The New Prince of Soul
My Career started back in 1958. I left High School, Crane Tech in Chicago to go on the road with the hit group known as The El Dorado’s. In 1955 their biggest hit was released, titled “At My Front Door” also known as Crazy Little Mama. Pirkle Lee’ Moses was the lead singer and I took his place. I knew all their songs from singing with my local vocal group known as the Facinators, we were just a street corner group who sang at the Bud Billican Parades, Westside Parades in Garfield Park, and in the High School corridors to get echo sound of acapella harmonies. We had great voices and could really blend… We always had the girls!
With The El Dorado’s I lived in San Francisco, California for about two years or more promising my mother that I would finish my High School Education going to night school in San Francisco while singing on the weekends. We were working pretty well for about two years, than it started getting slower. At that point I was ready to return to Chicago because I was pretty much home sick, plus I missed my girlfriend that I left back home. While I was singing with my vocal group earlier in my teens, we also sang Gospel songs as spiritual singers known as “The Sensational Starlighters.” I sang lead and we patterned ourselves after Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers. We knew all of their songs. Before singing with “The Artistics” I was very polished. I would say my mother was the reason for wanting to sing I would be waiting on dinner in the kitchen and she would be singing and I would just join her. She was a gospel chorus singer. When Carl Dais signed me, he told me he was going to put me with “The Artistics.” I was then signed to Carl Davis Management under the direction of Columbia Records on the Okeh Label. This gave us our first national World Wide Hit – “This Heart of Mine”, written by Barrett Strong of Motown Records. Carl signed me on the promise that he would make me a Single Artist. And he did another hit later after our biggest Word Wide on The Brunswick Label “I’m Gonna Miss you”. And then my single hit on Brunswick record label, “Time Stopped”. Which I appeared on the Chicago Don Cornelius Soul Train before he went to California; and also America Band Stand, hosted by Dick Clark.
When “Time Stopped” just took off I had been blessed to have worked with and have known some of The Greatest Artist in the World. Such as, Michael Jackson (Jackson Five), Aretha Franklin, Stevie wonder, Temptations, Gladys Knight & The Pips, Smokey Robinson, The Miracles, 4 Tops, Patti Labelle, Tammi Terrell, Dells, Chi Lites, Jackie Wilson, Martha & Vandells’s, Tyrone Davis, Jerry Butler, Johnny Taylor, Gene Chandler, Emotions, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield (On his record label) with my song “Who Will Do Your Running Now”, and “You’re Really Something Sadie” I have played The Apollo Theatre, Regal in Chicago, Uptown in Philly, Howard in Washington D.C, and many Coliseums, Clubs, Colleges, Venues in the U.s and England. I am now recording and hoping to get a record Deal. I’ll never stop… This is my life, to make someone feel better with my voice and The Help of God!
