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The Guardian
23-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jerry Butler obituary
When a Philadelphia radio disc jockey gave the young Jerry Butler the nickname of 'the Iceman', it was in recognition of the singer's avoidance of on-stage histrionics rather than any lack of warmth in his polished but ardent delivery. Butler, who has died aged 85, had hits across three decades, with records that spanned the evolution of African-American popular music, from the gospel-influenced doo-wop of For Your Precious Love, aimed at the teenagers of the 1950s, through the suave balladry of Moon River and Make It Easy on Yourself in the 60s, to the sophisticated boudoir soul of I Want to Do It to You in the 70s. There was a background to his unruffled demeanour. In his 2004 autobiography, titled Only the Strong Survive: Memoirs of a Soul Survivor, Butler gave credit to a teacher in the fifth grade at his elementary school in Chicago. Her name was Ernestine Curry and she taught 'maths, English, history, music, etiquette and how to box'. She also told her class of 11-year-olds about such great figures from Black history as Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, the world heavyweight champion boxer Jack Johnson and the jazz composer and bandleader Duke Ellington, while getting them to read the works of the historian WEB DuBois and the poet and novelist Countee Cullen. 'Mrs Curry gave us a sense of pride and dignity that has carried me and many other of her students through life,' Butler said. In later life Butler went into politics. He took a master's degree in political science and became a commissioner for Cook County, whose county seat is Chicago, serving on the 17-member board from 1985 to 2018. His place in the affection of soul fans was retained long after the end of his recording career. When Bruce Springsteen released a collection of cover versions of soul classics in 2022, he included two of Butler's best known songs: Only the Strong Survive, which gave the album its title, and Hey, Western Union Man,. Butler was born in Sunflower County, Mississippi, where his parents picked cotton as sharecroppers. He was aged three when the family became part of the Great Migration, moving to Chicago. His father, Jerry Sr, worked two jobs to feed the family, for the city's sanitation and streets department and for the Illinois Central Railroad. His mother, Arvelia (nee Agnew), took her children – two girls and two boys – to worship and sing at the Church of God in Christ. Every Sunday morning they listened to the three-hour sermons of the Rev Annie Bell Mayfield, whose grandson Curtis was a contemporary and became a friend. Butler was soon joining Annie Bell Mayfield's Travelling Souls Spiritualist gospel caravan, touring throughout the US in his school holidays as a member of a group called the Northern Jubilee Singers and experiencing at first hand the sounds of the great gospel groups of the time, including the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Soul Stirrers, with Sam Cooke. Butler was 14 when his father died suddenly of a heart attack, forcing him to begin taking night jobs in factories to help the family's finances while attending Washburne Trade School, where he trained to become a chef. It was seeing Nat King Cole in a Chicago nightclub that showed the teenaged Butler the kind of performer he aspired to be. In 1956 he stopped going to church and started singing with his first R&B group, a quartet called the Quails. After they split up, he and Mayfield got together to form a group that became the Impressions. For their first single, released on a local label, Butler and two of the other members of the group, Richard and Arthur Brooks, wrote a ballad called For Your Precious Love. Its blend of doo-wop cadences, gospel harmonies and Butler's pleading vocal not only gave them a Top 20 hit but induced the audience at the Apollo in Harlem to call the young men back for three encores of the same song. Two years later, having been persuaded by the record company to pursue a solo career, Butler achieved even greater success – No 1 in the R&B chart, No 7 in the pop chart – with the lovelorn He Will Break Your Heart, co-written with the record's producer, Calvin Carter, and Mayfield, who also sang the distinctive high harmony part on the chorus. Mayfield and the Impressions would go on to greater things, but Butler's subsequent career burned on an intermittent flame. He was the first to record the Henry Mancini-Johnny Mercer song Moon River in 1961, but saw it become a bigger hit for Andy Williams. A year later his version of Make It Easy on Yourself, by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, was also the first to be released. In 1964 his swooning duet with Betty Everett on Gilbert Bécaud's Let It Be Me, with an English lyric by Manny Curtis, reached the top five. In 1965 he and Otis Redding wrote I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now), a ballad that might have been the sequel to For Your Precious Love. It became one of Redding's early hits and was covered by many other artists, accruing royalties that Butler claimed outstripped all his other earnings put together. In the late 60s he teamed up with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, the gifted and ambitious Philadelphia-based songwriters and producers, for a string of heavily arranged hits that included Hey, Western Union Man, Only the Strong Survive and Moody Woman, and several albums, such as The Iceman Cometh and Ice on Ice, whose titles exploited the nickname bestowed upon him many years earlier. He made frequent appearances as the host of oldies shows on television and served a term as the chairman of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, a charity set up to provide belated support for black artists unfairly treated by the music business. In 1991 he and the four other original Impressions were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His brother Billy, a singer and guitarist with whom Butler ran a workshop for young artists, died in 2015. His wife, Annette (nee Smith), whom he married in 1959 and who had been one of his backing singers, died in 2019. He is survived by their twin sons, Randall and Anthony, four grandchildren, and a great-grandchild. Jerry Butler, singer and politician, born 8 December 1939; died 20 February 2025
Voice of America
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Voice of America
Soul singer Jerry 'Iceman' Butler dies at 85
Jerry Butler, a premier soul singer of the 1960s and '70s whose rich, intimate baritone graced such hits as "For Your Precious Love," "Only the Strong Survive" and "Make It Easy on Yourself," has died at age 85. Butler's niece, Yolanda Goff, told the Chicago Sun-Times that Butler — whose show business nickname, "The Iceman," was given to him for his understated style — died Thursday at his home in Chicago. A member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a three-time Grammy Award nominee, Butler was a voice for two major soul music hubs: Chicago and Philadelphia. Along with childhood friend Curtis Mayfield, he helped found the Chicago-based Impressions and sang lead on the breakthrough hit "For Your Precious Love," a deeply emotional, gospel-influenced ballad that made Butler a star before age 20. A decade later, in the late '60s, he joined the Philadelphia-based production team of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, who worked with him on "Only the Strong Survive," "Hey Western Union Man" and other hits. His albums "Ice on Ice" and "The Iceman Cometh" are regarded as early models for the danceable, string-powered productions that became the classic "Sound of Philadelphia." Butler was also a songwriter, collaborating with Otis Redding on "I've Been Loving You Too Long," a signature ballad for Redding; and with Gamble and Huff on "Only the Strong Survive," later covered by Elvis Presley, among others. His credits also included "For Your Precious Love," "Never Give You Up" (with Gamble and Huff) and "He Will Break Your Heart," which Butler helped write after he began thinking about the boyfriends of the groupies he met on the road. "You go into a town; you're only going to be there for one night; you want some company; you find a girl; you blow her mind," Butler told Rolling Stone in 1969. "Now you know that girl hasn't been sitting in town waiting for you to come in. She probably has another fellow and the other fellow's probably in love with her; they're probably planning to go through the whole thing, right? But you never take that into consideration on that particular night." Link to Mayfield Butler was the son of Mississippi sharecroppers who moved north to Chicago when he was 3, part of the era's "Great Migration" of Black people out of the South. He loved all kinds of music as a child and was a good enough singer that a friend suggested he come to a local place of worship, the Traveling Souls Spiritualist Church, presided over by the Reverend A.B. Mayfield. Her grandson, Curtis Mayfield, soon became a close friend. (Mayfield died in 1999.) In 1958, Mayfield and Butler, along with Sam Gooden and brothers Arthur and Richard Brooks, recorded "For Your Precious Love" for Vee-Jay Records. The group called itself the Impressions, but Vee-Jay, eager to promote an individual star, advertised the song as sung by Jerry Butler and the Impressions, leading to estrangement between Butler and the other performers and to an unexpected solo career. "Fame didn't change me as much as it changed the people around me," Butler wrote in his memoir, Only the Strong Survive, published in 2000. One of his early solo performances was a 1961 cover of 'Moon River,' the theme from the film 'Breakfast at Tiffany's.' Butler was the first performer to hit the charts with what became a pop standard, but 'Moon River' would be associated with Andy Williams after the singer was chosen to perform it at the Academy Awards, a snub Butler long resented. His other hits, some recorded with Mayfield, included "Find Another Girl" and "I'm A-Telling You." By 1967, his formal style seemed out of fashion, but Butler was impressed by the new music coming out of Philadelphia and received permission from his record label, Mercury, to work with Gamble and Huff. The chemistry, Butler recalled, was so "fierce" they wrote hits such as "Only the Strong Survive" in less than an hour. "Things just seem to fall into place," Butler told Ebony magazine in 1969. "We lock ourselves in a room, create stories about lovers, compose the music, then write the lyrics to match the music." By the 1980s, Butler's career had faded, and he was becoming increasingly interested in politics. Encouraged by the 1983 election of Harold Washington, Chicago's first Black mayor, he ran successfully for the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 1985 and was re-elected repeatedly, even after supporting a controversial sales tax increase in 2009. He retired from the board in 2018. Butler was married for 60 years to Annette Smith, who died in 2019, and with her had twin sons. Many of his generational peers had struggled financially and he worked to help them. He chaired the Rhythm & Blues Foundation, which provides a wide range of assistance to musicians, and pushed the industry to provide medical and retirement benefits. Butler considered himself relatively lucky, even if he did pass on the chance to own a part of Gamble and Huff's Philadelphia International recording company. "You know, I have lived well. My wife probably would say I could've lived better," Butler told the Chicago Reader in 2011. "Did I make 40, 50 million dollars? No. Did I keep one or two? Yes. The old guys on the street used to say, 'It's not how much you make. It's how much you keep.' "
