Jerry Butler, a premier soul singer of the Nineteen Sixties and after whose wealthy, 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, instructed The Related Press that Butler died Thursday of Parkinson’s illness at his house in Chicago. A longtime Chicago resident, Butler was a former Prepare dinner County board commissioner who would nonetheless carry out on weekends and determine himself as Jerry “Ice Man” Butler, a present enterprise nickname given for his understated fashion.
Butler, a member of the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame and a three-time Grammy Award nominee, was a voice for 2 main soul music hubs: Chicago and Philadelphia. Together with childhood good friend Curtis Mayfield, he helped discovered 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 earlier than the age of 20. A decade later, within the late ‘60s, he joined the Philadelphia-based manufacturing staff of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, who labored with him on “Only the Strong Survive,” “Hey Western Union Man” and different hits. His albums “Ice on Ice” and “The Ice Man Cometh” are considered early fashions for the danceable, string-powered productions that grew to become the basic “Sound of Philadelphia.”
Butler additionally was an impressed songwriter who collaborated 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 lined by Elvis Presley amongst others. His different credit 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 started serious about the boyfriends of the groupies he met on the street.
“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 instructed 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.”
The son Mississippi sharecroppers, Butler and his household moved moved north to Chicago when he was 3, a part of the period’s “Great Migration” of Black individuals out of the South. He cherished every kind of music as a baby and was a adequate singer {that a} good friend recommended he come to an area place of worship, the Touring Souls Spiritualist Church, presided over by the Rev. A.B. Mayfield. Her grandson, Curtis Mayfield, quickly grew to become a longtime collaborator. (Mayfield died in 1999.)
In 1958, Mayfield and Butler together with Sam Gooden and brothers Arthur and Richard Brooks recorded “For Your Precious Love” for Vee-Jay Information. The group referred to as itself the Impressions, however Vee-Jay, anxious to advertise a person star, marketed the music as by Jerry Butler and the Impressions, resulting in estrangement between Butler and the opposite performers and to an surprising solo profession.
“Fame didn’t change me as much as it changed the people around me,” Butler wrote in his memoir “Only the Strong Survive,” printed in 2000.
One in all his early solo performances was a 1961 cowl of “Moon River,” the theme to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Butler was the primary performer to hit the charts with what grew to become a pop commonplace, however “Moon River” could be related to Andy Williams after the singer was chosen to carry out it on the Academy Awards, a snub Butler lengthy resented. His different solo hits, some recorded with Mayfield, included “He Will Break Your Heart”, “Find Another Girl” and “I’m A-Telling You.”
By 1967, his formal fashion appeared out of vogue, however Butler was impressed by the brand new music popping out of Philadelphia and acquired permission from his report label (Mercury) to work with Gamble and Huff. The chemistry, Butler recalled, was so “fierce” they wrote hits corresponding to “Only the Strong Survive” in lower than an hour.
“Things just seem to fall into place,” Butler instructed Ebony journal 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 Eighties, Butler’s profession had light and he was turning into more and more excited by politics. Inspired by the 1983 election of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, he ran efficiently for the Prepare dinner County Board in 1985 and was re-elected repeatedly, even after supporting a controversial gross sales tax improve in 2009. He retired from the board in 2018.
Butler was married for 60 years to Annette Smith, who died in 2019, and together with her had twin sons. A lot of his generational friends had struggled financially and he labored to assist them, whereas additionally supporting varied relations. He chaired the Rhythm & Blues Basis, which gives a variety of help to musicians, and pushed the trade to supply medical and retirement advantages. Butler thought-about himself fortunate, even when he did cross on the possibility to personal part of Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia Worldwide recording firm.
“You know, I have lived well. My wife probably would say I could’ve lived better,” Butler instructed 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.’”
