got no traction.

  My father now dealt with the possibility that his life as a musician, which had been his main passion, might suffer an early death. After all, the music business was littered with the carcasses of has-beens and one-hit wonders. Curtis had no guarantee of getting even one shot to hit it big, and he’d just seen that shot come and go in a flash. Sure, he was only seventeen years old, but he already had the baggage of failure hanging around his neck.