Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  With their threads in place, they hit the road for their first professional engagement. The Brooks brothers had another brother who lived just outside of Detroit, and the Impressions spent the night in his house playing cards—Dad loved bid whist—and preparing for the work ahead. The next day, they made rounds to the Negro radio stations in the area, and they also appeared on Soupy Sales’s television show. Sales had three shows at the time, including Soup’s On, which he used to promote his love of jazz. Artists like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Coleman Hawkins had graced the stage the Impressions stood on that night.

  It was heady stuff, but the Impressions got a much different reception than expected from Detroit’s white show business professionals. “We were treated like a bunch of kids, young kids at that,” Jerry said. “In the black community [in Chicago], despite our youth, we were treated with respect, like heroes. To black people, young and old alike, we had grasped that elusive thing called success, and, if only for a moment, we symbolized their dreams and aspirations. Black males, for example, saw us as symbols of hope. Black females saw us as suave, worldly guys who had gone places, done things. We were special.” In Detroit, they were just another act.

  The trip took them down another peg before it ended. Famous Detroit DJ Larry Dixon sweet-talked the Impressions, telling them how good their record sounded and how Abner would get them on Ed Sullivan’s show. Then, he sprung the trap. He promoted a concert every Saturday, he said, and if the Impressions would perform there—just a song or two—it would help their sales in Detroit. They explained that they had scheduled an appearance on Bandstand Matinee back in Chicago. “Don’t worry,” Dixon said. “I’ll call Abner on Friday and straighten it out. It’s ridiculous to spend the money to come here and not get all the publicity you can out of this town.” All day Friday, WCHB played “For Your Precious Love” once or twice every hour. Late Friday night, Dixon called to say he had spoken with Abner and worked everything out.

  Around seven o’clock Saturday evening, the Impressions arrived at the club, where people already stood in line waiting to get inside. The full force of the house band hit the crowd as it cascaded in. The band showed up too late to rehearse the Impressions’ material—the first sign something was about to go wrong.

  Close to nine o’clock, Dixon appeared “dressed like some fairytale prince.” He walked to the bandstand and shouted, “It’s show time!” After the house band played a few more songs, Dixon introduced Eddie Holland, who sang Jackie Wilson’s “Reet Petite” with mesmerizing accuracy, down to every nuance of Wilson’s routine. Holland would soon cowrite some of the biggest hits in popular music history at Motown, the label run by “Reet Petite” cowriter Berry Gordy.

  After Holland finished, Larry started his rap: “Ladies and gentlemen … all the way from Chicago, Illinois … five young men who have the hottest record in WCHB land! The creators of the monster hit ‘For Your Precious Love’ … Here they are … our special guest attraction tonight … Jerry Butler and the Impressions!” The crowd erupted in cheers.

  As the Impressions performed, electric energy pounded through their veins. The audience carried them on a wave of ecstasy that felt downright holy. “I got the same feeling that night that I had experienced with the Northern Jubilee Singers when the church was with us,” Jerry said. “It’s a feeling of pushing up to your limit and then over, and your spirit lifts your body. It all becomes so real that it’s unreal. We finished, and the audience applauded and screamed. ‘More! More! More!’ We had two encores, singing the same song. After the third time, Larry got us off. Afterwards, there were young, pretty women with pieces of paper wanting autographs, fat ladies with big bosoms and whiskey on their breath wanting to hug and kiss us, and the boyfriends and husbands of these women wanting to kick our asses.”

  It is no secret that many insecure people find themselves drawn to the stage. The attention, spotlight, and applause help ease the pain of their insecurity and replace it with an often-fleeting sense of self-worth. My father was one such person. He knew a few things about how women treated performers, but the crowd’s reaction in Detroit was something else. Standing on that stage, he felt powerful and confident, maybe for the first time in his life.

  The stage offered him more than just sex and self-worth, though. As the crowd went wild in Detroit, he saw a way out of the constant hardship that had plagued him and his family throughout his life. The stage legitimized him. It raised his social status. It gave him the power to do what his father couldn’t or wouldn’t do—take care of his mother and siblings.

  It did another thing as well. As a loner, he had few close friends. The stage provided him support, adulation, and maybe even love. At the same time, it let him control those things. He could protect his insecurities by choosing how close he let others get. This didn’t always work in his favor when it came to personal relationships, especially romantic ones. But in that moment, it all seemed too good to be true. Until the end of the night.

  Coming down from the performance high, the Impressions realized that Dixon had disappeared with the $3,000 made at the door without offering them a cent—he “didn’t even buy us a hamburger,” Jerry said. Worse yet, when they slunk back to Chicago, a furious Abner chewed them out for missing Bandstand Matinee. They tried to explain, but Abner didn’t want to hear it. Of course he never authorized their extended stay in Detroit. They’d been duped, exploited, and taught a hard lesson about show business. My father catalogued these disappointments. He hated someone taking advantage of him, and he studied ways to make sure it didn’t happen again.

  Back in Chicago before the next tour began, the Impressions played several of Herb Kent’s sock hops. “Curtis was so broke in those days, his guitar didn’t even have a back,” Kent said. “Whenever you saw him, he was always facing you, because he didn’t want people to see the back of that guitar.”

  Curtis might have been broke, but it didn’t break him down. He spent most nights on the run, crashing either with friends or at Annie Bell’s. Staying with Annie Bell, however, meant submerging deeper into Spiritualist traditions. Before the Impressions left for Philadelphia, Annie Bell asked them to see a healer named Mrs. Washington and receive her blessing. “Mrs. Washington was a very hip old lady and we did it more out of respect for her than from the belief that it would do any good,” Jerry said.

  The little old lady prayed with the group, blessed some water in the name of God, and sprinkled it on Sam, Arthur, and Richard. Something changed when she got to my father and Jerry. She flung the rest of the water in their faces, ending the spectacle by throwing the cup at Jerry’s face. On the way out, my father muttered, “She sure did bless the hell out of us, didn’t she, man?” For all his soft-spoken seriousness, Dad always had a cutting, wry sense of humor.

  With Mrs. Washington’s odd blessing, and three St. Christopher medals hung around their necks to ward off evil spirits, the Impressions prepared for their longest promotional tour yet. They piled into their green Mercury station wagon—a gift from Vee-Jay—and set off to perform for the famous Philadelphia DJ Georgie Woods.

  Woods had a special power to break records. He served as Dick Clark’s inside man, alerting Clark to Negro music worth featuring on American Bandstand. In such a way, Woods formed a link between race records and the mainstream pop market. Impressing him was crucial.

  Unfortunately, the Impressions’ first show at Philly’s Uptown Theater suffered immediate trouble. That night, they replaced Ed Townsend, who had just had a huge hit with a doo-wop ballad called “For Your Love.” Townsend, who would later write for the Impressions, had become an overnight sensation. When Woods announced that Townsend wouldn’t perform, the crowd responded with thundering boos. The Impressions stood backstage trembling with fear. They hadn’t rehearsed with the orchestra because the show was in progress when they arrived. They had no arranger, which meant they had no lead sheets for the band. On top of that, the crowd was now furious.

  As
boos rained down, Woods yelled into the microphone, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! When I tell you who’s replacing Ed, you’ll know you’re in for a treat. These guys have a new record called ‘For Your Precious Love.’” Just like that, the crowd turned. Girls started screaming. It seemed there was no problem a hit song couldn’t fix.

  While in Philadelphia, the group stayed in a rooming house on North Broad Street called Mom’s, along with other acts on the show like Mickey and Sylvia, Lee Andrews and the Hearts, Huey Smith and the Clowns, Robert and Johnny, and Patti LaBelle. Mom’s served as a second home for most of the acts playing the Uptown Theater—even in the North, they had to lodge on the outskirts of town with other Negroes who made a living housing traveling performers. Within a few years, Woods would use his shows at the Uptown Theater to promote civil rights. He’d even receive an award from the NAACP in 1963. His voice was so strong in the Negro community, he helped disperse the Philadelphia race riots that occurred near the theater in 1964. But, for now, the unwritten rules that forced people like my father to stay in dingy boarding houses and people like Woods to limit their career aspirations to “race” music still stuck firmly in place.

  Not even oppression dampened the Impressions’ spirits, however. They were young, relatively famous, and making more money than they ever imagined. Plus, the camaraderie among the artists turned even the harshest situation into a chance for fun. “We used to play tricks on one another,” LaBelle said. “Like the time we were performing with the Impressions at the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia. We stuffed their shirts with paper and filled their shoes with water. But they paid us back. At the end of the engagement, Jerry, Curtis, and Sam came to our dressing room and sang ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ in wonderful harmony. We were touched. When they finished, as we hugged them goodbye, they stuck us with pins!”

  Practical jokes aside, the Impressions finished the week at the Uptown Theater, picked up their money, and prepared for the biggest engagement of their lives. Next stop, Harlem.

  This was it. The world-famous Apollo Theater. Mecca and Nirvana wrapped in one for the Negro performer. Mount Rushmore, even—an eternal badge of success. It made everything else look rural. And yet, upon arriving, the mood soured when they saw the billing on the marquee. The Apollo marquee was, after all, a hallowed place. Night and day, it sparkled like a diamond alerting all of Harlem, which meant the world, that the names in bold black were worth something. It once held the consecrated names of John Coltrane, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, Josephine Baker, Billie Holliday, and Joe Louis. Like every Negro performer, my father dreamed of seeing his name in those lights, and his chance had finally come.

  Only, he didn’t see it. Right there on that sacred marquee, the name “Jerry Butler” loomed in giant letters over the much smaller “and the Impressions.” Once again, the rest of the group had been cast as also-rans, bruising their barely healed egos. They threatened to walk out, and they might have done it had Abner not flown in and repeated the speech he made in Chicago. Still, passions ran high. Jerry said, “I felt like a stranger among guys who were my friends.”

  Strangers or not, the Impressions had a weeklong gig to get through, and they had reached the pinnacle of Negro entertainment, no matter how the billing read. Before the first show, Dad waited nervously back-stage as the promoter, Harlem DJ Jocko Henderson, warmed up the crowd. “Jocko was number one in Harlem,” Jerry said. “He had his own television show and everything. He was famous for his so-called ‘Rocket Ship Show’ on the radio and a rap that goes like this: ‘Eeeh tiddy yock. This is the jock. Back on the scene with my record machine saying, ooh pooh pah dooo. And a how do you do? We got good music just for you. Mommio and Daddio, this is Jocko with the rocket ship show, get up you big bad motor scooter’n lets go!’”

  As Jocko performed his rap at the Apollo, a picture of a rocket ship was projected onto the theater’s huge movie screen. When he finished, the screen lifted to reveal him on stage in his space suit and helmet. Then, the Kodaks did their set, followed by the Story Sisters, Lee Andrews and the Hearts, Huey Smith and the Clowns, and Robert and Johnny. Finally, it was time for the Impressions. Curtis and the guys rubbed the Apollo’s famous tree of hope for good luck as they strode onto the stage. What they saw almost stopped them dead.

  Faces—a sea of them—faces stacked on faces, stacked on faces, towering as high as the eye could see, which wasn’t too high because the stage lights mercifully expunged the upper rows, which were themselves full of faces, upon faces, upon faces. A crowd that size has a way of making its presence felt, though, and the young Impressions heard it stirring with a thousand little noises, breaths, grunts, and groans. My father, guitar in hand, led the group into some crowd-friendly fare. They opened with a cover of “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” a rollicking song Elvis had just taken to the top of the R&B chart. As Jerry explains, “Since we were going to New York, we knew we had to be super sophisticated, and what was more sophisticated than to do an Elvis Presley tune?”

  The only problem with crowd-friendly fare was, this was no friendly crowd. The Apollo crowd has never suffered fools, and if a performer didn’t know that going in, he learned quickly. My father’s first lesson came after the Impressions finished their Elvis cover. As the final notes died out, someone shouted, “Y’all take that white shit someplace else and sing what I came here to hear!” The restive audience burst into pockets of laughter and applause.

  It was a shaky start, but it contained an important message. The Negro performer existed between two worlds. The white world had money but rarely accepted Negro artists. The Negro world offered a support base that could last an entire career but couldn’t bring the same riches. This left Negro performers like my father on a tightrope. Sure, it was possible to cross over to the white market and massive fame and fortune—Ray Charles and Sam Cooke had done it a few years before. But it was just as possible to stray too far from your core audience trying to appease the white market and end up unceremoniously dropped by both.

  The person who shouted at the Apollo subconsciously warned the Impressions they were wobbling on that tightrope, in danger of falling. My father would never forget this lesson—he couldn’t. It restated the unspoken rule he learned listening to Dunbar’s two-voiced poetry, and it was a part of the music business that would plague him for decades. Like everything else about American life, whites and Negroes remained separate in the music business, too.

  As the laughter settled down at the Apollo, Dad hit the opening notes of “For Your Precious Love.” The effect was devastating, like lighting a fuse that made the theater burst. When the song finished, the crowd demanded three encores. After their set, the Impressions floated backstage, jubilant, sweaty, bubbling with excitement. Bobby Schiffman, manager of the Apollo, greeted them. “I’ll tell you what to do,” he said. “I want you all to sing ‘For Your Precious Love,’ and if you get an encore, I want you to sing it again, and if they call you back a third time, I want you to sing it again.” For the rest of their engagement, they did just that.

  At the end of the night, the Impressions returned to their rooms at the Grampion hotel in Harlem. The Grampion wasn’t so different from the White Eagle, the seedy hotel where Curtis grew up. “Plenty of junkies and rats,” Jerry recalled. To make matters worse, Carter had warned that junkies would creep up the fire escape at night to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. He suggested the Impressions leave their money on the dresser—that way the junkies wouldn’t have to wake them up with a pistol to take it.

  They couldn’t help but feel nervous, although they didn’t own much for a junkie to steal. The group pulled in $1,250 for their week’s work at the Apollo, which seemed an astronomical sum on paper, but after paying commissions and expenses, it didn’t amount to much once split between five band members.

  During their stay at the hotel, they lived in adjoining rooms. Sam, Richard, and Curtis shared the front room; Arthur and Jerry took the back room near the window and fire escape. A
s they settled down that first night, shining their shoes and preparing for the upcoming shows, they told jokes and ghost stories until Jerry dozed off. With Carter’s warning and the unease they all felt, Dad couldn’t miss an opportunity for a great practical joke.

  As Jerry slept, a loud crash near the window jolted him awake. He opened his eyes, saw a hand in front of his face, and screamed in terror. This sent Curtis, Arthur, Sam, and Richard into paroxysms of laughter. The crash came from a shoe Curtis threw against the wall, and the hand was Jerry’s own dangled before his eyes. That was life on the road with my dad. He was the type of guy who would throw a bucket of cold water on you in the shower and lose himself in laughter.

  The second day of their engagement, Sunday, a line stretched from the Apollo box office halfway down Seventh Avenue while they rehearsed inside. During one rehearsal, the Apollo house musicians couldn’t figure out how my father was getting that sound out of his guitar. They couldn’t follow his chord fingerings either. That’s how he found out he tuned his guitar to open F sharp, from a bunch of grizzled old pros that had never seen or heard anything like it. In no time, all the great guitarists around—session guys mostly—came to the Apollo to watch this kid create something new and magical with his instrument.

  Monday, the performers could get a little money in advance of the full payment to pay off debts they incurred from food-and-clothes expenses, or the constant gambling backstage. After the second show, the Impressions asked for $300 to pay their food tab and have some spending change. As soon as they got their money, the underworld rose to meet them. “Every junkie and booster in Harlem had been standing around the corner waiting for the eagle to fly,” Jerry said. “When it did, they swooped down on the theater with hot suits, hot watches, televisions, radios, rings, socks, underwear, shirts—everything, in your size, shape, and color. You name it, they had it. If they didn’t, they promised to have it by the last show, which was payday.” It was a cutthroat world for a bunch of kids. The next day, Tuesday, my father turned sixteen onstage at the Apollo.