In 1972 soul singer Barry White, who has died of kidney failure aged 58, found the path that resulted in the sale of more than 100-million records.
The starting point was his appearance on the female trio Love Unlimited’s single Walking in the Rain (With the One I Love). The footsteps and rain sound effects, White’s deep bass baritone voice and arranger Gene Page’s lavish orchestration propelled the record to number 16 in the American pop charts and number six in the R&B lists.
White had seen himself as Love Unlimited’s producer-songwriter. He only sang on the demo as a vocal guide, but when his business partner Larry Nunes heard the tape, he insisted they issue the song with White’s voice on it. White later claimed they had argued for three days before he relented. But, emerging as a solo artist in 1973, he scored a big hit with I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Baby and, in 1974, married Love Unlimited’s Glodean James. In Britain he scored three number-one hits across 1972-73. White modelled his output on Isaac Hayes and Marvin Gaye, both of whom were then hugely successful soul sex symbols. He could never match either singer in talent, so he simplified and synthesised their styles and scored a succession of hits across the next five years.
His trademark sound found him singing intimate odes over billowing orchestral cushions and Latin-tinged rhythms. The results greatly influenced disco, and his raspy bedroom baritone and huge girth led to the nickname ‘the walrus of love”. Thus did he become one of the era’s greatest, if most unlikely, sex symbols.
Among his biggest hits were Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up; Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe; You’re the First, the Last, My Everything; What Am I Gonna Do with You; and It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me.
He first visited Britain in 1973, recalling later that ‘the English were my first international fans, and that is something I won’t forget. England was incredible.”
White called his husky voice ‘my supreme gift, the gilded chariot on which I have driven the music of my life”. His ability to sing songs that were both sexy and romantic established him, in the popular media at least, as a ladies’ favourite.
Between 1973 and 1977 White issued two albums a year, both under his own name and with the Love Unlimited Orchestra. But, by 1976, the formula had become stale. After Your Sweetness Is My Weakness reached number two in the American R&B charts in 1978, his success faded. He issued no new music between 1983 and 1987, though in 1990 he had an R&B number-one hit, participating on Quincy Jones’s The Secret Garden (Sweet Seduction Suite).
White was born in Galveston, Texas, the son of Melvin White and Sadie Carter. His father never lived at home, and his mother moved to the black neighbourhood of Watts, in South Central Los Angeles, when he was six months old. At the age of eight he began singing in the local Baptist church choir, soon becoming its organist and assistant director. He made his recording debut at 11, playing piano on Jesse Belvin’s 1956 R&B hit Goodnight My Love.
By the age of 16 White had fathered two children, quit school and served four months in prison for stealing tyres. In 1960 — while incarcerated — he listened to Elvis Presley’s then number-one hit It’s Now or Never, and focused himself on succeeding in the music business. He sang bass in the Upfronts, though their six singles flopped.
White spent the 1960s as a sideman, songwriter and arranger for small southern Californian record labels. In 1963 he worked on the arrangement of Bob and Earl’s The Harlem Shuffle. Working with Gene Page, he scored twice in 1967 as writer and producer for Felice Taylor, whose I Feel Love Comin’ on reached number 11 in the British pop charts. Using the name Lee Barry, he recorded — unsuccessfully — and, with his first wife, Mary, and their four children, often had to rely on welfare cheques to survive.
Then, in 1972, came the breakthrough.
By the 1990s White had established himself as a pop culture icon. In 1991 he hit number two in the R&B charts with Put Me in Your Mix. The following year he duetted with the British pop singer Lisa Stansfield on All Around the World, and her championing of his cause smoothed his successful return to Britain.
A media that had earlier dismissed him as a singer of trashy boudoir ballads then found a White with a self-deprecating humour, making celebrity appearances on television shows such as The Simpsons and Ally McBeal. The American pop band Fun Loving Criminals had a British hit with a song called Love Unlimited, which celebrated White as a contemporary love god.
White continued to record and tour the world; he was even invited to play at the private parties of the Sultan of Brunei. Yet it was his endlessly recycled greatest hits that sustained his popularity. He scored the film Together Brothers (1974), acted in the controversial Coonskin (1975) and addressed the United Nations on South Africa’s apartheid policies in 1983.
In his autobiography, Love Unlimited (2000), he reflected that ‘I see a world of beauty and perfection. And I strive through my music to spread that vision. To help make this planet we call home a better, more desirable place for us to love one another, to procreate, and to keep our spirits renewed.”
White is survived by his wife Glodean, his partner Katherine Denton and eight children from his two marriages. — Garth Cartwright /