24-Carat Black's Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth

Zach Schonfeld

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501355516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In 1973, the musical collective 24-Carat Black released an unheralded masterpiece on Stax Records-and then disappeared. Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth, a soul-funk concept album primarily written by the ex-Motown arranger Dale Warren, was too bleak, ambitious, or just outright bizarre to reach mainstream audiences. 24-Carat Black collapsed when Stax went bankrupt, and the group's only completed album sank into cultural obscurity. With deep reporting elucidating an untold story full of cinematic details, this book traces how Ghetto went from commercial flop to enigmatic underground classic embraced by the hip-hop community. It also chronicles, in infuriating detail, how the music industry of the 1970s systematically exploited soul musicians and then left them struggling to get paid-and where 24-Carat Black fits into this broader injustice. This is a fascinating and multilayered story about a remarkable album nearly lost to history. It's also a rare glimpse into what it's like to have your music resurrected by rap samples decades after your career fell apart.

1

The Story of the Ghetto

They called themselves the Ditalians, and for a brief, magical spell, they were the best high school band around Cincinnati. “We were the hottest band to hire,” says drummer Tyrone Steels. “Cuz when we came to play for you, we had a ten-piece band.” Indeed, as the band graduated from talent show curiosity to formidable show band, it dazzled audiences with an ever-expanding lineup, which at one point included two drummers, seven backup vocalists (one female contingent and one male), one MC, and a six-piece horn section.⁴

This is the band that would eventually morph into 24-Carat Black. Yet it would take many years, several lineup shifts, and—most crucially—the arrival of an eccentric interlocutor to get there.

In the beginning, it was just four friends attending Sawyer Junior High in Cincinnati: Steels, James “Sonny” Talbert, Larry Cottrell, and his brother Willie Cottrell (later credited as Billy Best). The group formed in 1965, a huge year for Motown, with the Supremes launching to worldwide stardom and sugary soul-pop gems like the Temptations’ “My Girl” and Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)” ruling the airwaves. Like thousands of other Black teenagers, the Ditalians were inspired. “We were in our early teens,” Steels tells me. “We were crazy about music. We would go home and listen to Motown and all the stuff coming out of the South. So we said, ‘Let’s start a band.’”

The group’s main hangout spot was a record store owned by a man named Bobby Jarrell, whom the teens suspected might have some industry connections. Jarrell took an interest in the Ditalians and became their first manager. “That’s when the group really became a group,” Steels says. “He started booking us gigs at nightclubs throughout Cincinnati and Kentucky. We were young. Some of them clubs we weren’t supposed to be playing at. But he got us in there.”

Now with four male vocalists (including Willie Cottrell), the group refined its chops and became a mainstay at local talent shows. Soon they befriended the owner of a local tuxedo business—supplier of their stage outfits—who introduced them to NBA star Oscar Robertson, a player for the Cincinnati Royals. Robertson was impressed and, surprisingly, decided to bankroll the young group.⁵ With his help, the Ditalians landed a small-scale record deal with a local label called Saxony Records. Saxony arranged a recording session in Nashville for the group’s four vocalists, who were backed not by their own band, but instead Nashville session players.

“And lo and behold, guess who produced those songs?” Steels says. “Dale Warren!”

Indeed, in a startling bit of foreshadowing, a twenty-three-year-old Warren crossed paths with the Ditalians years before he would mold the group into his visionary art-funk ensemble. According to Steels, the singers returned from the session raving to him, “Man, this guy named Dale—this guy was unbelievable.” Yet these early recordings, while appealing, bore no resemblance to the future 24-Carat Black. The jovial call-and-response soul of “Philly Dog New Breed” is a galaxy removed from 24-Carat Black’s “Poverty’s Paradise.”

Besides, the Ditalians’ stage show was centered around upbeat covers, not scorching soliloquies. “We were a local party band,” says saxophonist Jerome Derrickson, who joined around 1968. “We were playing dance music—Motown songs, like ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.’ We weren’t focused on singing like on Ghetto, where you hear us talking about food stamps or you hear the baby crying.”

After the session with Warren, Saxony issued three original tracks by the Ditalians. “They did real well regionally in Cincinnati,” Steels says. “Philly Dog New Breed” even became a local hit and, in late 1966, landed the group a write-up in the Cincinnati Enquirer, which described it as “[a] swinging new record currently being plugged by WCIN.”⁶ But national success was elusive. And Saxony Records was not long for this world.

Meanwhile, the band grew better and better. A six-piece horn section joined. “Aw man, we were really big,” Steels says. “We started performing at dances, weddings, schools, proms. We got our name known around Cincinnati. You had a revue when you hired us! And we were gigging every weekend.” Sonny Talbert’s mother, Virginia Talbert—whose other son, Billy, had joined as keyboardist—became the Ditalians’ manager and arranged for them to record new demos to shop around. They landed a short-lived record deal with Mercury Records.^*

Around 1968, the group scored an even better asset in the form of three powerhouse young vocalists: Princess Hearn, just fourteen; Patricia Hearn, her sixteen-year-old sister; and their classmate Kathleen Dent. The Ditalians had encountered the girls at a high school talent show and quickly poached them. “They wanted Princess ’cause she could sing,” says Patricia, who now goes by P. Ann Everson-Price. “We were like, ‘If you don’t take all three of us, you don’t get her.’” They took all three. Princess could work a crowd singing Aretha Franklin songs, and the Ditalians became more popular than ever.

The Hearn sisters, it turned out, had an older brother named Clarence Campbell, who was in his thirties and lived in Michigan. Campbell had some contacts in the music industry—and he would do anything to help his little sisters. “I just had so much love for my family,” Campbell explains, “and they have so much talent.”

In time, Campbell would reintroduce the Ditalians to the man who would rewrite their destiny. His name was Dale Warren.

Here is what we know for sure about Dale Ossman Warren: (1) He was a musical genius. (2) He drank. A lot.

Anyone who knew Warren invariably mentions one or the other—the brilliance, the boozing. Usually both. Which is not to suggest that they were related. But nor did one sabotage the other. He was, in modern parlance, a high-functioning alcoholic. “He never went anywhere without his bottle of Beefeater,” says Warren’s daughter, Tori Gray. “[But] if it wasn’t for him turning the bottle up, you would never know he had been drinking. He never reeked of it. He always smelled like Brut Cologne. And he was very, very functional.”

In Soulsville, U.S.A., Rob Bowman’s epic Stax biography, Isaac Hayes describes Warren walking into sessions “with a bottle of gin in his back pocket.”⁷ That was the rule, not the exception. “If we had a recording session, he was going to be drinking,” says Everson-Price. “That Beefeater gin—that was his ‘do-it’ fluid. The more he drank, the more he created. And the more he created, the more he drank.”

It wasn’t the usual debauchery. Warren wasn’t a partier. He was an introvert. The alcohol helped him to be around other people, says his longtime music copyist and protégé, Vicki Gray. “And then, after a while, it just became the crutch.”

Now about the genius part. As a classically trained arranger for Motown Records, and later its Memphis-based competitor, Stax, Warren was one of the invisible architects of ambitious 1960s soul. His ear was remarkable. “He could write for a full orchestra without ever touching the keyboard,” says Vicki. “Everything was in his head. Which was pretty darn amazing.”

“I thought Dale was pure genius,” says Shakir Suleiman, a member of 24-Carat Black’s second lineup. “He would bring me music. In the middle of the night. We would sit up and talk over the sheet music. I could see he had his heart inside of that music.”

Warren was born into a musical family in 1943, the son of a concert pianist father and the nephew of Raynoma Gordy Singleton, who would become a crucial figure in the early history of Motown, the pioneering soul label founded by her then-husband, Berry Gordy. Nepotism surely helped his career along, but it wasn’t fronting for a lack of talent. At the age of eight, after seeing the legendary violinist David Oistrakh perform with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, he asked his mother for a violin. She bought him one. By twelve, he was writing music.⁸ By his early teens, according to Numero Group’s research, Warren was “a confirmed violin, cello, and piano prodigy,” spending his high school years performing in professional symphonies around his native Detroit.⁹

He was not born into the sort of abject poverty that Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth chronicles, but that doesn’t mean his childhood was easy. His parents were staunch Jehovah’s Witnesses. “He had to deal with going door-knocking,” says Vicki. “He immersed himself in his music.”

In 1961, Warren, just eighteen, landed a gig at Motown as a staff arranger. Three years later, after Raynoma and Berry had split, his aunt hired him at Shrine, the short-lived label she formed with third husband Eddie Singleton. “Ray kept us busy,” says Warren’s collaborator Robert Manchurian. “We were like turning out cars on an assembly line!”

“Dale was a terrific violin player, could write and arrange for strings, and was versed in the language of classical music,” Gordy Singleton would write in her 1990 memoir, which describes her nephew as a “violin genius.”¹⁰ Indeed, even as his family connections steered him towards the epicenter of American soul, Warren remained firm in his devotion to classical music: here was an eccentric whose idea of a side hustle was guest-conducting a symphony. Naturally, that pedigree infiltrated his work as an arranger. His compositions had a flair for the dramatic. “He took classical music and turned it into commercial music,” Vicki says. She cites Smokey Robinson’s circus-like hit “The Tears of a Clown”: “He fought to put the calliope in it, because it would create the ambience required for people to feel the circus,” Vicki says.

Warren became a prolific arranger, dabbling with a variety of soul labels, including Calla, where he arranged Bettye LaVette’s 1965 hit “Let Me Down Easy.” During his Shrine tenure, Stax—which had been launched out of a garage in 1957 by a white bank employee named Jim Stewart—emerged as the Southern soul answer to Berry Gordy’s hit factory. It was the scrappier, grittier rival, its mid-sixties rise buoyed by the scorching pipes of signature star Otis Redding. As Rufus Thomas once put it: “Motown had the sweet, but Stax had the funk.”¹¹ Indeed, Stax executives favored Black authenticity over crossover appeal—and Stewart, writes Bowman, “was always loudly championing keeping the company’s sound as ‘Black’ as possible.”¹²

But when Warren arrived at Stax in the late 1960s, the label was in crisis. Its marquee act, Redding, had perished in a plane crash. Months later, Stewart severed Stax’s distribution deal with Atlantic Records and was stunned to discover that, due to an obscure ownership clause he had never read, Atlantic would retain the rights to Stax’s entire song catalog. It was an inconceivable betrayal. Stax could no longer profit from its own legacy.¹³

Stax executive Al Bell, a hip-talking former disc jockey soon to become co-owner of the label, had a wild solution: build an entire new catalog from scratch. Bell ordered Stax artists to get to work, plunging the label into creative madness, with the goal of releasing twenty-eight new albums and thirty singles in mid-1969. Of the dozens of LPs that materialized, one sailed above the rest: Isaac Hayes’s astonishing Hot Buttered Soul, the centerpiece of which, a breathtaking, twelve-minute annihilation of the Burt Bacharach standard “Walk On By,” featured orchestral arrangements by Warren. The album sold more than a million copies and transformed the bald-headed singer into Stax’s sexy, velvet-voiced icon.

It was Bell who had spotted Hayes’s star potential when he was working as an in-house songwriter and studio musician for Stax. “I knew Isaac was rare,” Bell says. “I would watch him when he went into the small clubs in Memphis and performed. I called him the pimp and the preacher. He wasn’t the most handsome guy in the world. But Isaac would get on the keyboards and get to rocking and talking and singing his songs. And by the time Isaac left, there were two or three girls leaving with Isaac. I was like, ‘Wow. This guy has magic in him.’”

The singer’s first album, Presenting Isaac Hayes, didn’t ignite. But Hot Buttered Soul changed everything. The Hayes phenomenon was so intense, Bell claims, people were breaking into stores just to steal Soul. “I had every radio promotion person working for every company in this industry getting in touch with me, wanting a copy of that record and running around telling radio stations about it,” Bell tells me. “I’ve never had that experience before or since then.”

The explosion of Hot Buttered Soul paved the way for Ghetto in more ways than one. For one thing, it gave Warren the cachet to turn his loftiest visions into reality. “He got carte blanche in the studio and a budget to back him,” writes Numero Group co-founder Rob Sevier.¹⁴ In the grander scheme, Hayes’s album ushered in a new era in which LPs by Black musical artists were regarded—and marketed—as a serious art form, rather than just a tossed-off repository of singles. “Hot Buttered Soul unquestionably proved that Black artists could sell LPs,” Bowman writes, “and singlehandedly revolutionized the notion of the length and musical palette appropriate for Black artists.”¹⁵ Groundbreaking releases by Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, and others soon followed—all doing their part to expand the potential of the Black LP in the pop imagination.

In other words, before Soul, the notion that an ambitious R&B album with an average track length of eleven minutes could sell a million copies was absurd. After Soul, anything seemed possible—even a soul-funk concept album about poverty.

Warren remained closely associated with Hayes for years, arranging two 1970 follow-up records, The Isaac Hayes Movement and … To Be Continued. Vicki Gray claims he also contributed—possibly as a ghostwriter—to Hayes’s wildly successful Shaft soundtrack, with its wah-wah-toting title theme.^* This is questionable: Warren’s name appears nowhere in the LP’s credits. But, says Gray, “I know he did [Shaft]. I used to write his music. I know his signatures.”

In 1971, Cash Box announc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Introduction: Synopsis
• 1 The Story of the Ghetto
• 2 In the Ghetto
• 3 Rebirth
• 4 Gone
• 5 Poverty’s Paradise
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Also available in the series
• Copyright