Jerry Butler: ‘For Your Precious Love’ and Your Precious Rules
One of the things Jerry Butler liked most about the 1958 Impressions hit “For Your Precious Love,” besides the fact it was a hit, is that it broke multiple unwritten rules of popular songwriting.
“It has no break in the middle,” Butler said in a late-1980s interview. “It has no chorus. Nothing is repeated. It’s all verses. The title isn’t even in the lyrics.”
Okay, that last one is close. The lyrics do say “your precious love,” omitting only “for.” But that doesn’t negate his larger point, which is that the romance of the lyrics and the beauty of the Impressions’s gospel-like harmonies were enough. Marvelous as saxophone interludes are, “For Your Precious Love” didn’t need one.
Butler’s death on Thursday, from complications of Parkinson’s at the age of 85, takes away the last of the original Impressions, who included Curtis Mayfield, Richard and Arthur Brooks and Sam Gooden and whose story illustrates, again, the random origins of so much marvelous music.
The Impressions began, more or less, with Butler and Mayfield meeting as young teenagers in a Chicago church choir. Not long after that in Chattanooga — as recently noted on the website The Strange Brew — the Brooks brothers and Gooden sang in a group called Four Roosters and a Chick. When they moved to Chicago, they teamed up with Butler and became just the Roosters. Butler called his old friend Curtis, he signed on and they became the Impressions, much cooler than the Roosters.
They impressed Vee Jay Records when Butler and the Brooks brothers put music to a poem Butler had written in high school, called “They Say.” They recorded it and Vee Jay pressed it as Vee Jay #280, which is exactly the dream of every singing group except that in this case Vee Jay made one small tweak. The label read not “The Impressions,” but “Jerry Butler and the Impressions.”
Little things mean a lot.
“We had no idea,” Butler said years later. “That wasn’t what we wanted. That wasn’t how we saw the group. It wasn’t me with backup singers.”
But Vee Jay, like other R&B record companies over the years, loved the idea of a group spinning off a successful solo singer. Think Teddy Pendergrass, Lionel Richie, Smokey Robinson, Luther Vandross, need we go on.
Vee Jay won the battle — “For Your Precious Love” gave the label a big crossover hit — and seemingly blew the war. Within months, internal resentment had ripped the Impressions to shreds. Butler left for that solo career and the others apparently were left adrift. By the next year Vee Jay had dropped the group and Mayfield was selling cigars for a living.
Butler did score hits, though, notably the irresistible “He Will Break Your Heart,” and he went out on the road to play them. When his guitarist Phll Upchurch left to play behind Dee Clark — another artist Vee Jay had plucked from a vocal group (the Kool Gents) and turned into a solo success (“Raindrops”) — Butler again rang up his old pal Curtis, who admitted he was still a little raw, but carried no personal resentment toward Butler.
Mayfield also liked the money and he knew he wanted to do with it: resurrect the Impressions. The Brooks brothers stayed only a little while and left again, but the trio that remained — Mayfield, Gooden and Fred Cash — proved a perfect vehicle for the songs Mayfield had begun writing: “Gypsy Woman,” “Amen,” “It’s All Right,” “Keep on Pushing” and his masterpiece, “People Get Ready.”
You could say Vee Jay had accomplished its goal of creating both a successful solo artist and a successful group, except all those later Impressions hits were recorded for another label, ABC-Paramount. That didn’t matter to listeners, but presumably it stung a little for Vee Jay.
While Butler and Mayfield took mostly separate musical paths over the years, they remained friends. They joined up for an Impressions reunion tour in 1983, and after Mayfield was paralyzed from the neck down in a 1990 stage accident, Butler bought him the amplifying equipment that enabled him to sing backup in Butler’s live shows.
Butler had a prominent career beyond music, serving for 33 years as a Cook County commissioner in Chicago. Still, he never stopped singing, and looking back on all of it years later, he had a low-key, somewhat unsettling take on the way much of popular culture had been promoted — based in part on his own experience in the 1970s, when he and other prominent black artists like the Temptations found themselves no longer played on radio stations where they had multiple crossover hits in the ‘60s.
This obviously hurt sales and earnings, Butler noted, and he traced it largely not to individual malice, but to the inertia of unwritten rules.
“If you’re an artist, you need exposure,” he said. “Exposure means opportunities like ‘The Tonight Show.’ But you rarely see black artists there, not because Johnny Carson is racist, but because his show does best when he has guests he feels comfortable with. So you see a lot of white guys who play golf. I have nothing against that. It just leaves out people like me.”
Who might have broken a few rules themselves.
