By May, Taylor had listened to several demo versions of ‘Who’s Making Love’. Homer Banks sang it to him in a corridor at Stax. Bettye Crutcher, tall, elegant and alluring, sat down with him in a quiet room and explained the song’s innocent origins. She had previously written another Taylor record, ‘Somebody’s Sleeping In My Bed’ (1967), which he had recorded months before. It was mildly suggestive, but this new song took the theme of sexual infidelity much further than he was comfortable with. Then, after a week of badgering by good people and reassurances by others, Taylor, not wanting to let anyone down, agreed that he would sing it. Success was immediate, and landed Crutcher a much coveted BMI award for composition. She received the award on the same night that John Lennon was honoured for ‘Hey Jude’, a song set against the backdrop of Lennon’s divorce from his first wife Cynthia but which magically captured the anti-war zeitgeist of 1968. Unintentionally, Crutcher’s multi-award-winning ‘Who’s Making Love’ had something tangential to say about the year, too, and particularly the last dramatic months of Dr Martin Luther King’s life.
Worries that the song might fall foul of a radio ban or city-wide censorship proved unfounded but the anxieties were real enough. Of all the cities in America, Memphis had one of the worst reputations for heavy-handed censorship. The Memphis Censor Board had been formed as far back as 1921 to ‘censor, supervise, regulate, or prohibit any entertainment of immoral, lewd, or lascivious character, as well as performances inimical to the public safety, health, morals, or welfare’. Their powers stretched to every area of entertainment, but the greatest sensitivities were in cinema and the recording industry. One of the city’s most notorious censors, Lloyd Binford, had banned films by Charlie Chaplin, calling him a ‘London guttersnipe’ after hearing stories of Chaplin’s passion for young teenage girls. He also banned any films starring Ingrid Bergman because she had left her husband and shacked up with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. When announcing the ban on Rossellini/Bergman’s landmark 1949 film Stromboli, he refused to permit ‘the public exhibition of a motion picture starring a woman who is universally known to be living in open and notorious adultery’. Binford was an unreconstructed segregationist who used his power to oppose any cinematic depiction of racial equality. In 1945 he blocked a stage show of the hit musical Annie Get Your Gun at Ellis Auditorium because there were black actors in the cast ‘who had too familiar an air about them’. Mayor Loeb, the scourge of the sanitation workers, was also an ardent supporter of strict censorship, and Binford’s legacy lived on in Memphis long after he himself retired. In the post-war period, as Memphis blues mutated into rock ’n’ roll, the city police routinely smashed records they received complaints about. Four hundred copies of three blues recordings – ‘Move Your Hand, Baby’ by Crown Prince Waterford, ‘Take Your Hands Off It (The Birthday Cake Song)’ by Billy Hughes and ‘Operation Blues’ by Amos Milburn – were ritually destroyed by order of Carroll B. Seabrook, then chief of the MPD, after a complainant heard them on a jukebox in a downtown bar. Well into the sixties, R&B music was still considered to be a corrupting influence. Billie Holiday’s song ‘Love For Sale’ was banned because it supposedly promoted prostitution, and in 1966 a mass burning of Beatles records was orchestrated by southern radio stations outraged at John Lennon’s quip that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus.
Despite his anxieties about singing what was to become his greatest song, Johnnie Taylor remained faithful to pure emotional soul across his entire life. His career saw him signing for the greatest pure soul labels of the post-sixties era, first Stax, and then the short-lived Beverly Glen in Los Angeles, where he was a label mate with Bobby Womack and Anita Baker, and finally Malaco Records of Jackson, Mississippi – the self-styled ‘Last Soul Company’ – where he shared duties with Bobby Bland, Z.Z. Hill, Denise LaSalle, Shirley Brown, Dorothy Moore (of ‘Misty Blue’ fame) and Benny Latimore. His other great hit ‘Disco Lady’, despite the unpromising title, was a near-perfect up-tempo soul song devoid of the worst synthetic excesses of the disco era.
Johnnie Taylor’s ‘Who’s Making Love’ would become one of the most influential soul records of the era, digging down into one of the time-honoured themes of southern music: marital infidelity. Its reach was all-pervasive, breeding answer-records, rivals and reprises by a generation of deep soul artists. The self-assured Bettye Crutcher wrote some of the best of them, including ‘Somebody’s Been Sleeping In My Bed’ (1967); Ted Taylor’s self-lacerating betrayal song ‘I’ll Hate Myself In The Morning’ (1976), composed with the peerless Sam Dees; and eventually Barbara Mason’s ‘From His Woman To You’ (1974). Mason, a mainstream soul singer who recorded in the Philadelphia independent scene for Arctic Records during the late sixties, had signed to Buddha Records, where she toughened her persona, singing about infidelity with an uncommon frankness on songs like ‘Bed And Board’ and ‘Shackin’ Up’. In a style that was hugely innovative and daring for a black woman, she would interrupt her singing to deliver straight-talking ‘raps’ about romance direct to the other women in the audience. The style, which became synonymous with singers like Shirley Brown and Millie Jackson, reflected changing attitudes to sexuality and power, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, appealed in the main to female audiences. In 1975 the brilliant Shirley Brown recorded Crutcher’s ‘It’s Worth A Whippin’, an agonisingly honest song that unusually fronts up to female betrayal and is sung from the perspective of a woman who finds deeper love outside marriage. Songs of betrayal and infidelity became commonplace, and enrich southern soul in particular. While they did not begin with Taylor’s ‘Who’s Making Love’, his success emboldened others. Doris Duke’s ‘If She’s Your Wife, Who Am I?’, Ann Peebles’ ‘Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody’s Home’ and Jean Stanback’s ‘The Next Man’ were just three among many that captured an era of changing attitudes to sexuality, women’s assertiveness and infidelity.
Bettye Crutcher, in particular, challenged lyrical convention and stimulated a new candour in soul music. She was born into a city unaccustomed to black women with such forceful attitudes. ‘I guess I was writing when I was about seven or eight,’ she said in a rare interview with Soul Express magazine. ‘I wrote little poems, and that was kind of an outlet for me. I was never an athlete kid, so writing has always been a friend of mine. As I got older, I wrote just as a hobby, and a friend of mine came by one day and said, “I can’t believe you’re writing like this and you’re not doing anything with it.” I said, “When the stack pile gets too high, I just throw it out.”’ A friend dared her to take some of her childhood poetry and stories to her audition at Stax, and she did, explaining to the seasoned songwriter David Porter how she fashioned songs from nursery rhymes and turned childhood lyrics into often demanding adult love songs. ‘Somebody’s Sleeping In My Bed’ was a play on lines taken from the fairy tale ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, and ‘Who’s Making Love’ was influenced by a record she had first heard in childhood – ‘Who Takes Care Of The Caretaker’s Daughter’ – a 1925 radio hit by novelty jazz singer Whitey Kaufman and his Original Pennsylvania Serenaders. The song was reactivated by Bobby Darin and Johnny Mercer in 1961 when Crutcher was a teenager, and it was their versions she knew best. Homer Banks, her co-writer, has also cited the same influence, although he claims that he had heard Frank Sinatra singing the song on network television (it was more likely Bobby Darin).
Bettye Crutcher divided opinion. She was a capable singer who preferred composition and has variously been described by those who worked with her as ‘pushy’ and ‘lazy’. Whatever the truth, she was not hugely prolific, but the songs she did write soared above the average. At last Stax had someone who was willing to tackle ‘the civil war inside’. She wrote honestly about infidelity and the rampant levels of betrayal in relationships, sometimes drawing on her own life, but just as often on the lives of her friends and family. ‘Call Me When All Else Fails’, ‘Up For A Let Down’ and ‘Walk On To Your New Love’ all spoke of betrayal, connivance and failed love. S
he soon became part of Stax’s best in-house writing team – We Three. ‘There were two young writers, Homer Banks and Raymond Jackson, who were kind of writing together,’ she recalled. ‘Homer is like a think-tank and he’s the ideas man. He would always come to me to finish the song, because he always wanted a female point of view, which I really liked about him.’ Crutcher had a firm set of personal values, which often rubbed up against the more religious singers at Stax. She was a convinced secularist who believed her songs were about love in the real world – a world that was cruel, unforgiving and, most of all, changing. She infamously fell out with Mavis Staples of the Staple Singers for insisting that the gospel singer did not improvise religious references in one of her songs. She had, rather courageously, stopped a recording session to tell Staples to stop referring to Jesus or the Lord. It led to a tense stand-off between two very determined women. Staples ended the studio session prematurely, refused to record any more of Crutcher’s songs and was never produced by her again. Bettye for her part continued to plough a path in secular soul music, one that dug deeper and more honestly into the complex world of the bedroom and rarely, if ever, looked back to religion. In time the We Three writing team – Crutcher, Banks and Jackson – became a fully fledged production company and record label called We Produce. They released records by the Temprees, cover versions such as their hectic interpretation of the standard ‘At Last’ and the Crutcher-inspired ‘Follow Her Rules And Regulations’. We Three came to a pitiful ending in October 1972, when Jackson accidentally set fire to himself while trying to ward off rats under his home. He packed gasoline-soaked rags into a hole beneath the house unaware that he had spilled gasoline on his clothes. When he lit the match, flames engulfed him, and Jackson, who had served without incident in Vietnam, suffered seventy-five-degree burns and was rushed to a local Memphis hospital where he subsequently died.
Although it was unknown at the time, Martin Luther King’s tragically short adult life was also troubled by the so-called ‘civil war inside’. He shared with Johnnie Taylor a joyous Christian upbringing that valued the gospels above secular soul music, but when it came to personal and sexual fidelity, he fought a long losing battle. Coretta forgave her husband a lot, not least his obsessive pursuit of civil rights and the consequential absence from home, but she was never fully aware of the extent of his dalliances. Coretta, a gifted soprano and confident pianist in her own right, had mapped out a career as a jazz and gospel singer, but abandoned any notion of being a professional musician when she married King on the lawn of her mother’s home in Marion, Alabama. She devoted the remainder of her life to her family and to her husband’s memory, with a depth of devotion that her husband had fallen far short of.
Back in 1964, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and irked by King winning the Nobel Peace Prize, J. Edgar Hoover developed an unhealthy obsession with King’s private life. In one of the most abhorrent acts in the era of surveillance in American society, Hoover instructed one of his deputies, William Sullivan, to concoct a letter as if it had been written by a disillusioned King supporter.
In view of your low grade, abnormal personal behavoir [sic] I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry the VIII and his countless acts of adultery and immoral conduct lower than that of a beast.
King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure they don’t have one at this time anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God and act as you do. Clearly you don’t believe in any personal moral principles.
King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile. We will now have to depend on our older leaders like Wilkins, a man of character and thank God we have others like him. But you are done. Your “honorary” degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done.
No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. I repeat – no person can argue successfully against facts. You are finished. You will find on the record for all time your filthy, dirty, evil companions, male and female giving expression with you to your hidious [sic] abnormalities. And some of them to pretend to be ministers of the Gospel. Satan could not do more. What incredible evilness. It is all there on the record, your sexual orgies. Listen to yourself you filthy, abnormal animal. You are on the record. You have been on the record – all your adulterous acts, your sexual orgies extending far into the past. This one is but a tiny sample. You will understand this. Yes, from your various evil playmates on the east coast to [redacted] and others on the west coast and outside the country you are on the record. King you are done.
The American public, the church organizations that have been helping – Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are – an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done.
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant [sic]). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
To disguise the letter’s origins and to distract from any suspicion that it had been composed at the heart of the FBI in Washington, Sullivan sent an agent to Miami where the false hate mail was sent in a package to King’s home in Atlanta. King’s love life was unquestionably reckless, and at odds with his status as a religious leader, but what is less well known is the range of relationships he was playing off against each other in his last fateful days in Memphis.
On 3 April, King’s Eastern Airways flight into Memphis was late, having been delayed on the ground in Atlanta after a credible bomb threat. On their arrival in the city, the SCLC delegation were met by board members of COME, the support group backing the sanitation workers. The Reverend Jim Lawson had allocated an activist called Tarlease Mathews to accompany King and act as his chaperone. A funeral services company, R.S. Lewis & Sons, owned by a local NAACP activist, provided a limousine and a trusted driver, Solomon Jones, at no cost to King. COME refused any support from the MPD, who they considered hostile to both the strike and to King’s movement, and asked a police detail to leave the airport. Mathews had a stand-up row with police detective Ed Redditt at the airport and left him in no doubt that his presence was unwelcome. Already sporting the beginnings of an afro, Mathews was something of a local personality in Memphis – a tenacious and charismatic individual. In her teenage days, she had been arrested at the Memphis City Zoo for entering the grounds on a night designated for whites only. She subsequently filed a historic lawsuit against her arrest that in effect ended discrimination in public places in Memphis, most notably the zoo and a string of well-heeled suburban golf courses. By 1968 Mathews, now in her early thirties, was married with three young children. She came with an impeccable curriculum vitae in civil rights. She was a board member of the NAACP, an honorary probation officer and an advisor to the juvenile court, specialising in difficult and unruly black teenagers. Mathews ran her own beauty salon in South Memphis, and in a gesture of solidarity offered the sanitation workers free haircuts for the duration of the strike. King had already heard of her by reputation but they did not know each other well. Over the course of their first day in Memphis, according to various conflicting accounts, they became close enough for Mathews to invite King and his fellow SCLC executives to her Binghamton home for a steak dinner. This was immediate
ly after he had delivered his stirring ‘Mountaintop’ speech to the strikers. What took place that night became a matter of serious litigious dispute. In the first edition of his patchy and not wholly reliable autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, published in 1989, Ralph Abernathy made the sensational revelation that Mathews and King disappeared into a bedroom and had sex, staying in the room together until they re-emerged at 1 a.m. Although admitting to being charmed by King, Mathews felt slighted by the accusations. She was a married mother, had a reputation as a proud civil rights activist in her own right, and in her version of events accusations of a sexual liaison undermined her reputation. In 1993, under her chosen African name, Adjua Abi Naantaanbuu, Mathews sued Abernathy, his publisher Harper & Row and the book’s editor Daniel Bial, seeking a total of $10 million in damages. She demanded the book be pulped and republished without ‘the defamatory material’. The dispute ceased to have much relevance after April 1990, when Ralph Abernathy, the man who had lived in the gigantic shadow of Martin Luther King, died. At his funeral, Coretta King sat majestically in black, as if widowhood was her calling. Abernathy’s personally scripted eulogy was read out – two brutally honest words – ‘I tried’.
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