October 9, 2002

The voice
Falling in love with Jimmy Scott is wonderful.

By Johnny Ray Huston

A HEAVEN- sent day. How else can I describe Thursday, Oct. 2, – the day I interviewed Jimmy Scott in the morning and saw Ray Charles conquer the Paramount Theatre at night. The luck of this concurrence went beyond encountering two legends. Charles is the producer of Scott's Falling in Love Is Wonderful, an album that – no thanks to one the most egregious cases of avarice-against-art in the music business's racist history – has been out of circulation for 40 years. A classic album that is being rereleased this month, saving me and other Scott fans from bidding $350 (a price I've seriously considered) on the rare occasions the ill-fated LP version makes an eBay appearance. That $350 is about what Scott was paid for an album's worth of work by the man who tried to kill Falling in Love. That $350 of record-collecting cash wouldn't garner Jimmy Scott a single earthly penny.

"Perfect timing." Those are Scott's words when I tell him I'm about to see Charles in Oakland. The connections don't stop there. That night, a highlight of Charles's show is his performance of "A Song for You," the majestically solitary ballad best-known for a studio version in which the voice of the late, great Donny Hathaway fatefully descends and ascends into silence. The producer of Hathaway's "A Song for You" is Joel Dorn, the same man who produced 1969's The Source – Scott's other classic album, another album that was kept off music stores' shelves for more than three decades.

Perfect timing certainly describes the story of Scott this year. Earlier in 2002 his most recent studio recording, the restrained But Beautiful, was unveiled to critical acclaim. This fall the rerelease of Falling in Love Is Wonderful is accompanied by two major works devoted to the mythic but wholly real personal history of the great Scott. Matthew Buzzell's superb documentary Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew is on an international journey that includes a current stop at the Mill Valley Film Festival. David Ritz's just-published Faith in Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott provides Scott with the book-length recognition he deserves.

Jimmy Scott was born July 17, 1925. His birth itself contained instants of death: the umbilical cord left stranglehold marks on his neck that, according to Ritz's book, remain to this day. Scott's many-sistered childhood as part of a large Cleveland family was defined at age 13. The same year that his creative dreams were sparked by Judy Garland singing "Over the Rainbow" in a darkened movie theater, he was struck by two tragedies. He stopped growing. A hormonal deficiency known as Kallman's Syndrome meant that he would never be able to pass through puberty. And months later his beloved mother, Justine, was killed, her arm severed by a drunk driver's car when she fought to push one of her daughters out of the vehicle's path.

Faith in Time's introduction contains an anecdote that symbolizes Scott's devotion to turning those curses into gifts. Embittered by his experience writing an authorized portrait of Aretha Franklin, Ritz ponders the task of writing about Scott, before watching him sing at a San Francisco club. As author stands with singer by the stage, a woman approaches Scott and asks him the location of the ladies' room. Explaining that it's a "little tricky" to find, Scott graciously leads her directly to the ladies' room door. One could say that Scott's voice performs a similar act of kindness, with an added twist: it takes listeners to the door between man and woman – as well as man and child – and opens it. This is an act of goodwill the world might not deserve. Though married four times, Scott has been ridiculed as a freak, a fag, a sissy, and a queer, and more than once he's been stripped and insulted by white police officers. According to Ritz's book, he is still mistaken for a woman daily.

This mistake extends to Scott's music. One of his standout early recordings, a 1950 live version of "Embraceable You" on Charlie Parker's One Night in Birdland, was initially credited to a female vocalist named Chubby Newsome. This "mistake" helped set a pattern of abuse and silencing. The bulk of Scott's early material – including a version of "The Masquerade is Over" that made the song a standard – was recorded for Savoy, a label owned by Herman Lubinsky. Dorn has referred to the now-dead Lubinsky as a "human hemorrhoid," an insult that still somehow falls short. Greedy spite compelled Lubinsky to rain ruin upon the careers of two of my favorite singers, Scott and Esther Phillips. He paid both artists next to nothing for dozens of recordings, and in Scott's case, he used contractual threats to halt the release of an artist's later, greatest works (Falling in Love, The Source).

"Lubinsky was a bully. He just bullied his way through the business," Scott volunteers at one point during our interview, though I haven't spoken the man's name. "He knew that many record companies would not fight him. He held threats over Little Esther for a long time. She was manipulated and misused as an artist. She was quite a little lady. She had the sense for playing all styles of music, but she was never allowed her choice of what music she could sing."

Though Scott has inspired male singers from Johnnie Ray to Marvin Gaye (Ritz, who authored the primary Gaye biography Divided Soul, writes that Scott's was the voice Gaye turned to in his most troubled times), his bond with female vocalists runs deeper. Nancy Wilson essentially credits him with her own phrasing. Falling in Love is influenced by at least three female legends. Scott's high notes have the laser-sharp brightness and intensity of Dinah Washington's, while his low notes seem to hug themselves beneath a velvet cloak – a quality that recalls Judy Garland's CBS performances of the era. "Oh, that was my little girl," says Scott. "Judy and I are about the same age, ya dig? When we were coming up, I had great admiration for her. She worked her way through many facets of the business, not just singing. She was enlightening to lifelike idioms." Scott never met Garland, but like so many elements of his story, this injustice was partly amended: around 1992, actor and longtime Scott admirer Joe Pesci brought Liza Minnelli to New York's cabaretlike Tavern on the Green to see Scott perform.

The third female legend haunts Falling in Love's overall sound. The album contains a rendition of "There Is No Greater Love," a short song Billie Holiday magically stretched into an idyllic, ironic daydream on a 1947 Jazz at the Philharmonic live recording. And Falling in Love's fusion of jazz and pop – strings and a horn section dominated by melancholic instruments such as the oboe – has the satin classicism of her penultimate song collection. Scott was close friends with Holiday; his second wife, Channie Booker, was related to her husband. I ask Scott to name his favorite song on Lady in Satin, knowing it's an impossible request. "I just love Billie. I love everything she sang," he replies. "She was such an elegant singer. She was quite a woman. But coming up in that era, she had it rough. The things people had to do to survive were different."

This reminiscence gives way to the first of a few tiny orations. "Creative people don't go in thinking, 'Oh, look at all the money I can make.' That's silly. You either love the songs or you don't. Most people don't realize this: prepare yourself to sing all songs. Then your promotion is that you are a singer. You ask yourself, What are these songs saying? Is there a message to them, an awakening? People want to be lifted from misery, people come to clubs for comfort. They think, 'I'll go out tonight and ease my mind and forget all this old bad crap.' " Wise words. Yet Scott's art isn't based on forgetting – it's powered by the remembrance of pain and anguish. His voice touches each wound and makes a listener grateful that it has healed.

The word "awakening" sticks out. The period after Lubinsky had Falling in Love pulled from record stores was Scott's silent era, but it was also the time that produced his most profoundly thrilling music. For nearly 25 years, with two exceptions, he never entered a recording studio. He washed dishes and cooked food at a Bob's Big Boy. He worked as a nurse's aide. Around 1967, Nancy Wilson checked into a Sheraton Hotel during the Cleveland stop of a tour and came face to face with her idol, then employed as an elevator operator. Ritz's book describes this period as one of religious study for Scott. He expanded the Buddhist-influenced Protestant teachings of his youth, balancing Eastern and Western forms of faith. He considered becoming a preacher.

And in a sense, he did. The sermon is The Source, perhaps the most spiritually intense – certainly the most dramatic – popular music I've ever heard. Scott's singing on this album bridges the gap between religious and secular songs in a manner quite different from Charles's pioneering fusions or Franklin's landmarks. His tone is meditative and piercing, and his behind-the-beat phrasing slows to an absolutely individual cadence that suspends time and expands space. The singing is like a genius poet's placement of words on a page. The instrumentation vaporizes and rematerializes to mirror an epic vocal quest that morphs from solitary yearning to ecstatic embrace. In Faith in Time, Dorn remembers pianist Junior Mance listening to "Day by Day" 's first playback; Mance shook his head and said, "I can't believe it. I can't believe I'm hearing what I'm hearing."

The Source boasts more than one unbelievable song. (The 1993 reissue Lost and Found chooses five highlights and replaces the few non-awe inspiring selections with some previously unheard love diamonds; needless to say, both collections are worth more than they currently cost.) The album's spiritual undercurrents are lonely rivers that flow to the open arms of the sea, to paraphrase a lyric from "Unchained Melody" – and next to Scott's reading of that song, the Righteous Brothers' hit seems puny. "Exodus" opens The Source on an operatic note: when Scott sings the first line, "This land is mine," his regal, princely approach makes "land" incredibly vast, and "mine" as vast as "land." "Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child" provides an unmatched illustration of the emptiness of the "o" inside the word "home."

Thinking about the album, and that song in particular, I wonder if Scott agrees that his spiritual search had reached a higher plane. "I think so," he agrees, and his answer quickly reaches further back to a specific source of inspiration. "It came through – the essence of things that my mother might have told me, that we may have discussed through the years that we were together. Of course, I was 13 when she passed, but I did a lot of communicating with her as a child. She was the strength of the family. I just had one of those fathers who wasn't attentive. Hey, what can you say? He's still my dad.

"The songs are more or less about her. Expressions. She was there always to support me. You're singing and you think, 'Ma said this.' You think, 'Here's where I can put what she said' – different things we talked about, musically."

Scott's career now spans 60 years. It has outlived a mid-'90s hipster cache that spawned Twin Peaks appearances and Madonna endorsements. Scott's sixth decade as a singer has been his most prolific, yielding seven albums. Still, it's probably no accident that the most recent, But Beautiful, both contains and takes its title from a song featured on Holiday's career-climaxing Lady in Satin. Day by day, Scott continues to make life into art. "It's all part of the training, baby. Let's face it," he says. "You have the interest and you develop. What you discover is, who knows how long it takes to develop? But over time, you learn to portray your experience.

"Look at a song, its story. It's talking about you. So many people don't even recognize that as something to think about concerning their music. This is no passing fancy. It's a job, and you study. You advance your attention to your art. If I can't do something to encourage you, then how am I going to better my situation? I'm encouraged because you're listening.

"We're always learning, baby. So many people make the mistake of believing, 'Oh, well I got it now.' Bull! It's my job to learn."

Both Faith in Time and the new documentary by Buzzell respect this belief that life is a lesson, a course that requires one to excavate wise pleasure from pain. Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew has a twilight-and-stage light glow that fits its subject. It also features an amazing concert clip from 1995. Performing in a small club, Scott wails one of his oldest signature tunes, "Why Was I Born?," with a volume and force that could fill a cathedral or a stadium. "Sing that song!" a man yells in response to one line. "Sing it, baby!" a woman calls out after another. The age- and body-defying energy of Scott's next vocal outburst causes someone in the crowd of a dozen or so to laugh joyfully, incredulously.

As my interview with Scott draws to a close, I think back to its beginning, when his current girlfriend, Jeannie McCarthy, answered the hotel-room phone, her voice bright and friendly. In Buzzell's film Scott likens his four failed marriages to a square; rolling his eyes in an uncharacteristic show of exasperation, he adds, "Now I gotta get the Star of David." Ritz's book, while loving, doesn't ignore Scott's troubled side – the same sad memories that fuel his art have sometimes reduced his romantic life to ashes, and they provide a fiery threat that remains today. So is he still shooting for that star? "Might be. Just might be," he answers with cagey enthusiasm. "She's my little devil. It was a pleasure to meet a lady who is just down-to-earth. She knows the atmosphere of life."

After that, I have only one thing left to say: thank you, Jimmy Scott.