Where Is The Love: Donny Hathaway Finally Gets His Due

                        
                     

Hathaway Suite I: Sack Full of Dreams (Prelude)

"I've done everything right. I know how to touch people. What do I have to do to get people to love me like Stevie?" Hardly words you’d expect from a gifted and multi-faceted talent at the top of his game. Producer. Arranger. Songwriter.  Television. Film scores. When the stage lights went out after another triumphant show and the money was pocketed, Hathaway poured his heart out to mentor Quincy Jones and ponder---where is the love?  

Donny was quick; he was truly a genius. But he couldn’t understand why Stevie Wonder; whom I ‘d known and admired since he was 12 was more popular than him. He used to travel with $200,000 to $3000,000 in cash and he felt safe enough to call me from almost every city in America, day or night. The last time was from his grandmother’s in St. Louis.
               
Months after he made (his last) the record, on a Sunday, Donny took of all his clothes and managed to unscrew two-inch-thick floor-to-ceiling glass windows at the Park Lane Hotel in New York, then leap out and land on an awning twenty-three stories down. These calls were desperate pleas for help. This memory pains me, deeply; it is one of many.”

Q's 2001 recollections are a little foggy concerning events of Hathaway's passing on January 13, 1979. The troubled singer actually died on a Saturday. When his body was found outside the Essex House hotel, He was fully clothed. Back in his hotel room following a recording session and dinner with long-time partner Roberta Flack, he removed a protective glass safety plate from his window and fell fifteen floors to his death.

 

Differing accounts of his passing were abound. Was there foul play? Maybe it was an accident. Hathaway had a tendency to sing or cite Bible passage while leaning out his window. In the past he'd been dismissed from hotels for his habits. His death was ultimately ruled a suicide. Ebony and Jet' magazine's multi-page spreads revealed different sides of the troubled musician---the great talent on the comeback trail on the mend from mental health issues that  plagued him. A troubled individual fixated with suicide. Pictures show an inconsolable Flack in tears and a pained Wonder grieving from church pews during Hathaway's funeral.

                                                       

                                                     
                                                                         

                                                                         
                                         
                                Hathaway Suite II: Young, Gifted and Black

Back-to back listening of Hathaway's Memory Of Our Love and Wonder's Golden Lady  confirms their creative kinship. They were a musical Poitier and Belafonte---two stars occupying the same space in the galaxy. Hathaway's respect for Wonder was deep. During live renditions of Wonder’s Superwoman, he called him "the Black pool of genius." 

 

Hathaway’s career frustrations were justified. He was first out the gate to usher in album oriented sophisticated soul. Liner notes from debut album reissue Everything Is Everything place music journalist A. Scott Galloway as the first person on the scene to document Hathaway's seminal impact. Interviews  with album collaborators who compare Wonder's tput pre-Hathaway and after. Everything  is cited as record that inspired Wonder master works  Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness First Finale and Songs In The Key of Life---recorded when he broke free of his artistic constrictions at Motown Records.

  Let's connect the dots. When Hathaway crafted his debut in the fall of ‘69, the signature masterpieces from soul music's usual suspects didn't exist.Wonder and Marvin Gaye's career were defined by their hit singles. Their ground-breaking albums were years ahead of them. The Mighty Three songwriter/producers Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell had yet to perfect their album-length Philly Soul soliloquies. Sly and The Family's Stand! album was the exception---a powerful harbinger of things to come.  

When Everything Is Everything hit the streets in the fall of '70, R&B's feet were firmly planted in sounds structured for radio: Wilson Pickett and Jerry Butler's hard-driving soul, the Jackson Five's cherubic bubblegum stylings and sweet harmonies from next-level stand up vocal groups breaking out of the shadow of the Temptations.                            

The musical landscape was changing. The three-minute record couldn't contain Isaac Hayes, Norman Whitfield and James Brown's elongated productions and lengthy funk workouts. Black music burst at the seams, intent on expanding to new horizons.  Instead of following the pack, Hathaway took  a different route. 

 Everything Is Everything was a dissertation flaunting a mixture of styles---classical and blues. Soul and jazz. Spiritual devotionals, odd covers and original compositions anchored by Hathaway's soaring tenor. Vocal and musical interplay between musicians, background singers and Hathaway were ethereal. Everything was a top-shelf spirit best served in a snifter of high-end headphones and hi-fi components sets, an acquired taste for "hip" and in the know. 

                                                                         

Everything's intentional anti-commercial bent set the tone for subsequent albums Donny Hathaway (1971) and Extensions of a Man (1972). That was just fine for Hathaway's admirers. One in particular---singer/composer Carole King---was so impressed with the album, she purchased multiple copies of and passed them around on to industry heavy hitters. Atlantic Records exec/producer Jerry Wexler devoted an entire sheet of liner notes to him, placing him in the pantheon of legends like Otis Redding. Roberta Flack went one better---she proclaimed  Hathaway far superior  than the deceased soul legend. 

During a New York Times interview in 1979. "People compare Donny to Otis but Donny was greater. He was not only a singer, he was a composer, arranger, conducter, singer and teacher. When we met in the studio at midnight to do You Got A Friend, he wrote the music at midnight, scored, did the whole job and we where out of there by 2am." 

 No stranger to Hathaway's talents, Flack saw it first hand---having attended Howard University with the prodigy who was more advanced than  music professors  who taught him. In Hathaway's era, "staying in one bag wasn't an option. White acts like The Eagles, Davis Bowie, Elton John and the Bee Gees injected R&B-inspired inflections in their music The Isley Brothers and Aretha Franklin tried on rock sounds for size. Hathaway brought new life to recorded hits and obscure tracks and made them his own.  Renditions of Blood Sweat and Tears, Leon Russell and Gladys Knight and the Pips songs---I Love You More Than You Ever Know, A Song For You and Givin' Up were destined to become Hathaway classics.

                     

            

Intimate clubs like Manhattan's The Bitter End and The Troubadour out in LA were the spots on which the Hathaway legend was built. When Phil Upchurch, Willie Weeks, Cornell Dupree, Mike Howard and Earl De Rouen launched into Love, Love, Love's jazzy stutter-step, Hathaway's vocals slid in between the rhythms but remained in the pocket. The team of crack musicians transported audiences back to the Motherland  on the kunga-driven The Ghetto---Hathaway's signature. Crowds erupted into cheers at the sound of the tinkling piano keys of A Song For You's intro. During his rendition of the Carpenters' wistful For All We Know, it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. No footage exists of these electrifying performances but 2004's A Song For You Live! leaves a heavy musical footprint.

                                                        

                                            Hathaway Suite III: Tryin’ Times

Hathaway was your favorite artist's favorite artist. A musician's musician. Artists yearned to have him play on their sessions. He lent his talents to Aretha’s Franklin’s epic Young Gifted And Black album. He pinch hit for Quincy Jones scoring the blaxploitation film Come Back Charleston Blue. He sang the theme song for Norman Lear’s long running Maude television series. When he secured David Franklin, a baby-faced Black lawyer with no previous entertainment experience, they walked away with a $400,000 record contract, the largest deal for a Black entertainer at the time---two million dollars in today’s terms. 

                                             

There was a downside---Hathaway struggled to crack the code to mainstream success that was being enjoyed by his peers. It was as if he was stuck at the station as Black music moved on without him, headed towards a commercial destination in a vehicle he'd help construct. 

Stevie Wonder molded Donny's eclecticism into a more accessible package. Year after year he swept the Grammy awards with album of the year nods earning the adulation of an entire music industry. So did Earth Wind and Fire. They sold millions of albums using a blueprint straight out of Hathaway's playbook. Marvin Gaye's What's Going On ecohed Hathway's spiritual overtones, jazz inflections and airy choral vocal arrangements. 

New singers like the rugged Theodore Pendergrass and the impish Al Green played up their gospel roots and sex appeal. Gaye morphed into spiritual love man on follow-up Let's Get It On. Isaac Hayes' Black Moses persona included a bare torso adorned in a shirt of gold chains. Tethered to his mighty Fender Rhodes, Hathaway was a more figurative Moses observing others enter spaces just beyond his reach.

            

Hathaway could be smooth and seductive. He could make the ladies swoon to the churchified She's A Lady, I Know It's You or the breezy Memory Of Our Love. He displayed a husky baritone on Sunshine Over Showers and the romantic slow burner You Were Meant For Me. At his core, Hathaway wasn't a sex symbol. He was a musician. There were moments when he felt that his superior gifts were no match for the current landscape ----at least in his mind. Atlantic Records boss Jerry Wexler revealed Hathaway's struggles with his self-image in his 1993 memoir Rhythm and the Blues. He would complain to Wexler: "I know I can sing but look at me. I'm shaped like a pear." His mental health was fragile and he required medical attention. His   career slowed down. Wexler's help was out of reach. "Donny and I were close, and it didn't take me long to learn of the powerful and painful battles that waged between his hear and his soul. His sexual identity was rife with uncertainty. Loneliness never left him long."                                                  

 Some critics got Hathaway's music, hailing the wide-ranging diversity of his work. Those who didn't considered him self-indulgent. Abstract. Hard to understand. They were unable to  digest songs like Thank You Master for My Soul, Magnificent Sanctuary Band, and I Love the Lord, He Heard My Cry. 

In 1972, a writer from the Village Voice tossed off a back-handed literary sneer as if it was a hand grenade: "Jerry Wexler and Atlantic, who would seem to know more about this stuff than I do are pushing this refugee from the production booth as the Man Who Would Revitalize Soul Music. Could be, as I say. If having soul means digging  on all this supper club melodrama and homogenized jazz. then I'm content to be sterile, white and square."

Hathaway lived and breathed music. Quincy Jones marveled at his ability to construct classical symphonies in minutes. Grandiose and sweeping concertos and operatic vocals---a rarity in 70s soul were a constant in his work. He'd play around with ballads, inject them with funky breakdowns at the bridge---they'd abruptly pause---like sonic cliffhangers coaxed back from the edge by soothing melodies. 

Striving to elevate his talent, Hathaway took orchestral conducting classes and sought out jazz musicians as musical mentors. In interviews, he waxed poetic on the link between African history and modern Black music with broad strokes of scholarly intellectualism. In his mind's eye, blues and gospel were both sacred and secular cornerstones of the African-American experience. An avid fan of country music's simplicity, Hathaway saw it as a White expression and offshoot of Black blues. He dissected music and culture with a fluidity that Dr. Michael Eric Dyson would demonstrate years later. A renaissance man who loved photography and an eager student of life, Hathaway soaked up all of the experience he could. The well of his curiosity was bottomless. A telling interview reveals his sharp focus and how atypical he was compared to the average R&B artist of the 1970s. 

Occupying an exclusive musical world where gifted contemporaries/Black maestros like Philly Soul arranger/composer/producer Thom Bell and old Chess partner Charles Stepney resided---they all were driven by the same goal: utilizing their talents to explore Black music's unlimited potential. Bell and Stepney had something that grounded their lofty ambitions that Hathaway didn't---collaborators like Linda Creed and Maurice White who  gave Stylistics and Earth Wind and Fire a palatable rung for audiences to cling to that Hathaway's music sometimes lacked.  

The closest he'd ever come to mainstream acceptance he craved were the legendary romantic duets recorded with music soulmate Roberta Flack. You Got A Friend was a massive radio hit, Where Is the Love was a crossover smash. Love earned him his only Grammy. Their 1972 album Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway sold a half-million copies. Only Hathaway's Live album would go gold in his lifetime.

 

 

 

His drive for studio perfection was so strong he'd frustrate session musicians. Business partner Ric Powell remembers Atlantic Records execs anxious to package Flack and Hathaway as a duo---"put him on the shelf for awhile" after it took him a year to record an album. They were also weary of the nervous breakdowns that caused his mood swings.  A Jet magazine article revealed Hathaway's sober response to a reporter asked him where he would be if he wasn't doing music. His reply was direct: "Dead."

 Hathaway's drive for perfection in the studio was so strong that he'd frustrate session musicians. Weary of Hathaway's mood swings and nervous breakdowns, business partner Ric Powell remembers Atlantic Records execs anxious to package Flack and Hathaway as a duo "put him on the shelf for awhile" after it took him a year to record an album. 

A  Jet Magazine  reporter asked Hathaway what he would be doing if he wasn't making a doing music.  His reply was direct: "Dead."
  
A period of estrangement instigated by Hathaway's personal woes saw them separate for a time. When they reunited for 1978's The Closer I Get To You, Hathaway's health restricted travel requiring them to record separately. Flack recalls:“I tried to reach out to Donny. That's how we managed to do the song we did last year. I felt this need because I didn't know what to do. I couldn't save him, I knew he was sick. But I knew when he sat down at that piano and sang for me it was like it was eight or nine years ago because he sang and played his ass off.”

Closer was another gold-selling hit. Intent on repeating their chemistry via a new collection of duets following Closer's, success, they retreated back to the studio. This time, Hathaway was well enough to travel to New York for the sessions. They'd only record two songs---the upbeat Back Together Again and a song co-written by Stevie Wonder that would the last song he'd ever sing---You Are My Heaven. Released months after his death, Roberta Flack featuring Donny Hathaway extended their string of million-sellers giving the late singer a final posthumous gold album.                                        

                             Hathaway Suite IV: A Love Supreme (Epilogue)

The reeling sense of loss that occurred in January '79 resurfaced seven months later almost exactly to the day of Hathaway's passing. Singer Minnie Riperton lost her battle with cancer. Like Hathaway, she was loved and highly respected around the industry. Her exquisite talent transcended beyond hit records and defied linear creativity. Four decades in counting, no one has ever filled her void.

One can only guess how Hathaway would have navigated the terrain of an industry reigning in his kind of adventurous creativity due to fiscal concerns and changing tastes. How would he adapt to technology? How would he have viewed hip hop? Would there have been a platform for his talents? Would he retreat back to the classroom or head for Nashville where the old ways of creating were still prevalent? 

We'll never know. What's clear is that Hathaway's  DNA is forever prevalent. His gospel melisma and burnished vocals survived New Jack Swing, hip-hop soul and neo-soul's  middle passage. Producer Teddy Riley branded New Jack partner Aaron Hall as the "Donny Hathaway of our era." Hall and brother Damion would go on to deliver a stirring rendition of A Song For You. When David Hollister embarked on a solo career, he revived Hathaway’s signature apple jack caps and fly skys. His penchant for uplift can be found in R. Kelly’s inspirational anthems. The warm pensiveness lives on in Carl Thomas, Glenn Lewis and Musiq Soulchild and his musicianship survives with Alicia Keys and John Legend. And of course daughter Lalah's smoky pipes keep her father’s memory alive.       

                                                       

                                                         

                                                                                 

                                                       

 Reigning R&B king Charlie Wilson is the ultimate Hathaway disciple. From 70s and 80s Gap Band gems Nothing Comes to Sleepers (But A Dream), You Are My High and You Can Count on Me to his current solo works I'm Blessed and Amazing God---they all have strains of Hathaway's vocal richness and spirit. Wilson and his brothers even did a loose cover of Hathaway's Someday We'll All Be Free featuring Stevie Wonder. He would go on to sing the praises of both his idols in his 2016 memoir, I Am Charlie Wilson":

"God is in the vocal chords and in distinctive vocal chords like Stevie's. His voice is otherworldly. It moves and digs and inspires in a way that any singer worth his salt, any music lover who adores the noise, would understand to be a gift. The same can be said for Donny Hathaway with his butter-smooth delivery on songs like "A Song for You", I ‘Il Love You More Than You Ever Know, and Someday We'll All Be Free."  --- Charlie Wilson (2016)

R&B’s Prince of Sophisticated Soul Will Downing continues the Hathaway legacy via an extensive catalog of jazz-influenced love songs and tasteful remakes. In Hathaway tradition, Downing's latest album The Promise is a spiritual devotional dedicated to the Creator. Formerly showing brushes of Hathaway-like tendencies---R. Kelly is on the brink of banishment from our memories forever, a broken link in the chain of ancestral reincarnation

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Hathaway's era is long gone. Supplanted by a climate where claims of genius and legendary status are premature (see Kanye and Jacquees). As the torch has been passed from Michael Jackson to Beyoncé, high-wattage Black star power remains intact but continues to dim the light of innovators with lower profiles flying under the radar, thriving at a time when R&B revolved around its own orbit---buried like long lost African civilizations---legacies crumbled under the heavy weight of colonization's rewritten history, crossover aspirations and sales fixations.  

Matthew 16:26 said: What will it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his own soul? Black music is filled with carcasses of R&B and hip hop Icaruses who arrogantly flew too close to the sun---picked over by culture-vultures appropriating our cast-off styles we abandoned in pursuit of the next thing. 

The lack of Black musicianship continues to be an enigma. Its absence blocks the knowledge transfer of Hathaway's studious virtuosity to our future generations. Streaming has replaced  physical product---the disappearance of album covers and CDs and liner notes are like guilty fingerprints on a crime scene wiped clean---no record of activity or proof of existence. 

As elders and modern-day griots pass from the scene, information and knowledge are lost like a vessel adrift in the Bermudian abyss of nothingness.

For forty years now, a cloud has hovered over Donny Hathaway. A legacy overshadowed by trials and tribulations. But no more. Finally he will experience sunshine over showers. Later this year, Hathaway will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award, celebrating his impact on the music industry. Maybe it might reignite interest in his career.

                                                  

 In life, Donny Hathaway pondered where was the love. In death, he can finally lay down his cumbersome sack full of dreams by the river and bask in the recognition he rightfully deserves. He can rest in paradise and power. His someday is today. He's finally free.

"Donny Hathaway is a genius who brings to his music performances a sincerity and honesty---it reveals the word high in the word height, the word deep in the word depth and the word god in the word good. Serious and studious, he utilizes all of his energies and feelings and makes listening to him a totally Black religious experience.  -----Roberta Flack (1972)