Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  He spent the beginning of 1960 living in Cabrini-Green, working a dead-end job selling cigars with Alfred Dunhill Co. In later years, he’d often boast it was the only job he ever had outside of music. He spent his days going to fancy office buildings in the Loop, Chicago’s central business district, trying to sell cigars to white businessmen. Often, they’d either harass him or throw him out. A Negro—even one selling cigars—had no place in the white business world. As for the Impressions, they lessened the blow by calling their breakup a hiatus. Of course, the word hiatus implies things will resume, and none of them knew when or if that would happen.

  Real progress, however, was being made in race relations, which gave Dad something to focus on. In 1960, John F. Kennedy became the youngest president in American history. He seemed sympathetic toward Negro rights, giving those in the movement reason for hope. Less than a month after his inauguration, the movement received another positive jolt when four young Negro men sat down at the counter of a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave when denied service. Within a week, similar protests occurred across the state and into South Carolina. The era of sit-ins had begun, and the movement entered its most successful phase—one in which my father would play a major role. Then, as if the roller coaster of 1960 hadn’t given him enough to think about, he proposed to Helen.

  Curtis married Helen in a double ceremony alongside Fred and his first wife, Judy. After the marriage Curtis and Helen moved into an apartment outside of Cabrini, where Uncle Kenny visited them often. “We were still living in Cabrini-Green,” Kenny says, “and I went over to his house one time, and it was the first time I ever had a shower in my life. I think I was about fourteen years old then. That kind of stays in my mind. A lot of things I could say that I done in life was because of my brother.”

  In fact, even though he had married and lived apart from his family, Curtis still played the role of the protective brother. Aunt Carolyn recalls him coming to her rescue after she got into a fight with a schoolmate. “I beat her up, and the next thing I heard was that her brother was looking for me,” she says. “I remember Mama talking about it, and Curtis was in the house doing whatever he did—he always acted like he wasn’t paying attention, but he was. And he said, ‘Who is that?’ They told him who it was. He said, ‘Oh, OK.’ The next thing I know, he left, and I didn’t have no more problems with the brother. Whatever he said, that took care of it. He used to say, ‘If anybody asks you for something, tell them to ask me.’” Now seventeen years old, my father still embraced his role as man of the house, the part he’d played for more than half his life. It made him older than his years. Perhaps that’s why he decided to get married at such a young age.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t ready. His relationship with Helen faced trouble from the start. “I don’t think that relationship ever came together properly,” Eddie says. “Curtis was a very unusual person because he was a genius, and geniuses have idiosyncrasies going and coming. Sometimes a woman can’t deal with them, or the man can’t deal with it. Basically, they couldn’t get it to fit. That’s just the way it went.”

  Whatever problems Curtis and Helen had going into the marriage were heightened by an unexpected turn of events that sent him back on the road. In mid-1960, the IRS came after him for $400 in taxes. Even though royalty checks still trickled in, he didn’t have that kind of money. He did own a Webcor tape recorder, on which he recorded snatches of potential songs that came to him while he noodled around on his guitar between shifts at the cigar store. The IRS wanted him to sell the tape recorder to pay off his debt, but he needed it too much. His creativity came in torrents, and the tape recorder was the only way to hold onto the hundreds of chord progressions, melodies, lyrics, and song structures he discovered before they disappeared back into the ethereal cloud where ideas are born. Curtis needed an escape. Just then, fate stepped in.

  Jerry spent most of 1960 touring the chitlin’ circuit trying to break as a solo artist. One day in New York, his guitar player—Phil Upchurch, who would soon play on much of my father’s work—announced he was leaving the band. Stuck in a bind, Jerry called and asked my father to meet him in New York. “Man, I don’t know anybody’s songs but yours,” Curtis said into the phone. “Well, just play those—that’s all I’m singing,” Jerry replied. “Well, I don’t have no amplifier,” Curtis said. “Get here,” Jerry said. “I’ll have your amplifier when you get here.” So, my father jumped right back into life on the road. “When Jerry called, I had nothing to do,” he said later. “I got away from [the IRS] by playing for Jerry. I did nothing but play for Jerry and sleep with my guitar and write songs.”

  Curtis didn’t just sleep with his guitar, though; he also shared a bed with Eddie to save money. When Jerry had started his solo tour, he had hired Eddie as a valet, a position Eddie saw as demeaning but necessary. “I was his chauffer—or flunky, that’s what I called it, carry his shoes, go to the bathroom with him, wipe his behind, whatever it takes,” Eddie says. “Swallow your pride, that’s what you call it.”

  When Dad joined, he and Eddie became closer than ever. “We were living together like man and wife almost,” Eddie says. “You don’t get any closer than that. We were always planning and scheming, maneuvering, what we were going to do. He was always writing something, asking what did I think of it.”

  Eddie also learned that despite the humiliations he suffered as Jerry’s valet, the job came with hidden benefits. As he explains that period:

  I was making history with radio stations and disc jockeys. I had their names, their home phone numbers, their kids’ numbers. I had a book of DJs. You name a place, I’ll tell you something about it. I would live with the jocks. I had a strong bond. I was like a powerhouse. I could come to town with no money, other guys come to town with a couple thousand dollars in their pocket to go on the radio station, but the [DJs] always gave me a pass because they knew I was broke and poor, and I could take them to get a cup of coffee and a hamburger or something, but they accepted me because they felt me from the heart. I was at radio stations promoting Jerry but at the same time promoting Eddie Thomas.

  As winter approached, Curtis had been on the road for almost two years, making it easy to forget Helen back home. Despite the fact Jerry occasionally traveled with his wife and that Curtis slept with Eddie most nights, they were three young men who had women falling at their feet. Curtis had already experienced a taste of what fame could bring in terms of female attention, and he liked it. Being on the road with Jerry, he got another heaping plateful.

  In regard to their marriages, Jerry says,

  I can assure you that we did it very poorly. It was not an easy thing to do. But why wasn’t it easy? Because we had nothing to compare it to. We were treading in new territory. You know, you’re young. Never had enough of anything. And all of a sudden, everything is coming at you in great abundance. How do you deal with it? There was no [Uncle] Charles around to say, “Don’t do that.” And you always felt that everybody around you was trying to hustle you. Nobody was around you because they really liked you. They were there because they liked what you represented. Or they liked what you had. And they became vicariously stars in their own way. And pretty soon, you got to the point where you couldn’t trust anyone.

  Call it the famous man’s curse—thousands of acquaintances but few real friends. It plagued my father and Jerry throughout their careers, and as Jerry said, they had no mentor to help them deal with it. While Curtis was away, both Uncle Charles and Wal Mayfield left Annie Bell’s house on the same day, never to return.

  One night, watching the miles flash by between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, Jerry started humming a melody. My father sat splayed in the back seat with his guitar, as he usually did on tour, and he began putting chords behind Jerry’s voice. “He always had an instrument close to him if he could,” Jerry says. “I mean sometimes we might not have space, but that was rare. Because usually he’d be in the backseat with my wife and the guit
ar, and Eddie and I would be in the front seat driving to wherever we had to go.” As they worked on Jerry’s melody, they went through the normal conversation of whether it should be fast or slow, what the lyrics should say, and so on. Soon, they had polished off an up-tempo number called “He Will Break Your Heart.” It would become Jerry’s first number-one R&B hit as a solo artist and a national top twenty record, featuring my father on guitar and backing vocals. It shared a similar rhythmic backbone with “Lonely Teardrops,” a song made famous by Jackie Wilson two years earlier, cowritten by Berry Gordy.

  At that time, Gordy had cowritten another single that began making its way up the charts—“Shop Around.” Released on Gordy’s new label, Tamla, it introduced to the world a group called the Miracles with Bill “Smokey” Robinson. “Shop Around” sold one million copies on its first release. Soon, Tamla would become Motown, Smokey Robinson would be a household name, and Gordy would run the most successful Negro-owned business in the country. My father surely heard “Shop Around” on the radio as he flashed from city to city, and he felt the fire to make a hit for himself.

  He saved up nearly $1,000 on tour with Jerry, and he had a song he wanted to cut with the Impressions. He’d begun writing it when he was twelve years old after watching a Western movie. Even at such a young age, his imagination could carry him far from the ghetto’s claws. He introduced it to Eddie one night in his usual way—“Hey, Tom. What do you think of this?” Then, he played a few licks and began singing about a mysterious gypsy woman dancing around a campfire. “Yeah, that’s a hit, I hope,” Eddie said. “But I think we might be starting a new trend because right now it’s all doo-wops. We’re coming up with something different, and something different might be acceptable. Let’s go for it.”

  On a stop in Chicago, Eddie called the Impressions to his apartment. That night, Curtis, Fred, Sam, Arthur, and Richard sat around catching up on old times, and then Curtis played them the song—“Gypsy Woman.” They wanted to hear it again and again. Each time he played it, another voice found a harmony to sing. Soon, the air grew full with five voices intertwined. By the end of the evening, the Impressions were a group again.

  Before beginning his last leg with Jerry, Dad booked a session at Universal Studios in Chicago to cut “Gypsy Woman.” The recording they made that day creeps from the speakers and settles over the listener like fog on a dark night. Castanets and finger cymbals accent a nasty snare-drum pattern that splits the difference between funk and a marching beat. The Impressions provide the perfect backing, blending doo-wop and gospel, laying a plush bed for Curtis’s trilling falsetto to lie upon. Curtis’s guitar is a quintessential lesson in understatement, especially the lick he rips off after the line “She danced around and ’round to a guitar melody”—two notes so perfectly placed and executed they hit like a punch to the gut.

  Everyone knew the song had legs; they just needed a break. As luck would have it, Jerry’s tour stopped next in Philadelphia, playing for Georgie Woods at the Uptown Theater again. Eddie knew the radio stations in Philly could break “Gypsy Woman,” so he spent ample time at WDAS and at Philly’s other major station, WHAT. “I was there with my tin cup begging that guy to play the record,” Eddie says. “I had to see the program director. I sold him a bill of goods, you know, I had my hand crossed behind my back. He said, ‘OK, we’ll give you a shot. We’ll put it on the extra list, but you’re going to have to talk to the jockey personally to get him to play it, because on the extra list, they’re not required to play it.’ So now I got to go to the jocks one on one, take my time, come back a different time, ask them to plug my record.”

  Eddie had one other asset in his favor in Philadelphia: a good promotion man named Manny Singer. “I used to take him out to dinner a couple of times,” Eddie says. “I’d say, ‘Manny, I need your help on this.’ So, he would talk to the jocks, too.”

  Still, it was Georgie Woods who ultimately held the key to Philadelphia. Eddie told Woods, “This is me, man; this is for me.” Woods put the record in heavy rotation, and it took off in Philly, became bigger than bubble gum. The fire spread to Maxie Waxie in Baltimore and DC, followed by Bill Summers in Louisville and Porky Chedwick in Pittsburgh. Through sheer gumption, Eddie was slowly creating a radio smash.

  “Eddie was such a hustler, man,” my father said. “Everywhere we went, anything even looked like an antenna, maybe five or ten miles away, we’d come on and Eddie would hustle ‘Gypsy Woman’ to whoever was there…. Country and western, gospel, any kind of station, didn’t matter what the format was. Eddie would pull over and take us into the station. People just appreciated you coming in and making the stop, so they’d give you a play. So that’s how we began to build up ‘Gypsy Woman.’”

  Even Jerry helped promote the song. As “Gypsy Woman” picked up steam on local radio, the Impressions received an invitation to perform on television. The rest of the group couldn’t make it in time, so as Curtis pantomimed the song for the cameras, Jerry and Eddie stood in the background, just close enough to the lights so the crowd could tell they were there, but far enough in the shadows so no one could see who they were.

  With television and radio promotion going strong, “Gypsy Woman” continued gaining traction. Meanwhile, Jerry returned to the Apollo as Eddie scoured New York for a new record deal. It seemed just days ago he was begging around Record Row in Chicago trying to sell the original Impressions, but even after so much hard work, he had to begin from the bottom again.

  Eddie went to Laurie Records first, which had Dion and the Belmonts and the Chiffons. They passed. Next, he went to Scepter Records, home of the Shirelles and Tammy Montgomery, who would later score massive hits as Tammi Terrell, singing with Marvin Gaye for Motown. Scepter passed. Then, Eddie went to RCA Records on Fifth Avenue and played the demo for A&R man Ray Harris, who thought my father looked like a rabbit with his front teeth sticking out. Harris said, “No, I can’t see this group singing about a gypsy woman and the kids getting into it.”

  Undaunted, Eddie kept on his dogged way to ABC/Paramount Records on Broadway. ABC existed in another stratum from the labels that had already rejected “Gypsy Woman.” When Eddie plucked up his nerve and walked into the building, he stood in the house of B. B. King, Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, and perhaps biggest of all, Ray Charles. Charles had signed with ABC the year before and negotiated a contract virtually unheard of for a Negro at the time, with a $50,000 annual advance, high royalties, and eventual ownership of his masters. That last part did not go unnoticed by my father.

  At ABC, Eddie met A&R man Clarence Avant, and played him “Gypsy Woman.” It didn’t knock Avant out, but for some reason he decided to help. “He was black, and I’m black, and I guess we had to stick together,” Eddie says. “And he knew it wouldn’t cost them anything to put it out because they were known for being cheapskates, which meant that they would only give you enough advance money to put in your pocket.” Eddie showed how much hustle he had, telling Avant, “Being with Jerry Butler, I know a lot of DJs across the country. I got their home phone numbers and everything. I think I can support this record. If you guys will distribute it, I can get the airplay to get it started.”

  Avant played “Gypsy Woman” for ABC president Samuel Clark and told him it was a great record, although he didn’t quite believe it himself. True to form, Clark signed the Impressions with no advance money offered. ABC would only release the song regionally in Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, and New York, and the label passed off most, if not all, promotional responsibilities to Eddie and the group. If the song hit—and the odds were stacked against it—ABC would release “Gypsy Woman” nationally. If the song missed, which was much more likely, the Impressions were out of the business. Eddie said, “Man, we’re going to have to roll our sleeves up and hustle the best we can,” but my father already knew that.

  After the last Apollo show, Dad told Jerry he wouldn’t be playing guitar for him anymore. Jerry said later, “I could see it coming, but I didn’t know it
would come that soon. Curt was anxious to try new ideas and explore different sounds. And so we parted again, this time more amicably.”

  My father explained it like this: “Everybody who was part of the Impressions could see that it was God’s calling.” He wasn’t a religious man, but he’d endured enough of Annie Bell’s droning sermons to recognize the sound of that heavenly phone ringing.

  All he had to do now was answer.

  5

  Keep On Pushing

  “Maybe someday I’ll reach that higher goal,

  I know I can make it with just a little bit of soul.”

  —“KEEP ON PUSHING”

  New York City, late 1960—The sidewalk outside the Brill Building bustled with hungry young songwriters seeking a break. Inside, the major music publishers in New York sat ready to prey on these desperate youngsters. The publishers had everything set up in the boxy building on Broadway—songwriters toiling in tiny offices, arrangers who could write a quick lead sheet for a sawbuck, an in-house demo studio, and radio promoters who pushed songs into nationwide rotation. “Brill was a building where songwriters would go up to the eleventh floor and would come down on the elevator and stop at each floor, trying to sell their songs at every office,” said Mike Stoller, who cowrote many of Elvis’s hits.

  Only the best writers earned offices in the building—Carole King, Phil Spector, Burt Bacharach, Paul Simon, and other soon-to-be famous names. Roving musicians and lesser writers lingered in phone booths at the Turf, a restaurant on street level, hoping for a crack at the big time. “If a songwriter was doing a demo session and someone hadn’t shown up, they’d run into the restaurant and shout, ‘I need a bass player,’ and he’d get one,” Stoller said.