(Friday Music is very proud to announce for the first time...)
Friday Music is very proud to announce for the first time ever the stunning 180 gram audiophile vinyl release of The Best of Donny Hathaway. Mastered for the first time from the original Atco Records tapes by Joe Reagoso, The Best of Donny Hathaway features a heavy menu of Donny s finest moments like the funk infused "The Ghetto," the definitive balladry of Leon Russell s "A Song For You," and of course his duet chart topper with Roberta Flack "Where Is The Love," which truly opened up a worldwide audience to this sorely missed genius. Also included is his signature and timeless smash "Someday We'll All Be Free" as well as the super rare holiday classic "This Christmas."
Donny Hathaway was an African American jazz, blues, soul and gospel singer, composer, and arranger. His solo recordings are considered part of the foundation of American soul music which influenced numerous performers, from R&B singers to rappers and singer-guitarists.
Background
Donny Hathaway was born on October 1, 1945, in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was the son of Hosea Hathaway and Druseller Hathaway (later Huntley). He was brought up in St. Louis, in the Carr Square housing project, by his grandmother Martha Crumwell, also known as Martha Pitts, a gospel singer.
Hathaway played the piano and sang gospel at an early age. At three years old, he was performing in public. Billed as "Donny Pitts, the Nation's Youngest Gospel Singer, " he accompanied himself on the ukulele.
Education
Hathaway was classically trained as a pianist, and could play the organ and drums.
At age fourteen, he entered Vashon High School in St. Louis, where he was singled out as a musical prodigy.
During his senior year, he played Grieg's Piano Concerto, as well as the accompaniment to Handel's Messiah. While in high school, he also took part in a music theory program at Washington University in St. Louis.
After graduating from high school in 1963, Hathaway attended Howard University in Washington, on a fine arts scholarship; he majored in musical theory. Professors at the school of music said he was too advanced to teach; they could only expose him to "new musical avenues. " Hathaway was a straight-A student at Howard.
To earn money to help pay for his education, Hathaway played the organ in churches and joined a jazz group, the Rick Powell Trio, composed of fellow classmates, which performed in a number of Washington clubs. He left Howard after three years because he couldn't keep up with his studies and the multiple offers for him to perform.
Career
Hathaway worked in 1968 and 1969 as a producer with Curtis Mayfield's Curtom label in Chicago. There his duets with June Conquest resulted in his first hit in 1969, "I Thank You Baby. " Work-related stress forced him to quit Curtom, and he signed with Chess Records as a staff musician-producer. He also worked freelance with Uni, Kapp, and Stax Records with Woody Herman, Carla Thomas, and the Staple Singers.
The following year he met tenor-saxophone great King Curtis at a music trade convention; Curtis introduced him to Atlantic Records, where Hathaway signed as a performer, writer, and producer in 1970. As a singer, he recorded "The Ghetto" (1970) and "Love, Love, Love" (1973). "The Ghetto" was a rhythm-and-blues hit and established his standing as an important figure in soul music.
From the beginning, his music was that of a preacher and storyteller. Each of his songs was a testimony, a sermon. In a 1973 interview, he said that preaching was his next "master plan. " In fact, he was known for leaning out of the window of the seventeenth floor of the LaSalle Towers, where he lived in Chicago, and preaching to the winds.
From 1968 to 1973, Hathaway composed prolifically, including the score for the film Come Back, Charleston Blue (1972), which he also conducted. He sang the title song on the soundtrack with Valerie Simpson. Hathaway also wrote and sang the theme song for the television show Maude. Although he composed music for both films and television as well as songs recorded by Aretha Franklin and Jerry Butler, Hathaway is best known for his duets with former Howard classmate Roberta Flack. Their complementary voices, Hathaway's dramatic style offset by Flack's purity, brought "Where Is the Love" (1972) and "The Closer I Get to You" (1978) into the top five on the American music charts.
Solo albums include Everything Is Everything (1970); Donny Hathaway (1971); Donny Hathaway Live (1972); Extensions of a Man (1973); and his posthumously released In Performance (1980), taken from live performances at New York's Bitter End and the Troubadour in Los Angeles. With Roberta Flack he recorded Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway (1972), which sold more than 500, 000 copies.
At the time of his death he was working with Flack on Roberta Flack Featuring Donny Hathaway (1980). Hathaway died at the age of thirty-three, as a result of a fall from the fifteenth floor of the Essex House Hotel in New York City. The death was ruled a suicide by the New York medical examiner, but many of Hathaway's friends questioned this finding. Although Hathaway had been hospitalized in the past for emotional problems, friends say he was in good spirits the evening of his death. After a dry spell, his career had appeared to be reviving; he was working again on an album, and "The Closer I Get to You" had just been nominated for a Grammy. According to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who delivered the eulogy at his funeral, Hathaway's death seemed "to have been an accident. Donny died with his coat, scarf and cap on, and it's not likely that anyone would go through the preparation of putting on full attire just to jump out of a window. " Hathaway was buried in Lake Charles Cemetery in St. Louis.
Hathaway was steeped in the religious tradition of the black church.
Views
Quotations:
"When I think of music, I think of music in its totality, complete. From the lowest blues to the highest symphony, you know, so what I'd like to do is exemplify each style of as many periods as I can possibly do. "
Membership
At Howard Hathaway was a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.
Personality
At the height of his career Hathaway was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was known to not take his prescribed medication regularly enough to properly control his symptoms. As his condition was getting worse, Hathaway started to believe that "white people" were trying to kill him and had connected his brain to a machine, for the purpose of stealing his music and his sound.
Quotes from others about the person
According to Roberta Flack, "When we met in the studio to do 'You've Got a Friend, ' he wrote the music at midnight, scored, did the whole job, and we were finished by 2 A. M. "
Critics described the "remarkable intensity" of his music: "Using only the quality of his voice and the originality of his piano style; he didn't have to shout or grunt to convey passionate feelings. "
Connections
Hathaway met his wife, Eulaulah, at Howard University and they married in 1967. They had two daughters, Eulaulah Donyll (Lalah) and Kenya. Lalah Hathaway has enjoyed a successful solo career, while Kenya is a session singer and one of the three backing vocalists on the hit TV program American Idol. Both daughters are graduates of the Berklee College of Music.