Brook Benton - Endlessly: Hits & Rarities Extended Liner Notes
Brook Benton - Endlessly: Hits & Rarities
Rhythm and blues journeyed uptown during the late 1950s in search of widespread pop crossover acceptance. Instrumentation expanded from hard-socking rhythm sections accentuated by a couple of horns to full orchestras complete with violins and choirs. Chord structures grew more adventurous, especially once a heavy gospel influence was introduced. A new generation of polished young singers not tied to the blues experience rose to prominence, many of them indelibly influenced by sanctified sounds. One of the most popular artists within that crowded field was Brook Benton.
Benton’s uncommonly rich, smooth baritone pipes were surrounded with sumptuous strings by Clyde Otis, his songwriting partner and producer at Mercury Records, their sophisticated efforts tabbing Brook as a pioneer of the uptown soul movement. Benton’s lengthy winning streak for Mercury commenced in early 1959 with the magnificent ballad “It’s Just A Matter Of Time.” He encored with an avalanche of opulent solo smashes as well as a pair of saucy 1960 duets with Dinah Washington that were also tremendously popular. Like his fellow standup vocalists Lloyd Price, Sam Cooke, and Jackie Wilson, all of them charismatic enough to set any stage ablaze, Benton’s virility on the pop charts was nearly as titanic as it was on the R&B hit parade, where he scored three chart-toppers in 1959 and three more the next year (including his two duets with Dinah).
The mellow and mellifluous Benton chased success for quite a while prior to his big breakthrough on Mercury. Born Benjamin Franklin Peay in Lugoff, South Carolina (or nearby Camden—they’re only five miles apart) on September 19, 1931, he hailed from a deep gospel background. His father, Willie Peay, served as choir master at Lugoff’s Ephesus Methodist Church, where Benjamin honed his vocal chops with the Echoes of Zion youth choir before relocating to New York in 1948.
The teenaged singing hopeful joined a succession of gospel groups, notably Bill Landford and the Landfordaires and the Jerusalem Stars, prior to making the leap into R&B in 1954 with a newly minted vocal aggregation called the Sandmen, rounded out by second tenor Walter Springer, baritone Furman Haynes, and bass singer Adrian McDonald. Through his friend, gospel deejay/talent manager Bill Cook (his stable was headed by another velvety R&B vocalist along similar lines, Roy Hamilton), Benton and the Sandmen found their way to Columbia Records’ OKeh subsidiary in December of 1954, a young Quincy Jones leading the studio band on the quartet’s revival of Oscar Hammerstein II and Sigmund Romberg’s pop chestnut “When I Grow Too Old To Dream.” Its OKeh flip side was the Cook-penned “Somebody To Love.”
The Sandmen weren’t long for the world, although they did add smooth harmonies at sessions behind quirky Columbia artist Lincoln Chase and hitmaking OKeh blues shouter Chuck Willis. Benjamin Peay was broken out as a solo artist in the summer of ‘55 when he cut “The Kentuckian Song” under his new moniker of Brook Benton, apparently dreamed up by OKeh A&R man Marv Holtzman (the Sandmen did receive underbilling on the B-side, “Ooh”). After another OKeh solo release, Columbia shifted Benton over to its pop-oriented Epic imprint for two more. The second one, “The Wall,” stood a chance at a chart berth until pop chanteuse Patti Page registered a mild hit with the song during the spring of 1957 for Mercury.
Benton’s Epic contract expired with no hits posted, so he defected to RCA Victor’s Vik logo that summer. Both sides of Brook’s Vik debut single, “I Wanna Do Everything For You” and “Come On, Be Nice,” were penned by the singer and his frequent compositional partner, up-and-coming New York songsmith Clyde Otis. The Prentiss, Mississippi-born Otis and veteran music publisher Dave Dreyer had just launched Eden Music, where many songs that Brook and Clyde wrote together would be published.
Songwriting and singing demos were Brook’s primary vocations prior to his imminent bout with stardom. They handed vivid audio blueprints to the Diamonds for “The Stroll” (scribed by Otis and Nancy Lee), to Nat “King” Cole for “Looking Back” (the creation of Otis, Benton, and arranger Belford Hendricks), and to Clyde McPhatter for “A Lover’s Question” (written by Brook and Jimmy Williams), all 1958 smashes. Brook also co-wrote McPhatter’s ‘59 hit “You Went Back On Your Word” with Bobby Stevenson.
The first disc of Sunset Boulevard’s Brook Benton collection unearths 18 rare Benton demos circa 1957-58 that were created for other singers to closely follow in the studio but polished enough to merit release had some enterprising label snapped them up. In addition to “A Lover’s Question” and “Looking Back,” they include “Next Stop Paradise” and “I’ll Stop Anything I’m Doing” (both introduced on wax by Teddy Randazzo), “Nothing In The World” (Cole again), “You’re Movin’ Me” (Walter Spriggs), “Everything Will Be Alright” (Gene Allison), and “You Can’t Get Away From Me” (Vikki Nelson). “Ain’t It Good,” “Ninety-Nine Percent,” and “Doggone Baby Doggone” sound like lost hits. Benton would croon “Nothing In The World (Could Make Me Love You More Than I Do)” himself for Mercury as the B-side of his hit ‘59 Yuletide single “This Time Of The Year.” Clearly on the cusp of making it big, Benton was such a prolific songwriter that locating prime material would never pose a problem.
Benton found his way onto the silver screen in 1957, charmingly miming his relaxed Vik ballad “If Only I Had Known,” which he co-authored with Otis, in the alleged Alan Freed biopic Mister Rock and Roll (his co-stars included McPhatter, LaVern Baker, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers). Vik was also responsible for pressing up Brook’s first pop chart entry for Vik in the spring of 1958, “A Million Miles From Nowhere.” Before he exited Vik, Benton demonstrated his mastery of rock and roll with “Crinoline Skirt,” but he couldn’t find his way back to the hit parade there.
Mercury was so impressed with Otis’ work on “The Stroll” that president Irving Green appointed Clyde to the position of New York A&R chief (Diamonds manager Nat Goodman reportedly applied pressure on label brass to boost Clyde’s chances), making history because Otis was the first African American named to such an exalted position by a major label. One of Clyde’s first and wisest moves was to sign his buddy and writing partner Benton to Mercury.
At his first session for his new label, Brook cut the delightful “It’s Just A Matter Of Time,” which he’d written with Otis and Hendricks. Clyde spared no expense on its first-class production values, lavishing a full string section on the ballad (Ray Ellis was the uncredited arranger) that gave Brook’s stately vocal effort all the more impact. The song took off like a rocket during the early months of 1959, topping the R&B hit parade for nine glorious weeks in Billboard and making an impressive #3 pop showing. Its rocking opposite side “Hurtin’ Inside,” a throwback to Benton’s earlier sound without any sign of strings that was penned by the singer with Otis, Randazzo, and Cirino Colacrai, made a sizable chart splash of its own.
Mercury sprang for low-budget promo films of both songs ostensibly intended for airing on TV record hop programs. Brook lip-synched “It’s Just A Matter Of Time” in front of a wall of clocks, his graceful hands constantly in motion. He wore workout togs to mime “Hurtin’ Inside” on a set tricked out to resemble a gymnasium, the singer athletically hitting a weight machine during the sax solo and taking a medicine ball hard to the gut on the fade out.
A hitmaking formula thus firmly established, Brook and Clyde got down to business on a regular basis at Mercury’s New York studios. His initial Mercury albums were larded with vintage pop standards, while Benton and Otis and concentrated on creating hit singles overflowing with high-flying strings and insistent rhythmic pulses. Both sides of Brook’s Mercury encore 45 were major sellers piercing the R&B Top Five during the spring of ‘59: the galloping “Endlessly,” its creation initially credited solely to Otis though Benton’s name was soon added (he sang it on CBS-TV’s top-rated Sunday evening variety program The Ed Sullivan Show), was tethered to the luscious “So Close,” Benton exploring the lowest reaches of his bottomless pipes (this time Brook and Clyde were joined in its writing by another uptown soul architect, Scepter/Wand Records A&R ace Luther Dixon).
Belford Hendricks’ downright audacious violin arrangement for “Thank You Pretty Baby,” Brook’s R&B chart-topper later that summer, had violins whirling about the stratosphere while cellos laid a husky foundation underneath and guitars slashed through the outskirts. Benton remained a delight behind the mic, rapturously describing his beloved over a bouncy, danceable beat. The Benton/Otis copyright designation had become a surefire guarantee for hitdom. Yet the pair wasn’t averse to reaching out to their friends for worthy material: the devotional “So Many Ways,” the last of Brook’s three 1959 R&B chart-toppers and a #6 pop smash, was supplied by Bobby Stevenson.
Brook wasn’t the only Mercury star benefitting from Otis’ studio acumen. Dinah Washington had been one of the company’s first genuine luminaries, straddling the fence between rhythm and blues and jazz and excelling at both as she nailed a lengthy string of R&B smashes from 1948 on before falling into something of a commercial slump when rock and roll reared its impudent head during the mid-‘50s. Clyde rejuvenated her career by applying the same violin-enriched formula to her output that he had perfected with Benton—her majestic readings of “What A Diff’rence A Day Makes” and “Unforgettable” not only restored her to the R&B airwaves in 1959, they were major pop sellers as well.
So why not team the two up for some devilishly delightful duets?
That’s exactly what Otis did, bringing Brook and Dinah into New York’s Fine Recording in December of ‘59 for what was originally intended as the first session for a duet album with Belford Hendricks contributing his usual highly inventive arrangements. It didn’t work out that way. Although the date produced two number one R&B/Top Ten pop hits with the captivating duets “Baby (You’ve Got What It Takes)” (penned by Otis and Murray Stein) and “A Rockin’ Good Way (To Mess Around And Fall In Love)” (the work of Benton. Otis, and Luchi DeJesus, it had premiered in 1958 by Priscilla Bowman on Chicago’s Abner logo with Benton and Otis’ “I Ain’t Givin’ Up Nothin’” its flip), all was not copacetic between the two stars.
Brook was at times encountering difficulty knowing precisely when to come in—witness Dinah’s salty “You’re in my spot again, honey” adlib coming off the second bridge of “Baby (You’ve Got What It Takes).” Though their repartee seemed playful enough on the surface—charming, in fact--there was a spiky edge to a few of Dinah’s retorts. A subsequent public argument between the pair when Washington was starring at Roberts Show Club on Chicago’s South Side doomed the project permanently in a foul torrent of cursing and insults. Brook would briefly experiment with a 1963 duet single with Damita Jo for Mercury (“Baby, You’ve Got It Made”), but both he and Dinah were better off leaving the coosome twosome action to less volatile personalities.
Besides, Brook was still cranking out one solo smash after another, although “The Ties That Bind” stalled out disappointingly that spring. “Kiddio,” Benton’s solo R&B chart topper in the late summer of 1960, wasn’t exactly fresh off the presses, Randazzo having originally belted the Benton/Otis theme in Mister Rock and Roll back in ’57, but Brook’s thrilling version was unequivocally definitive, Hendricks pouring jaunty violins over what was basically blues with a beat as Benton sashayed through its cute storyline with disarming ease. No wonder the anthem cracked the pop Top Ten: Brook made it all seem totally effortless and natural.
His legion of fans didn’t mind if Benton reached back for an old pop standard from time to time. Rube Bloom and Johnny Mercer’s “Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear To Tread)” harked back to 1940 and competing renditions by orchestra leaders Bob Crosby, Kay Kyser, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and Harry James; Brook’s scampering remake made a lofty #5 R&B showing during the first weeks of 1961 (Rick Nelson’s ‘63 revival did even better than Benton’s). Airplay was split on Brook’s next Mercury offering, the jaunty “For My Baby” making a #2 R&B showing and its elegant plattermate “Think Twice” climbing to #6 (Otis was in on the composition of both).
“The Boll Weevil Song” marked Brook’s first foray into countryish material and proved his top seller of 1961. Hendricks sketched out a repeating piano figure, laidback strings, and backing vocals by the Mike Stewart Singers to abet Benton’s largely spoken tale of a beetle dedicated to cheekily destroying a farmer’s crops. Brook’s easy-going rendition likely referenced Tex Ritter’s 1945 hillbilly rendition on Capitol, though blues legend Lead Belly had recorded a similar piece a decade or so before that. Benton’s charming redo registered a #2 peak on both the pop and R&B hit parade.
“The Boll Weevil Song” marked the last Mercury collaboration from Brook and Clyde. They parted ways, ending an incredible winning streak, and Benton’s production reins passed along to his successor, Shelby Singleton. Shreveport, Louisiana had been Singleton’s stomping grounds prior to his relocating to New York; his background was largely in country music, and he had an uncanny talent for acquiring masters from smaller labels that blossomed into blockbusters on Mercury and its Smash subsidiary.
“Back during my Mercury years, I picked up things like ‘Running Bear’ by Johnny Preston, ‘Hey! Baby’ and ‘Hey Paula’ from Major Bill Smith, and ‘Sea Of Love’ with Phil Phillips,” said the late Singleton. “Different kinds of things like that. Normally, these would be records that would already be out, that would be making noise in a town, or getting some airplay, and I would get ‘em and put ‘em out on a national basis. But it just so happened that some of these records were actually records that had never been released, and I would happen to get ‘em and hear ‘em.”
Weathering the front office change without breaking stride, Benton reached all the way back to the turn of the century and a well-publicized St. Louis murder case for his next hit, “Frankie And Johnny.” The violent incident had inspired an enduring folk song that everyone from elfin bluesman Mississippi John Hurt to pumping piano man Jerry Lee Lewis had rolled out prior to Benton’s steady-swinging treatment, arranged for a change by Stan Applebaum.
With Otis gone, new writing collaborators were necessary to keep Brook on the charts. For his first hit of 1962, he teamed with Marnie Ewald and Oliver Hall to craft the brawny swayer “Revenge,” Applebaum’s arrangement full of blustery brass and sweet strings. Smooth doo-wopper Malcolm Dodds got the nod to arrange Benton’s next chart entry, a thundering remake of Robert MacGimsey’s 1930s spiritual “Shadrack,” already taken around the block by Louis Armstrong, the Golden Gate Quartet, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and plenty more. It barely slipped into the pop Top 20 for Brook; his next Mercury outing, a swaggering interpretation of Mack David and Elmer Bernstein’s theme to the movie Walk On The Wild Side, didn’t even crack the Top 40.
But Benton righted the ship that summer with “Hit Record,” a laundry list of the ingredients that went into making a smash platter, including the proverbial manager with the long cigar. Dodds’ rollicking arrangement was every bit as clever as Sibelius Williams’ narrative; just like that Brook was back in the R&B Top 20. Back on a roll, Benton switched his recording site to Nashville—far more familiar turf for Shelby—for a marvelously easy-grooving “Lie To Me.” The comparatively stripped-down backing—Music Row’s A-Team and the Merry Melody Singers, headed by Singleton’s wife Margie, who penned the number with Brook—kept the focus squarely on Benton’s splendid pipes throughout the #3 R&B/#13 pop seller.
The biggest of Singleton’s productions on Benton came on another gem from the same Nashville session that again presented the singer in a relaxed, blues-drenched setting minus the big city trappings. Shreveport-born guitarist Jerry Kennedy led the band on “Hotel Happiness,” the work of Leon Carr and Earl Shuman; Brook’s soaring vocal and a gliding, bluesy groove translated into a #2 R&B/#3 pop juggernaut in the winter of 1962-63.
“Jerry was more or less my right arm during those years,” noted Singleton. “I actually moved him to Nashville from Louisiana, where we’re both from.”
That same bountiful July 16, 1962 session at Owen Bradley’s Nashville studio spawned two more major hits. The regretful “I Got What I Wanted,” another collaboration between Brook and Margie (the two had proximity to one another because Nashville’s downtown hotels were then segregated, so when Shelby’s R&B artists hit town to record, the Singletons put them up at their home), proved a #4 R&B seller in the spring of ’63. It was followed that summer by a catchy “My True Confession,” another Top Ten R&B entry that was the work of Margie and Ray Stevens, a busy Nashville studio keyboardist when he wasn’t making Mercury hits of his own.
“Two Tickets To Paradise,” Benton’s last hit of 1963, was a leftover from his New York dates with Dodds conducting but by no means sounded dated with its horn-fueled drive and Brook’s virile vocal delivery. 1964’s British Invasion knocked a great many veteran recording stars from the uppermost reaches of the pop hit parade and Brook was no exception, though his heartbroken “Going Going Gone,” “Too Late To Turn Back Now,” and its sinuous plattermate “Another Cup Of Coffee” made respectable showings. The unusually up-tempo “Do It Right,” Benton’s final charter for Mercury, came at the end of the year.
RCA Victor reclaimed Benton in the autumn of 1965, reuniting him with Otis as his producer and songwriting partner—though the only hit they emerged with was Brook’s first RCA offering, “Mother Nature, Father Time.” Eight more singles brought the veteran crooner into early 1967 without repeating his chart magic, so Benton moved on to Reprise, where he worked up a pop cover of Leon Ashley’s country chart-topper “Laura (What’s He Got That I Ain’t Got)” with L.A. producer Jimmy Bowen and arranger Billy Strange. Nothing commercial came of that hookup, so Brook moved on to Atlantic Records, which placed him on its Cotillion subsidiary in the fall of 1968.
There Benton made a spectacular comeback under the production auspices of some industry heavy hitters. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had first crack, writing and producing “Do Your Own Thing” on Brook. Then Arif Mardin assumed his arranging and production reins, and things started to happen. “Touch ‘Em With Love” didn’t make any chart noise, but Mardin struck paydirt with Benton’s third Cotillion 45, a remake of Toussaint McCall’s intimate soul ballad “Nothing Takes The Place Of You” that just missed the R&B Top Ten in the summer of 1969. And he was the man behind Benton’s last mammoth hit in the early months of 1970.
Tony Joe White, a swamp rocker from rural Louisiana, set the pop airwaves ablaze in 1969 with his atmospheric slice-of-bayou-life “Polk Salad Annie.” One of the centerpieces of …Continued, White’s encore album for Fred Foster’s Monument Records, was the incredibly atmospheric “Rainy Night In Georgia.” Mardin had the inspired idea of Benton covering Tony Joe’s masterpiece, cutting it at Mack Emerman’s Criteria Studios in Miami with a young soul rhythm section, Cold Grits, subtly backing Brook. Something about White’s downhome lyric really resonated with Benton; his reading was positively sublime. It resonated with his fans as well—not only did it pace the R&B hit parade in March of 1970, it vaulted to #4 pop.
Brook Benton was back on top once more.
Although he made lesser hits for Cotillion after that (notably a cover of Joe South’s “Don’t It Make You Want To Go Home” and the Don Covay/George Soule copyright “Shoes,” both boasting backing from the Dixie Flyers with Mardin still producing), none of Brook’s follow-ups traversed the same lofty commercial heights as “Rainy Night.” Even then, he wasn’t quite through climbing the charts. Brook reunited with Otis one more time on Olde World Records, staying contemporary on a smartly tailored rendition of White’s soulful groover “Makin’ Love Is Good For You” that made the R&B Top 50 in 1978.
There was also time during the latter stages of Benton’s spectacular recording career to revisit many of his greatest successes. Those faithful remakes comprise nearly all of this compilation’s second disc. From “It’s Just A Matter Of Time” to “Rainy Night In Georgia,” Brook replicated his classics, his voice having lost not a thing and the arrangements hewing close to the seminal original versions. It’s intriguing to hear Brook handle his classic duets with Dinah as solo vehicles. The one exception to the remake rule on disc two is the luxurious “Let The Sun Come Out” from the same timeframe as “Makin’ Love Is Good For You.” Written by its producer Otis along with Duncan Cleary, it was an utterly contemporary piece of work. Benton and Otis weren’t content to simply live in the past, resting on their past laurels. They were still competitive and in the market for more hits.
Spinal meningitis and pneumonia took Brook Benton’s life on April 9, 1988 in the New York borough of Queens at the much too young age of 56. He’s been gone for a while now, but his magic carpet voice has aged like fine whiskey. There’s plenty of his supremely assured mic magic to sip and savor throughout this two-disc set.
--Bill Dahl
SOURCES
45cat website: www.45cat.com
Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles 1955-1990, by Joel Whitburn (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 1991)
Joel Whitburn’s Top R&B Singles 1942-1988, by Joel Whitburn (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 1988)
Margie Singleton official website: https://margiesingletonmusic.com/about/
Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebooks: https://www.uncamarvy.com/Sandmen/sandmen.html
Second Hand Songs website: https://secondhandsongs.com/performance/34354/all
Wikipedia website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brook_Benton
WIS News 10 website: HYPERLINK "https://www.wistv.com/2022/04/21/heritage-committee-place-first-historical-marker-lugoff-century-old-church/" https://www.wistv.com/2022/04/21/heritage-committee-place-first-historical-marker-lugoff-century-old-church/
You Tube website: www.youtube.com