Donny Hathaway: a soul man who departed too soon
To remember the soul genius, who jumped to his death 35 years ago this month, here's a piece that singer-songwriter Kandia Crazy Horse wrote in 1999 – from Rock's Backpages
Soul man … Donny Hathaway in 1972. Photograph: Stephen Verona/Getty Images
My recent theory is that if the late soul man and scribe Donny Hathaway had been white he would be as (cult) famous as Cosmic American Gram Parsons; mentioned in the same breath as the prematurely departed mystic Nick Drake. Twenty years since Hathaway leaped to his death from the 15th floor of Manhattan's Essex House hotel, he's neither.
And yet, that Voice, that sweet mountain honey of a tenor caresses like a lullaby. A voice simultaneously neonatal and ancient. Eternal even. To convey sunshine to the blind, just play his records.
Today, there are multitudes of whippersnappers pretending to the throne; it's become de rigueur to cite Hathaway as an influence on one's hip hop or soul project. At the vanguard are D'Angelo – the best of the canny crooks, who cops the legendary Hathaway "look" which my father remembers as the mo of brothers looking to step to the soul sisters in Chocolate City at the turn of the 70s – and Jamiroquai's Jason Kay, who gets likened to Stevie Wonder, but is more akin to Donny with his heavy Fender Rhodes and string arrangements, and his messianic composition style. Neither, though, has yet delivered a masterpiece on par with any Hathaway composition. And given their current directions, they may never do so.
Among the retro-nuevo soul cats and Cosmic Negro rock'n'rollers coming up now, only the largely-ignored Marc Dorsey begins to approach Hathaway's vocal majesty. And Atlanta's David Ryan Harris, of the defunct Follow for Now, also mines a fusion of Hathaway and Wonder phrasings, rendered raw on the black rock tip. But truth is, the St Louis blues brother's sound is unique throughout the history of race records, if not further.
Hathaway's slave narrative is common to many African American youth of his generation; virtually cliche next to his contemporary R&B and country and western musicians. Still, it seems young Donny survived his broken home upbringing intact – as he'd later hint in Put Your Hand in the Hand. If anything, being reared by his gospel-singing grandmother, Miss Martha Cromwell, was a literal godsend: her spiritual and piano teachings proved an essential 50% of her grandson's singular soul music. Indeed, the sense of long-ago inherited Sudanese metaphysics couched in traditional black Christian love imbues Hathaway's singing and songs throughout his sadly brief recorded output.
Donny Hathaway's four solo recordings, Everything Is Everything, Extensions of a Man, the self-titled and live albums – plus his collaborations with Roberta Flack and Aretha Franklin, and the lost classic soundtrack Come Back, Charleston Blue – are an open secret at the end of the century. Sure, some know to cite him in their litany of forebears, but aside from the TV historians who recall he sang the theme to Maude, the wider populace and – most lamentably, young black kids – barely know him.
That's probably because Hathaway was not the pre-eminent soul stirrer during his lifetime. The 70s, a golden era of black music, was also the period that yielded the last of the classic male soul singers. There was the great Al Green, followed by the newly emancipated Motown kings Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Eddie Kendricks, as well as Teddy Pendergrass, Maurice White, the peerless Curtis Mayfield (for whom Donny arranged Choice Of Colors) and many others.
True, Hathaway's Someday We'll All Be Free became something of a black national anthem (to his own annoyance), and his 1969 hit The Ghetto (Part 1) is a pan-black bottom hit that resonates to this day, and his succession of duets with Flack – You've Got a Friend, Where Is the Love and so on – reanimated Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell for the 70s. Still, Hathaway seems perennially overshadowed by fellow piano-men proselytisers, Wonder and Sly Stone. And that's the great musical mystery of the last three decades, frustrating and unfathomable: Why, given his ghostly presence in the New Soul, hasn't he been spotlighted in the contemporary black music canon?
Atlantic Records' legendary producer Jerry Wexler, for one, immediately appreciated Hathaway's talent the moment he heard him (on a tape King Curtis had given him), and soon became the singer's surrogate father and confidante.
"He was the most brilliant musical theorist I ever encountered," Wexler said recently on the phone from his home in Florida, as he described the metaphysics of harmony, rhythm and melody embodied in Hathaway's songcraft. Not only did Hathaway "play with so much depth," Wexler recalled, he was a chordal master who spent a lot of time in rehearsal and in the studio pursuing his songs' self-evident harmonic complexity. An apt student of street, classical and Sunday music, Hathaway the singer and arranger created an amalgam that was unequivocally Soul, for there was no separation of those disparate essences. Wexler also remembers his cursed protege's depression, poor self-image and sense of alienation.
Hathaway's solo and duet albums have been, for the most part, made available on CD during this decade (though they haven't quite flooded the market). However, the never-on-CD soundtrack Come Back, Charleston Blue – its arrangements supervised by Quincy Jones – is Hathaway's true masterpiece. This aural accompaniment to the film version of Chester Himes' great crime novel is some of the heaviest blues around.
It's also the album that best demonstrates Hathaway's range as a composer, his absorption of styles from ragtime through big band and bossa nova. A score simultaneously groovy and elegiac, Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong and – in light of his encroaching shadows – the equally tortured prodigy Charles "Buddy" Bolden, call down to Donny, whether tickling his tack piano or dropping heartbreaking phrasing on Little Ghetto Boy. In a just world, Charleston Blue should be top on the list of priorities for the reissue folks at Rhino.
Yep, it's an old tired tale: brilliant black boy bursts with promise, presents his rimshot to the cosmos and disappears (often violently) from the proscenium too soon. Like Hendrix, Hathaway heard vast continents of sound in his head and struggled to make them corporeal for the waking world. And the Parsons comparison lingers: Hathaway, too, was a riveting interpreter of other people's material, able to scorch the blueprints of the originals. And was, like Drake, doomed by his own demons.
Yet here is the hour of Hathaway's stealthy return, if only in that he haunts the dreams of clever coloured composers hoping to restore the soul to the hip-hop nation (and I, for one, eagerly await the day Donny's vocalist daughter Lalah Hathaway finally decides to stage a concert series of her dad's four-part concerto Life). "I'm depending on you, little brother/ We need your help, little brother" Hathaway pleads at Little Ghetto Boy's coda. Today, his soul – and perhaps ours – depends on us revitalising the people's muse by honouring one of the supreme artists of our age.
© Kandia Crazy Horse, 1999
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