MISS LORRAINE ELLISON STOPPED ME IN MY TRACKS ONE DAY IN MY KITCHEN...

This post is part of my ‘Living Memoirs’ series

I was in the kitchen in my modest abode in London and as is often the case, I like to listen (and often singing along with) tracks from a Spotify playlist I created some time ago entitled ‘David Nathan’s ‘60s Uptown Soul Favourites.’

While cutting up some cabbage and garlic bulbs (both organic, of course!) to steam for my evening meal, I joined in with Maxine Brown (“One Step At A Time”), Dee Dee Warwick (“I’m Gonna Make You Love Me”), The Radiants (“Voice Your Choice”) and Irma Thomas (“It’s Starting To Get To Me Now”), all reminders of my youth, each song serving up a particular memory from the time when I first began to treasure real soul music.

Maxine’s ode to a hasty lover (penned by a very then-youthful Ashford & Simpson with writing partner Joshie Jo Armstead), Dee Dee’s musical demand (which I first heard on a UK pirate radio station in 1966 days after it was released in America), The Radiants’ echoing a teen plea I knew well to be picked from the pack; and Irma, regretting letting go of an errant lover (noting that Irma’s music unwittingly provided a backdrop for some real-life trauma for me involving the partner of her UK fan club in 1967).

Soul music has ALWAYS been an ‘as lived’ experience for me since the day I heard. and instantly fell in love with, Dionne Warwick’s heart-breaking ode, “Walk On By,” when I was 16 and smitten in deep unrequited for Marilyn Wolff who said she only went out with older boys. It is still my favourite recording of all time….

SINGING ALONG WITH…LORRAINE ELLISON? AN ‘ACQUIRED’ TASTE…

Back in my kitchen: the greens and garlic are ready and the playlist is still on. It’s natural for me to keep on singing along but it’s time to eat…until THAT voice, the unforgettable cut-you-to-the-core-emotion-beyond-emotion sound of Miss Lorraine Ellison bringing every shred of deep intensity to her version of a no-chance-in-a-million-possibility-of-being-hit-recording of “You Don’t Know Nothing About Love,” previously recorded by another unheralded soul music hero, Carl Hall in 1967.

Lorraine Ellison’s vocal style is an acquired taste, not as Brits like to say, ‘everyone’s cup of tea.’ Like me, when it comes to love and romantic partnerships. I am, unashamedly, ‘an acquired taste’. A friend of mine in Los Angeles once remarked - when I asked why he never introduced me to prospective guys to date - ‘You’re not the marrying kind.’

I was highly offended at the time and I knew truth when I heard it: for much like the super-soulful Lorraine Ellison at her stratospheric best, an acquired taste, indeed. The result was minimal popularity other than with ‘those in the know’ (think the iconic Laura Nyro, Patti LaBelle and a few other discerning folks including her longtime producer Jerry Ragovoy), Lorraine didn’t find compromise easy when it came to being true to her art and fully being herself.

RANDY’S RECORDS, “I DIG YOU BABY” AND “PLEASE DON’T TEACH ME TO LOVE YOU”

I first came across Lorraine Ellison’s name sometime in late 1965 or early 1966. I don’t have any idea how I discovered the existence of Randy’s Records, a shop in Gallatin, Tennessee that specialized in mail order and shipped 45s to the UK.

Given my teen obsession with finding R&B rarities (which had begun when I frequented a little basement shop off London’s Leicester Square called Transat that had imports of LP treasures such as Irma Thomas’ “Wish Someone Would Care” and Brenda Holloway’s “Every Little Bit Hurts”), when I got a copy of Randy’s regular catalog, I would thumb through it and, aided by depicted photos of then-current R&B hitmakers, I chose 45s to buy with the Saturday pocket money I earned from working at local record stores in London.

Among my prized possessions to this day are the very same singles I purchased back in ‘66 still intact - two 45s on Mercury Records by the ‘mysterious’ Miss Ellison…

About six months after Lorraine’s second Mercury single was released (with a brilliant ‘B’ side, “Please Don’t Teach Me To Love You,” penned by the ever-amazing Van McCoy with a lyric to which I could relate as a lovelorn teen!), a new recording emerged on Warner Brothers, seemingly ‘out of nowhere’.

As I would discover eight years later in my first full-on interview with Ms. Ellison, it was hardly that: it seems fellow Philadelphia-based Sam Bell - one of the co-writers with Lorraine and producer Dennis Lambert of “I Dig You Baby” (subsequently recorded by, and a hit for Jerry Butler) - whose career began with a local group called The Gainors (with a line-up that included Garnet Mimms and Howard Tate among others) had initially managed her.

As a member of Garnet Mimms & The Enchanters (of “Cry Baby” fame), Sam Bell had worked with producer Jerry Ragovoy and when the brief contract Bell had secured for Lorraine with Mercury ended, he introduced her to Ragovoy, who was working at the time as an A&R guy for Warner Brothers in New York…

“Stay With Me” was written by Ragovoy with George David Weiss (known for such standards as “What A Wonderful World,“ “Lullaby Of Birdland”) and there are few words that can describe the dramatic nature of the song. Suffice to say that Lorraine Ellison brought all the power and emotion of her years as a gospel singer with the family group, The Ellison Singers to the 3-minute-plus opus: no surprise that Janis Joplin and Bette Midler were among the high-powered vocalists who delivered their own ‘take’ on the song after Lorraine’s definitive original.

Lorraine, 1974: I remember that first session on “Stay With Me” particularly vividly. Jerry called up and told us we had the studio for three numbers — because Frank Sinatra had cancelled one of his sessions. Well, Garry Sherman was the arranger for the session and he had a huge orchestra assembled…for Frank Sinatra! No one told them that he’d cancelled and that I was going to be recording instead and it was real funny watching them go over the scores for the songs we were doing. When the time came’ for me to come out to record, the guys just fell apart — Frank sure had changed!

“WHO IS THAT?” AND A CHANGE OF MIND…

The first time I heard “Stay With Me” was a month or so after its release in America in October 1966. I was staying at the home of Dave Godin, the ‘Godfather Of R&B’ in the UK: it was during a time when he and I were working on the plans for what would be Soul City, the record store we created (with Dave’s friend Robert Blackmore) which opened on December 10, 1966.

Dave regularly received promotional copies from Pye Records in the UK, who were at the time the British licensees for Warner Brothers Records. After the postman delivered a package from Pye, Dave put on Lorraine’s 45. I was in the room I slept in when I heard “Stay With Me” and I vividly remember my reaction! “Who is THAT?” I yelled. Dave played the record a second time, which was unusual for him. He would only do that if a particular disc was of interest.

I was stunned by the sheer emotion imparted by Lorraine on the record. Dave seemed to concur. It was the essence of what we would come to know as ‘deep soul’ and initially, he thought “Stay With Me” was amazing. I say ‘initially’ because a few years later, for reasons unknown, he had revised his opinion in a column he wrote for Blues & Soul in which he claimed (inaccurately) that Lorraine’s vocals were ‘contrived.’ By the time his comments appeared, Dave and I were no longer working together at Soul City (which went out of business in the summer of 1970) so I never got an opportunity to ask why he’d changed his perspective on Lorraine’s Warners debut…

As an ‘odd’ personal aside, in the first few months of 1967, I had a personal ‘encounter’ with a Peruvian doctor named Tony and in the ‘afterglow’ of our tryst, he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I worked at a record shop selling R&B and, no lie, he wanted to know if I knew of a singer called….yes…Lorraine Ellison!

Apparently, a friend of his in California who worked at her record label had been extolling her vocal virtues so when I met up for a second time, I brought a copy of Lorraine’s “Stay With Me” along as gift, although the title did not reflect my sentiments at the time! Some ‘Machu Picchu’s’ are too challenging to climb!

REVERENCE FROM LAURA NYRO AND OTHER NOTABLES…

Lorraine became revered among pop and rock luminaries such as Van Morrison and Laura Nyro (who loved her work and had planned to write a song for recordings Lorraine was doing with photographer-producer Stephen Paley - see photo below)

Mass appeal evaded her, no doubt because Lorraine’s vocals were so ‘outside’ the usual approach that female artists took at the time. While Aretha Franklin and Patti LaBelle (another Philadelphia native) were known to praise Lorraine’s recordings, the fact that she did almost no live performing was a detriment although she continued to record (mostly with Jerry Ragovoy) for Warners, only switching producers - after a less-than-successful sessions with Paley in Muscle Shoals in 1970 - and then, finally, Warners’ executive Ted Templeman who masterminded her final self-titled LP, released in July 1974 which was the catalyst for my lengthy phone interview with her for Blues & Soul, the most extensive article on her to ever appear in print.

SWEET & SOULFUL SISTER LOVE…

Such is the synchro-destiny of my life: in October 1974, when I visited America for the first time, I took a day or so for a whirlwind trip to Philadelphia during which I got to met Lorraine Ellison in person! The circumstances remain a little hazy and it may well have been that I visited her a second time after I began my tenure writing for Blues & Soul in America in the early months of 1975.

What remains forever fixed in my memory banks was her kindness and warmth. She invited me to stay over at her home in Philly with her husband Sam and children, including Tonya, who remarkably, I met when I lived briefly in the city in 2008 when we took a trip to the very house (whose address I had memorized from when I first went there!).

That was two years after I had spoken with Tonya and Lorraine’s granddaughter Sidny on the phone after the folks at Rhino Records gave me the amazing opportunity to create “Sister Love,” a 3CD compilation of all of Lorraine’s Warner Brothers’ including a whole disc of unreleased demos, many of which featured Lorraine accompanying herself on the piano without any other instrumentation.

It was the second reissue compilation I had created from Lorraine’s over 60 recordings for Warner Brothers, the first an Ichiban Soul Classics 23-track CD thanks to my friend John Abbey, who was the editor and owner of Blues & Soul for many years and without whom I may never have had the chance to write for the magazine in the US in 1975, let alone begin my own reissue label twenty years later. More synchro-destiny…

Like so many of the greatest artists that I’ve ever had the pure joy to meet after relishing and bathing in the magnificence of their work, Lorraine never got the public acclaim, recognition and acceptance her unique talent deserved…and yet, I muse, if she touched just one soul - and I know she did, speaking directly and personally - then there’s a quiet assurance that she got her divine job done.

Please do listen to this playlist I created of some of Sister Love’s work but a warning: please don’t try sing along!

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