The success of Compared to What in 1969 enabled Gene McDaniels to stop performing in nightclubs, which he detested.
Gene McDaniels, the American singer and songwriter, who has died aged 76, began and ended his career as the smoothest of vocal stylists. His hits of the early 1960s, such as A Hundred Pounds of Clay and Tower of Strength, cast him as a suave performer of upbeat pop songs aimed at white teenagers; in his last years he would occasionally take the stage to deliver standards with all the graceful inventiveness of the great jazz singer he might have been.
In between came the event that changed his life, when his protest song Compared to What became an unexpected hit after being released on an album recorded at the 1969 Montreux jazz festival by his first employer, the pianist Les McCann, and the saxophonist Eddie Harris. The song went on to be covered more than 270 times by other artists, including Ray Charles, Della Reese and John Legend. Its success enabled McDaniels to stop performing in night-clubs, an environment he detested because of the lack of respect he felt was shown towards the music by their audiences.
The series of albums he made after the royalties from Compared to What started flowing in, joined in 1974 by those from Feel Like Makin' Love, which he wrote for Roberta Flack, failed to earn further chart success but attracted a small cult following which grew as the artists of the hip-hop generation discovered them and recycled their distinctive grooves in the form of samples. He was delighted by the attention from musicians 30 and 40 years his junior. "It's a great source of pride," he said. "I'm glad to be a part of the hip-hop movement – however remotely, however intimately."
The son of a minister, McDaniels was born in Kansas City, Kansas. The family moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where he sang in gospel groups before studying at Omaha University's music conservatory. At 19 he took his four-octave voice and his good looks to Los Angeles, where he sang in clubs and eventually joined the group led by McCann, who was never the most cerebral of jazz pianists but knew how to use the devices of gospel music to get a room rocking. The pair fell out in the early 60s, by which time McDaniels had signed a contract with Liberty Records and begun his string of chart hits with songs provided by the younger generation of Tin Pan Alley composers, including Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard (Tower of Strength), Gerry Goffin and Carole King (Point of No Return), Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman (Spanish Lace) and Randy Newman (Somebody's Waiting). Produced by Snuff Garrett, Liberty's head of A&R, these recordings stayed on the pop side of soul music, with McDaniels's delivery already sounding somewhat formal by the rapidly changing standards of the time.
In the UK, his career was hindered when British music publishers diverted his hit songs to local artists; Craig Douglas and Frankie Vaughan recorded A Hundred Pounds of Clay and Tower of Strength respectively, their popularity ensuring that the covers overshadowed the original versions. Nevertheless McDaniels was invited to Britain to appear alongside Douglas and Helen Shapiro in the 1961 film It's Trad, Dad, whose director, Dick Lester, shot him wreathed in cigarette smoke against a black background, like a Herman Leonard photograph, as he delivered the ballad Another Tear Falls, later to be recorded with greater success by the Walker Brothers.
Garrett also encouraged him to sing such mainstream ballads as And the Angels Sing and Portrait of My Love, using sophisticated arrangements by Marty Paich and Hank Levine in an attempt to turn him into a younger version of Nat King Cole. But perhaps his best recording of the 60s, although not the most successful at the time, was of a powerful song called Walk With a Winner, for which he wrote the lyric. Jack Nitzsche's driving arrangement and dense production helped make it an enduring favourite with Britain's Northern Soul dancers.
At the end of the decade, Compared to What came out of the blue. Inspired by the civil rights and Vietnam war protests, its uncompromising lyric was first heard on Flack's debut album in 1969: "The president, he's got his war/Folks don't know just what it's for/Nobody gives us rhyme or reason/Have one doubt, they call it treason …" Flack's version was accompanied by a delicately funky rhythm, but when McCann and Harris performed it in Montreux they added muscle to the groove so effectively that their nine-minute version quickly became a favourite with dancers, sending Swiss Movement, the LP on which it was featured, to the top of the jazz album charts.
Liberated from financial worries, McDaniels revived his own recording career with two albums, Outlaw (1970) and Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse (1971), in which, now rechristened Eugene McDaniels, he presented a strong and sometimes bitter social and political message set to stripped-down street-funk and quasi-rock rhythms. The cover photograph of Outlaw depicted a multiracial group of armed urban guerrillas, an explicit statement that seemed to align him more closely with the rage of Amiri Baraka and the Last Poets than with the gentler black protest music of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Curtis Mayfield's Back to the World. Their impact, however, was minimal until they were unearthed by hip-hop's crate-digging obsessives, who put such tracks as Cherrystones and Jagger the Dagger to new use. The album Natural Juices (1975) showed a more romantic side, but there was no audience for such fine love songs as Shell of a Man and Dream of You and Me. He moved into record production, working with the organist Jimmy Smith (for whom he produced the album Sit On It! in 1977) and the singers Nancy Wilson and Merry Clayton.
His later years were spent by the ocean in Kittery Point, Maine. In 2010, he performed an acoustic version of A Hundred Pounds of Clay to a group of teenage girls attending an arts outreach programme, and in February this year delivered a delicately poised version of The Nearness of You, accompanied by piano and guitar, to an appreciate audience at the Portland Museum of Art, looking and sounding immaculate.
He is survived by his third wife, Karen, and six children.
• Eugene Booker McDaniels, singer, songwriter and record producer, born 12 February 1935; died 29 July 2011
In between came the event that changed his life, when his protest song Compared to What became an unexpected hit after being released on an album recorded at the 1969 Montreux jazz festival by his first employer, the pianist Les McCann, and the saxophonist Eddie Harris. The song went on to be covered more than 270 times by other artists, including Ray Charles, Della Reese and John Legend. Its success enabled McDaniels to stop performing in night-clubs, an environment he detested because of the lack of respect he felt was shown towards the music by their audiences.
The series of albums he made after the royalties from Compared to What started flowing in, joined in 1974 by those from Feel Like Makin' Love, which he wrote for Roberta Flack, failed to earn further chart success but attracted a small cult following which grew as the artists of the hip-hop generation discovered them and recycled their distinctive grooves in the form of samples. He was delighted by the attention from musicians 30 and 40 years his junior. "It's a great source of pride," he said. "I'm glad to be a part of the hip-hop movement – however remotely, however intimately."
The son of a minister, McDaniels was born in Kansas City, Kansas. The family moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where he sang in gospel groups before studying at Omaha University's music conservatory. At 19 he took his four-octave voice and his good looks to Los Angeles, where he sang in clubs and eventually joined the group led by McCann, who was never the most cerebral of jazz pianists but knew how to use the devices of gospel music to get a room rocking. The pair fell out in the early 60s, by which time McDaniels had signed a contract with Liberty Records and begun his string of chart hits with songs provided by the younger generation of Tin Pan Alley composers, including Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard (Tower of Strength), Gerry Goffin and Carole King (Point of No Return), Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman (Spanish Lace) and Randy Newman (Somebody's Waiting). Produced by Snuff Garrett, Liberty's head of A&R, these recordings stayed on the pop side of soul music, with McDaniels's delivery already sounding somewhat formal by the rapidly changing standards of the time.
In the UK, his career was hindered when British music publishers diverted his hit songs to local artists; Craig Douglas and Frankie Vaughan recorded A Hundred Pounds of Clay and Tower of Strength respectively, their popularity ensuring that the covers overshadowed the original versions. Nevertheless McDaniels was invited to Britain to appear alongside Douglas and Helen Shapiro in the 1961 film It's Trad, Dad, whose director, Dick Lester, shot him wreathed in cigarette smoke against a black background, like a Herman Leonard photograph, as he delivered the ballad Another Tear Falls, later to be recorded with greater success by the Walker Brothers.
Garrett also encouraged him to sing such mainstream ballads as And the Angels Sing and Portrait of My Love, using sophisticated arrangements by Marty Paich and Hank Levine in an attempt to turn him into a younger version of Nat King Cole. But perhaps his best recording of the 60s, although not the most successful at the time, was of a powerful song called Walk With a Winner, for which he wrote the lyric. Jack Nitzsche's driving arrangement and dense production helped make it an enduring favourite with Britain's Northern Soul dancers.
At the end of the decade, Compared to What came out of the blue. Inspired by the civil rights and Vietnam war protests, its uncompromising lyric was first heard on Flack's debut album in 1969: "The president, he's got his war/Folks don't know just what it's for/Nobody gives us rhyme or reason/Have one doubt, they call it treason …" Flack's version was accompanied by a delicately funky rhythm, but when McCann and Harris performed it in Montreux they added muscle to the groove so effectively that their nine-minute version quickly became a favourite with dancers, sending Swiss Movement, the LP on which it was featured, to the top of the jazz album charts.
Liberated from financial worries, McDaniels revived his own recording career with two albums, Outlaw (1970) and Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse (1971), in which, now rechristened Eugene McDaniels, he presented a strong and sometimes bitter social and political message set to stripped-down street-funk and quasi-rock rhythms. The cover photograph of Outlaw depicted a multiracial group of armed urban guerrillas, an explicit statement that seemed to align him more closely with the rage of Amiri Baraka and the Last Poets than with the gentler black protest music of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Curtis Mayfield's Back to the World. Their impact, however, was minimal until they were unearthed by hip-hop's crate-digging obsessives, who put such tracks as Cherrystones and Jagger the Dagger to new use. The album Natural Juices (1975) showed a more romantic side, but there was no audience for such fine love songs as Shell of a Man and Dream of You and Me. He moved into record production, working with the organist Jimmy Smith (for whom he produced the album Sit On It! in 1977) and the singers Nancy Wilson and Merry Clayton.
His later years were spent by the ocean in Kittery Point, Maine. In 2010, he performed an acoustic version of A Hundred Pounds of Clay to a group of teenage girls attending an arts outreach programme, and in February this year delivered a delicately poised version of The Nearness of You, accompanied by piano and guitar, to an appreciate audience at the Portland Museum of Art, looking and sounding immaculate.
He is survived by his third wife, Karen, and six children.
• Eugene Booker McDaniels, singer, songwriter and record producer, born 12 February 1935; died 29 July 2011
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