LINER
NOTES FOR THE SWEET INSPIRATIONS' THE
SWEET INSPIRATIONS
By
Richie Unterberger
What do
Elvis Presley and
Aretha Franklin have in common? Aside from some similar musical roots
in gospel and rhythm and blues, both of those superstars also used the
Sweet Inspirations as backup singers on numerous recordings. Elvis and
Aretha were by no means the only stars to benefit from the Sweet
Inspirations' harmonies; the group sang on so many records by the likes
of Presley, Franklin, Dusty Springfield, and others that it will likely
never be known exactly how many records were graced by their presence.
As a consequence (particularly because of their association with
Presley), they're more known as backup singers than artists in their
own right. Too, one of their daughters became a superstar whose fame
dwarfed that of any member in the group.
The
Sweet
Inspirations, however, also recorded often under their own name between
1967 and 1970, when they issued four albums and a bunch of singles on
Atlantic Records. One of them, "Sweet Inspiration," was even a Top
Twenty hit, though it would ironically lead to long-term employment as
backup vocalists for the most popular singer of them all. "Sweet
Inspiration" was, naturally, featured on their 1967 self-titled debut
LP. Though largely comprised of cover tunes, each track was stamped
with the group's distinctive brand of gospel-soul fusion.
The Sweet Inspirations' gospel roots actually go
back decades before their association with Atlantic, when as a child,
Emily "Cissy" Houston started singing as part of the gospel act the
Drinkard Singers. With a lineup including both Cissy and fellow future
soul singer Judy Clay, the Drinkards recorded a live gospel album in
the late 1950s at the Newport Jazz Festival. In the early 1960s,
Houston replaced Dionne Warwick in a group (led by Dionne's sister Dee
Dee Warwick) that supplied backup vocals to many a session. Coming into
that group around the same time was Sylvia Shemwell, Judy Clay's
sister, who was replacing another future soul hitmaker, Doris Troy.
When Dee Dee Warwick left to pursue her solo career, she was replaced
by Myrna Smith, who—in keeping with the tight circle of connections
bonding the Sweet Inspirations' orbit—had sung in the Gospelaires, who
had also included both Warwick sisters. Estelle Brown, formerly of the
Gospel Wonders, joined to make the group a quartet shortly before they
evolved into the Sweet Inspirations.
Accounts vary as to how the group got their name,
and why Atlantic began to record them on their own. The most fanciful,
and likely least accurate, one was given in the original liner notes to
The Sweet Inspirations, which
proclaimed, "the perspicacious Jerry Wexler one fine day said to the
delicious Cissy Houston: 'I've got an inspiration.' 'Oh, that's
sweet!!' replied Cissy after Jerry had spelled out his plan, and the
Sweet Inspirations were officially named." In her autobiography How Sweet the Sound: My Life with God and
Gospel (written with Jonathan Singer), Cissy Houston remembered
it somewhat differently: "I cut a one-off single for Kapp Records, then
Jerry Wexler, one of Atlantic's partners, reeled me in. I guess he
didn't want me wandering to other labels, so Atlantic signed 'the
Group' [as Houston, Shemwell, Smith, and Brown were known within the
New York recording industry] and called us the Inspirations for our
gospel influence. But there was already another group with that name,
so they dubbed us the Sweet Inspirations." She described the situation
in a slightly different light in the late 1960s in Melody Maker: "As soon as we
started to achieve some success, everybody wanted us. But Jerry Wexler
was so good to us, we thought we'd stick to him." For her part, in the
liner notes to the 1994 CD compilation The Best of the Sweet Inspirations,
Smith recalled Wexler calling the group into his office and asking if
they wanted to put out a record on their own: "We were virtually the
house background singers for Atlantic and it was his way of keeping us
there!"
In his autobiography, Rhythm and the Blues (co-authored
by David Ritz), Wexler offered the most straightforward explanation:
"The Sweet Inspirations became one of the pillars of the Atlantic
Church of Sixties Soul..[they] were fabulous background singers who,
like Aretha, instinctively understood harmonies; they could match
vibratos, switch parts, and turn on a dime....they were always relaxed,
fun, and ready to offer a suggestion or innovative passage. Ultimately,
it was only a matter of common decency to put them under contract as a
featured group. I suggested the name Inspirations, which unfortunately
turned out to be already registered (to a group of acrobats!), so I
added the 'Sweet.'"
The group's career got off to a strong start with
the mid-1967 single "Why (Am I Treated So Bad)?" It was about as
closely tied to gospel music as any soul single could be in that era,
having been recorded by the Staple Singers for their live-in-the-church
1965 LP Freedom Highway. As
Houston observed in her autobiography, "It was a slow, languid
blues written by gospel singer Roebuck Staples, of the Staples. It was
so funky it sounded like it was recorded down in a Louisiana bayou
complete with tasty blues licks, a walking bass and seductive horns."
The single made the R&B Top Forty and got up to #57 in the pop
charts, while a more pop-oriented follow-up, "Let It Be Me" (previously
a Top Ten hit for both the Everly Brothers and the soul star duo of
Jerry Butler and Betty Everett), made it all the way up to #13 in the
R&B listings, though just grazing the bottom of the pop Top 100.
Both singles were included on The
Sweet Inspirations, and while these had both been cut at the
same April 25, 1967 session at Atlantic Studios in New York, the LP
would be filled out with material done in Memphis, some of which also
found its way onto singles.
Several of the songs on The Sweet Inspirations had likewise
already been made into popular records by other artists. "Don't Fight
It" was a Top Five R&B hit for Wilson Pickett; "Knock on Wood" had
been a big soul smash for both Eddie Floyd and the duo of Otis Redding
and Carla Thomas; "Do Right Woman—Do Right Man," the flipside of Aretha
Franklin's maiden Top Ten hit "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Loved
You)," was an R&B Top Forty charter under its own steam; Ike
Turner's "I'm Blue" was a Top Twenty hit for the Ikettes in 1962; Burt
Bacharach and Hal David's "Reach Out for Me" had found success with
both Lou Johnson and Dionne Warwick; "Don't Let Me Lose This Dream,"
written by Aretha Franklin, had been included on Franklin's first
Atlantic LP, I Never Loved a Man the
Way I Love You, which got to #2 in 1967; and "Blues Stay Away
from Me," though first recorded back in 1949 by the great country duo
the Delmore Brothers, had become a genre-crossing standard of sorts,
cut by everyone from Les Paul & Mary Ford to B.B. King and Gene
Vincent. Remarkably, however, The
Sweet Inspirations did not sound, as so many cover-dominated
albums do, as if the singers and players were phoning it in. Each track
was sung with gospel-fired intensity, yet given thorough contemporary,
spirited, and funky late-'60s soul arrangements.
There was, however, some relatively unfamiliar
quality material on The Sweet
Inspirations, including the luscious, dramatic ballad "Oh! What
a Fool I've Been." The bluesy, anguished "Here I Am (Take Me)" was
written by Stax Records' top songwriting team, David Porter and Isaac
Hayes. More famously, "Sweet Inspiration," penned by the
nearly-as-famous composing duo of Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, soared
into the Pop Top Twenty in the spring of 1968. According to a 2005
interview that Myrna Smith gave the Elvis Australia website, "The
session was going okay, but there weren't any songs that kind of stood
out. So a couple of guys left the session, went into another room.
Maybe forty minutes later they came back with a song that was named
after us called 'Sweet Inspiration.'"
As Oldham explained in Peter Guralnick's book Sweet Soul Music, "I had worked
with the Sweet Inspirations with Aretha, and gotten to know 'em and
loved the way they sung, so I couldn't wait for them to get a record on
their own. So I went to the session that night...Dan [Penn] was sitting
there, and we were watching all this go down, and they did two
songs—awful stuff—and my heart started sinking, and I said to Dan,
'Let's go next door and try to write a song.' We started walking
upstairs, and he said, 'I ain't got no idea,' and I said, 'Let's just
take off on that "sweet inspiration,"' and we hit the old guitar, and
we come back down there in a little while, and they were still moaning
and groaning. And we played it to 'em, about the second time Dan ended
up on the board, and I was playing guitar." Guralnick also reported in Sweet Soul Music that "Jerry Wexler
asked Spooner for a third of the royalties, since he had given the
group its name. What were the writers' reactions? 'We didn't comment,'
says Spooner with a dry chuckle."
"Sweet Inspiration" would have repercussions far
beyond its considerable chart success, leading to the group's
long-running gig as backup singers for Elvis Presley on both live
performances and recording sessions. As Smith noted in her Elvis
Australia interview, "Elvis heard that song and liked it. And, so he
got his people to get in touch. We didn't have to audition. He just
knew that we were the ones that he wanted to sing because he wanted a
soulful, R&B, gospel-sounding female group and gospel male
group. He had it all planned, and so we did it without an audition. He
just liked our record." Added Smith in an interview with the Elvis
Information Network website, "One night he even surprised us by singing
our song 'Sweet Inspiration' on stage. We didn't know that he knew it.
Elvis just broke into it and so we started singing background and he
was singing lead and we were shocked. It sounded good. It's those odd
little extras that made the individual concerts so special."
The Sweet Inspirations did continue to make records
for Atlantic over the next few years, but never did chart as high again
with any of their singles. Nor did any of their subsequent albums make
the Billboard listings,
though The Sweet Inspirations
had done quite well, making #12 in the R&B charts and #90 pop. By
the time of their final Atlantic session in 1970, Cissy Houston was
gone, having left at the end of the 1960s to start a solo career,
putting the original version of "The Midnight Train to Georgia" on a
1973 single shortly before Gladys Knight & the Pips had a #1 hit
with the song. To the general public, of course, she's most famous as
the mother of Whitney Houston.
The Sweet Inspirations did record on their own after
leaving Atlantic, issuing an album on Stax in 1973. It's their work at
Atlantic, however, that's most highly regarded by soul fans, and
spotlighted to fine effect on this, their initial full-length
recording. -- Richie Unterberger
unless
otherwise specified.
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