Happy 55th Anniversary to Donny Hathaway’s debut album Everything Is Everything, originally released July 1, 1970.
Writing one of these retrospective pieces usually falls into one of two categories. Either it’s an album you gobbled up on its release and can remember where and when you bought it and how it made you feel in that moment of release. You were there. You were part of that precise cultural moment when it landed in your lap. You lived and breathed the zeitgeist.
Alternatively, it’s often an album released before you were of album-buying age or even before you born. You still have those same feelings of falling in love with it, but you are disconnected from the cultural moment and can only reflect on it, years later. Sometimes reflecting on it can mean an examination of your circumstances at the time and, being a man of a certain (decrepit) age, you can come across as the living, breathing embodiment of Grandpa Simpson shaking his fist at the clouds.
I fear that will be the case here, in talking about the wondrous work of Donny Hathaway.
My musical journey of discovery (like most people’s, I guess) has been dependent on finances. I had no money as a teenager, so I relied on the library’s limited collection of things to copy onto tape at home, or albums traded with my school friends. At University, I had money but pesky things like food and rent needed paying. When I became a teacher, things changed, but I was still bound by an innate sense of financial restriction and the property ladder beckoned.
Still, my absolute favorite thing to do was to travel to central London and the enormous HMV on Oxford Street (not the one that endures, the one closer to Tottenham Court Road end) and stare wide-eyed at the vast array of music available to me. Though money was much more plentiful then than previously, I still clung to the ridiculous notion that it would be frivolous to buy everything that I wanted, even though I had the wherewithal to do so.
Faced with the enormity of opportunity, I would spend hours picking up then putting down albums, until I had a stack that felt acceptable to my guilt-ridden mind. Then on the tube home, I would rip the cellophane off and scour the booklets for names I knew and connections to works I already had, before finally arriving home and diving in.
Ready for some fist shaking at clouds? Here it comes.
Listen to the Album:
It was not as simple (and cheap) as opening an app on your phone or computer and pressing play. It required time, effort and money. It was an investment. And I carried on without a phone in my pocket that could offer me every drop of information about any album I came across. Sometimes I took chances and it paid off. Sometimes it most definitely did not.
Sometimes I listened and felt like the world’s biggest idiot.
Having picked up and put down Donny Hathaway albums numerous times, I finally took his debut Everything Is Everything home with me. Pressing play made me feel like a fool—how had I got through my life to that point without Donny Hathaway being part of it? His voice! His arrangements! The irrepressible life force emanating from every moment of the record! And I didn’t buy it as soon as I set eyes on it? What a monumental dickhead.
That’s more than enough about me though, Donny’s genius awaits.
Donny Hathaway was born in Chicago on October 1, 1945 and was raised by his grandmother in St Louis, Missouri. Anyone who has heard even one minute of his music could imagine what that upbringing was like. At the age of 3, he was singing in church and playing piano alongside his grandmother (a professional gospel singer), another genius nurtured and sculpted by the fertile musical breeding ground of the church.
During his music studies at Howard University in Washington D.C., he shared a room with Leroy Hutson, another future musical powerhouse. Together they left D.C. and returned to Hathaway’s birthplace to work at Curtom records under Curtis Mayfield’s auspice. They produced and wrote for Mayfield’s nascent Motown-like stable, but it became clear to Hathaway that his recording future lay elsewhere, despite Mayfield’s obvious exhortations to record for his label.
Hathaway’s debut Everything Is Everything was released on Atlantic subsidiary Atco and owed its place there to King Curtis. As Emily J Lordi recounts in her wonderful 33 1/3 book about Hathaway’s 1972 live album, Curtis heard Hathaway singing in an elevator, starting off by mimicking the pitch of the elevator motor. King Curtis was caught hook, line and sinker and waxed lyrical to Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun about the astonishing pitch perfect Hathaway.
At this point, Hathaway had already written, produced and recorded his debut album, but it had not yet found a home. That changed when Wexler and Ertegun heard it and it was released on July 1, 1970. Early on in Lordi’s aforementioned book, there is a gathering of quotes from his best friend Leroy Hutson, esteemed biographer David Ritz and academic Mark Anthony Neal that place the “live” version of Donny Hathaway as the most authentic or “best” version.
Enjoying this article? Click/tap on the album covers to explore more about Donny Hathaway:
Throughout the rest of her book, Lordi lays out the ways in which Hathaway creates “Black community, intimacy and joy” in the live setting of his 1972 album, but you can also feel the urge from Hathaway to create a facsimile of types on his debut album. Though a musical genius capable of recording in isolation, the album feels (at times) like it was recorded with hordes of people in the studio.
Towards the end of opener and rousing title track “Everything Is Everything,” there is a chatter between the musicians that would be entirely in keeping with a live gig. While the entirety of “Sugar Lee” is a raucous, audience-participation piece complete with soul claps, yelped refrains and retorts, and ribald appreciation. On “Thank You Master (For My Soul),” things are played largely straight, but there are moments when the odd handclap pierces the rest of the arrangement and at the climax, he tells the listener “Y’all don’t know what I’m talking about” as he replicates a live devise in the studio. There is a very definite sense of dialogue between artist and audience, or more accurately in this case, listeners.
And then there is “The Ghetto,” that masterpiece of tambourine driven, soul-clapping audience participation. There are few albums, if any, that more accurately portray the fact that soul music is simply church music with the occasional lyrical change. Further proof of that comes in the form of his cover of Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”—the sanctified organ, stately gospel sway and impeccable vocal performance wring every ounce of emotion from Simone’s composition. When you add in the vocal ad libs and exhortations for help from the audience, it becomes increasingly impossible to believe that the song was actually recorded in a studio as opposed to a church.
My final word on the power of this work will be a physical one. I am writing this in the midst of a heatwave in the UK, sweltering in a house patently not designed to deal with extreme heat and in front of a fan roughly the size of an elephant, blowing lukewarm air into my face. When I listened to his raucously delirious cover of Ray Charles’ “I Believe To My Soul” as I wrote and made notes, the hairs on my arms stood up and a shiver went down my spine. Music has always had this effect on me, but to have that shiver in this heat, was an unexpected and incredible testament to the incredible power of Donny Hathaway.
The way in which he finds the sweet release of freedom through song is astonishing and you feel his yearning for a live audience throughout. I stop short these days of declaring anything “the best,” rather choosing to think of “my favorites” and Donny Hathaway is my absolute favorite male singing voice and my stupidity at not knowing it for a good portion of my life, makes me revel in it all the more now.
Listen: