I have been checking this one out 4 some time now, and I find it "a very interesting soul album". I've never heard a Donny Hataway album before and I found this very great because a lot of people call it his most ambitious albums, having him dabble in different genres from R&B to jazz. So, any recommendations about this beautiful soul album ?
[Edited 1/11/05 18:14pm]

Love it! His rendition of Someday We'll All Be Free makes me cry. Valdez in the Country is funky as all hell, and I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know is one of my fave tracks of his.

Many people consider this his best album. I count myself among them. His first album "Everything is Everything" is also one of my favorites. His live stuff is classic, particularly his live cover of Stevie Wonder's "Superwoman". I'm such a fan that I just pick up anything with his name on it. I'm usually not disappointed!!

manray10 said:

It's just too bad there's not more stuff with his name on it.

silverchild said:

Beginning this album with a Classical Tone Poem "I Love The Lord, He Heard My Cry"
was an unprecedented act of genius!! I love the segueway into "Someday We'll All Be Free" !1 Classic!!

He turns 60 on October 1. I hope there's an anthology or a box set to mark this occasion.

RipHer2Shreds said:

Albums:

Everything Is Everything (Atco 1970)

Donny Hathaway (Atco 1971)

Donny Hathaway Live (Atco 1972)

Come Back Charleston Blue film soundtrack (1972)

with Roberta Flack: Roberta Flack And Donny Hathaway (Atlantic 1972)

Extension Of A Man (Atco 1973)

with Roberta Flack: Roberta Flack Featuring Donny Hathaway (Atlantic 1980)

In Performance (1980)

A Donny Hathaway Collection (1990)

These Songs For You Live (2004)


Donny Hathaway - Love, Love, Love - The Anthology (?) Someday?

I put all of his released music together and play them like a box set at times.

Short on Quantity, long on Quality!!

manray10 said:

I'm actually quite familiar with his catalogue. lol He's one of my favorites. I just don't think he'd truly tapped his own musical genius before he passed. He was working on a couple musical scores when he died that were never recorded. I like some of his more classical sounding stuff best, so this would have been a nice treat for the ear.

I'm actually quite familiar with his catalogue. lol He's one of my favorites. I just don't think he'd truly tapped his own musical genius before he passed. He was working on a couple musical scores when he died that were never recorded.

I've met and seen his eldest daughter, Lalah, in concert several times. Donny spit her out, physically and vocally. Prince bought 9 copies of her latest cd "Outrun the Sky" at a recent concert of hers in LA. At one of her shows I met her mom, Eulalah Hathaway. She has a huge stack of Donny's music that's never been recorded. It's possible that the family might do something with it in the future. An anthology is also possible. We shall see.


I like some of his more classical sounding stuff best, so this would have been a nice treat for the ear.[/quote]

There's a lot that's unreleased. Maybe someday!!

manray10 said:

I agree with you. Rhino Records are some of the mose greatest reissue companies in the business. They just released a live album from the Donny Hataway vaults last summer. They should do an anthology because he deserves it. I also think a 5-disc box set would work too. I would really like 2 know why and how Donny took his own life.
[Edited 1/11/05 19:44pm]

This was his masterpiece when his genious peaked,
It's like Marvin Gaye's "What's going on".
Totally artistic freedom.
/peace Manki

"No, I ain't got.... nobody else in miiiiind..... I know.... it's yooooouuuuu....."

That's the jam, right there!

manray10 said:

Thanks for the list. I only have his 1971 album.

A shame he did'nt put out any full albums after 1973.
/peace Manki

Coupla days ago, my friend played me an album that Donny Hathaway played keyboards on:

Woody Herman - Heavy Exposure (on Cadet, 1969)

deebee said:

Ndeed, It Is!! "I Know It's You" is the cut!! Actually, I love every song on the album..... A Masterpiece !!






....
[Edited 1/12/05 8:17am]

well, to me this is simply the BEST SOUL ALBUM EVER, even better than Marvin Gaye's "What's going on"

paligap said:

That is going to be my wedding song. The lyrics are emotional as they get


RipHer2Shreds said:


I thought that one was hit OWN compisition

And yes, Donny was working on a musical called "Life" b4 he died.

BTW Here's a Donny article from the Independent (london paper):

HIS SOUL GOES GROOVIN' ON; DID HE JUMP? DID HE FALL? THE DEATH OF DONNY HATHAWAY IS SHROUDED IN MYSTERY. BUT ONE THING IS CERTAIN - HE WAS A GENIUS. AND HE INFLUENCED THE BEST

He wrote and produced for Curtis Mayfield, sang hit duets with Roberta Flack, recorded a movie soundtrack at the behest of Quincy Jones and began his own albums with classical tone poems. Donny Hathaway really should have been one of the biggest soul stars of all. But 20 years ago, he fell to his death from the 15th-floor bedroom window of a New York hotel .

On the evidence of a door locked from the inside and information that, six years earlier, the singer had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, police assumed suicide. Some of his family and friends, however, maintain that Hathaway's death was accidental; that his mood on the night of 13 January, 1979, when he'd recorded lead vocals to "Back Together Again", later to become the last of his successful duets with Flack, had been relatively upbeat. Whatever the truth, there's no doubt that the demise of Donny Hathaway at the age of 33 robbed the music world of one of its most naturally gifted performers.

Eric Mercury, co-writer and co-producer with Stevie Wonder of "You Are My Heaven", the other tune recorded by Donny on the fateful night, unhappily describes what had become a typical studio session for his disturbed friend.

"That album, what became Roberta Flack Featuring Donny Hathaway, was supposed to be duets all the way through. In the end, Donny contributed to only two songs. He was so sick he really shouldn't have been expected to do it. In the studio he'd been talking to us in one voice and then answering himself in another. Other times he'd sit down at the piano and play all these fantastic classical themes, stuff he'd written himself. We cut what we could during lucid periods. In the end, the nurse he had with him didn't ultimately save his life. My view is he should never have been left on his own."

Speaking publicly for the first time, Hathaway's widow, Eulaulah, herself a professional classical singer, admits that her former husband's condition had deteriorated to the point of danger: "He'd been diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic in 1973 and subsequently was hospitalised several times. Like most people who take daily medication, Donny began to think that, if he felt better, he could go it alone: he'd come off his medication and he'd end up getting worse.

"But at no point had he ever tried to harm himself. The point is, all New York hotel windows will come open and if you are neglectful enough to sit on such a ledge, you just might fall. Did he feel under pressure from the record company to do the album? Let's just say, if he was still up to it vocally, then..."

Donny Hathaway was born on 1 October, 1945, in Chicago, but largely brought up by his grandmother, Martha Crumwell, in a poor part of St Louis, Missouri. She was paraplegic but also a noted local gospel singer, and encouraged her charge's obvious musical talents through the church. It wasn't until Donny won a scholarship to Washington DC's Howard University that he encountered the "devil's music" that was jazz, soul and pop.

Seventies soul star Leroy Hutson, Donny's roommate for two years at Howard and writing partner on several of his most memorable songs (including his biggest solo hit, "The Ghetto"), remembers his friend as both an overwhelming talent and a social innocent abroad: "I recall one time, maybe a month into us being roommates, he came home when I was playing Miles Davis' Porgy & Bess album, the one with the elaborate arrangements by Gil Evans. He sat on the couch and listened for a while. Then he began moving the needle around from cut to cut. After that he sat down at the keyboard and rearranged the whole thing as it was playing. He stretched the chords and made it all his own. It was an incredible experience.

"But he found himself living life at so fast a pace, he couldn't really handle it. He became prone to making, let's say, unwise decisions - hangin' with the people that could do him no good, getting himself into deals that could and did hurt him. The contrast between his upbringing and what he found in DC and the record business was something he never came to terms with."

Hutson and Hathaway both sang for The Mayfield Singers, a vocal group put together by Impressions leader and Chicagoan soul power-mover, Curtis Mayfield. After two years of straight As, Donny was seduced into joining Mayfield's new label, Curtom, as in-house arranger and writer for acts like The Impressions, The Five Stairsteps and Holly Maxwell. Even the man who created Superfly was surprised by what he'd signed: "To see him there in the studio at about 21 years of age, directing all these real big session guys like he'd been doing it for years, was a tremendous sight to see. But he always believed in himself. He wasn't conceited about it, but he knew he could do anything these guys could do, and almost certainly better. I'd have loved to sign him as an artist, but it wasn't to be."

Instead, in 1969, Hathaway joined Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun's Atlantic Records. In 1970, "The Ghetto" was released, featuring both his wife, Eulaulah, and crying eight-month-old daughter, Laylah: it was a huge R&B hit. The album which followed, Everything Is Everything, attracted huge acclaim for its merging of classical, jazz and gospel styles.

Then, in 1972, Wexler's suggestion that Donny team up with another of his old college friends, Roberta Flack, for an album of duets, paid commercial dividends. A single, the almost cocktail lounge-smooth "Where Is The Love", was an international Top 10 pop hit, rocketing the Roberta & Donny album to the top of the American album charts. It provided the platform for a slew of Hathaway solo releases throughout the rest of the year, including a superb live album, and his entry to the blaxploitation movie soundtrack archives, Come Back Charleston Blue, which Donny wrote, arranged and performed under the guidance of Quincy Jones. The stage was set for what many regard as Hathaway's masterwork, 1973's Extension Of A Man.

"As its title suggests," says Roberta Flack, "that album showed all the facets of Donny's talents. One of my favourite tracks by him is 'Come Little Children'. It's basically a call'n'holler song, like the slaves in the fields would sing, and yet Donny made it 5/4 - not a rhythm you'd associate with Afro-Americans at all. He could combine the church and the secular like nobody else. I was just glad the record company didn't make him sit on top of some 'rose garden' type strings, like they did to Sam Cooke."

She adds: "There was no end to what he would try. We had learned about writing a tone poem as the opening to a piece of music at college - but black people were not supposed to do that in their own music. So, in 'I Love The Lord (He Heard My Cry)', he put it right there at the opening of the album, as first track. He wouldn't be contained."

Copyright 1999 Newspaper Publishing PLC
The Independent (London)

February 26, 1999

Harlepolis said:

Great article!! Thanks, Harle!!

Harlepolis said:

It is his own composition, but for some reason I had it in the back of my mind that somebody else did it as well.

RipHer2Shreds said:

One thing 4 sure, good ol' Aunt ReRe paid the ultimate tribute when she covered that song for the Malcolm X movie

Harlepolis said:

Great article.

Time to resurrect Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson...



...Come back, Charleston Blue

tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...rmusic.htm

One word, Beautiful !!!!

He also did the theme song to my fave sitcom, Maude!!!

Genius never dies!!

JazzyJ said:

Lady Godiva was a freedom rider
She didnt' care if the whole world looked.
Joan of Arc with the Lord to guide her
She was a sister who really cooked.

Isadora was the first bra burner
And you're glad she showed up. (Oh yeah)
And when the country was falling apart
Betsy Ross got it all sewed up.

And then there's Maude.
And then there's Maude.
And then there's Maude.
And then there's Maude.
And then there's Maude.
And then there's Maude.
And then there's

That old compromisin', enterprisin', anything but tranquilizing,
Right on Maude.



LOL It took me a short while to figure out that it was Donny lol damn.