Donny Hathaway Live

33⅓ Main Series #117

by Emily J. Lordi

In January of 1979, the great soul artist Donny Hathaway fell fifteen stories from a window of Manhattan's Essex House Hotel in an alleged suicide. He was 33 years old and everyone he worked with called him a genius. Best known for “A Song for You,” “This Christmas,” and classic duets with Roberta Flack, Hathaway was a composer, pianist, and singer committed to exploring “music in its totality.” His velvet melisma and vibrant sincerity set him apart from other soul men of his era while influencing generations of singers and fans whose love affair with him continues to this day.The first nonfiction book about Hathaway, Donny Hathaway Live uses original interviews, archival material, musical analysis, cultural history, and poetry to tell the story of Hathaway's life, from his beginnings as a gospel wonder child to his final years. But its focus is the brutally honest, daringly gorgeous music he created as he raced the clock of mental illness-especially in the performances captured on his 1972 album Donny Hathaway Live. That album testifies to Hathaway's uncanny ability to amplify the power and beauty of his songs in the moment of live performance. By exploring that album, we see how he generated a spiritual experience for those present at his shows, and for those with the privilege to listen in now.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

155 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2016

About the author

Emily J. Lordi is Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and the author of Black Resonance and Donny Hathaway Live.

Reviews

[Gabriella · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short book (120 mini-pages) is a gratifying introduction to the 33 ⅓ series, as well as Donny Hathaway’s life and work. As a result of my “old soul” musical tastes, Hathaway is one of my favorite artists, specifically given his duets with Roberta Flack. Except the obvious facts (his daughter also makes great music and he tragically died at 33 years of age), I didn’t know much about his life, and tried to see if there were any books out there to help me.

We’ve been reading a lot of Emily Lordi in my Beyonce/Solange/Jay-Z class, and I enjoyed the way she talks about black musicians, so when I saw she wrote this one, I knew it’d be a perfect Spring Break read. If Donny Hathaway Live is any indication, the 33 ⅓ books take a critical look at a notable album of a notable musician, and how it fits into their broader legacy.

I say “critical” because it’s clear that Lordi is an academic. It’s equally clear, however, that she’s a great fan of Hathaway’s, and her love for his work is palpable through each song she discusses. One praise of the series called “each [book] a work of real love,” and I can’t find a better way to put it. This is a deliciously biased take on Hathaway’s 1972 album, by a woman who wants to remind us all of his lasting imprint on black music. Lordi focuses on Hathaway’s employment of the black church’s musical traditions, his promotion of the “genius” and technical rigor found in all black music, and his influence on many of your faves.

I think she had some first-hand interviews with Lalah Hathaway, and if not, she employs Lalah's outside quotes with an impressive level of intimacy. Anyway, in these interviews, Lalah mentions how Luther Vandross and Stevie Wonder both told her Donny was their favorite musician. Stevie Wonder is my mom’s favorite (secular) artist, so I’d always sensed some connection between the two. Lordi’s explanation of how Donny Hathaway Live inspired Talking Book, Innervisions, Song in the Key of Life, and beyond helped me to see exactly why Hathaway’s work feels so familiar to me. I’ve talked about my upbringing in the church in a couple of other reviews, and I wished Lordi talked more about the specific musicians he drew from there, but I’m not sure of her own religious background, so maybe that’s asking for too much.

This book will convince you of Hathaway’s genius, but also contextualize his tragic passing. I think a lot of people see Donny Hathaway in the same way they do Phyllis Hyman, projecting the burden of their death onto their life’s work, and deeming it “too sad” or “heavy.” Lordi finds a way to not minimize Hathaway’s mental health struggles, but maximize the incredible, often joyous work he was able to create in spite of these difficulties. Pick it up if you’re interested in learning more about the 33 ⅓ series format, and of course, if you’d like to spend some literary time with a masterful musician.

End Note: I am interested in trying to read more music books this year, and would love to pick out some more in the collection. Does anyone have any favorites? If so, please share in the comments! :)

[Jack Tecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

My heart and soul are full, very special album to me.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m always sad when I ask people if they know Donny Hathaway’s music and they haven’t heard of him. So much about his biography is sad, but I don’t want to dwell on that. If his music is sad, it is also optimistic, and the messages are just as relevant today. Finally there is a book on this great musician for the world to read (there is some poetry out there, too, so this is really the first nonfiction). I always believe the best way to learn about music is to listen, but reading always helps you know what to listen for. In the 33 1/3 series, Emily J. Lordi chose to write about “Donny Hathaway Live” to represent this artist.

If you’re a fan of Donny Hathaway and have tried to read up on him with the few resources available, you’ll find some familiar stories and more, from comprehensive research. If you are not familiar with his work, this will catch you up to speed, and fill in some of the gaps in how his story has been told. Much more than just the live album, this touches on, in the short length accorded to the series, biography and the rest of his discography. There isn’t a real in-depth analysis of the music itself, other than his outstanding vocals, but again: listen. How to even describe such music? Gospel is an underlying foundation, as is soul, but he and his band rock, groove, and jam. They can improvise as well as the best jazzers. The first time I realized that Donny Hathaway was playing the keyboards as well as singing, my mind was blown. Especially on the Wurlitzer and Rhodes pianos, he was a virtuoso. Lordi writes of how Hathaway’s music was different from that of his contemporaries, thematically as well as vocally, and how his identity was a reflection of this, or how his identity reflected itself in his music.

Hathaway’s studio recordings, though few, are impeccable, yet a live album was chosen for this series. In performance, he and his band had a different sound, and the reasons for having live recordings for representation are evident in Lordi’s writing. Interesting background on the engineering and production that went into this particular album is included, as is the hype made for the shows – he wasn’t well known that early in his career. Even the names of the venues where these shows were recorded are striking to me: The Troubadour in Los Angeles, suggesting a traveling musician telling stories, and the Bitter End in New York, which was actually a dry venue – but that wasn’t the first thought anyway. The “heaviness” in this music is pronounced in his live recordings, and what that means is really explored in this book.

One remarkable quality in Hathaway’s music is how he took songs others had written and made them his own. Why he was perhaps more comfortable and successful in this approach is discussed. Again, when I heard his live version of “You’ve Got a Friend” I was amazed by the audience singing along, and was just as surprised when I learned that was not his song originally. Songs like “A Song for You” and “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” also fit in this category, and his interpretation of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” is distinct from but just as moving as Nina Simone’s. On the other hand, songs he wrote or co-wrote are not the same when covered, with rare exception. I am going on a bit about my own feelings towards Donny Hathaway’s music, but I suppose I was just looking for an opportunity. But this isn’t about me.

This book, too much like Hathaway’s life, ends too soon, with so much more that could be said. The author discusses mental illness, and the reality of epidemics and misdirection that made conditions worse for Hathaway and for other men of color in the mid-twentieth century. Despite his tragic death, his legacy is profound, and his music remains powerful and emotional. Told in refreshing, accessible language, “Donny Hathaway Live” fills the need for a long-deserved extension of a biography.

Note: this e-book was provided through Net Galley. For more reviews, follow my blog at http://matt-stats.blogspot.com/

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Emily Lordi Has Got The Feelimg

Professor Lordi's take on Donny Hathaway, the man, the myth and the artist is a rare treat. She describes the music and the circumstances that led to the creation of the music equally well. It was a pleasure to immerse myself in Professor Lordi's prose about one of soul music's greatest titans.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tried to listen to Donnie Hathaway's live album but I couldn't hack it, in a way that made me eager to read the volume and on the whole I liked it.

Rather than focus on the Live Album Lordi pinpoints how Donnie Hathaway live was both the beginning and end of this singer's career. There are some discussion about the significance of the covers in the record but really this is a loose bio, however the most interesting bit is Hathaway's life after the live album and his descent into mental illness. It is uncomfortable reading but for someone who has never heard his music before, I thought it was a good introduction.

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this album, and I love the series for getting me behind the scenes of these albums. This album has a special place in my heart, and the author does a great job in breaking down not only the album, but the artists. There's not a lot here I didnt know about Hathaway, but to be able to shed light on the crowd that night, on their singing along, their exhortations...it just makes me want to listen to the album over and over again.

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one that left me absolutely stuck on the fence; it was neither exceptional nor horrible. I liked bits and pieces, though the looming ghost of Hathaway's death loomed large and only gets touched upon in depth in the last twenty pages. Overall, I feel like we get a glimmer into the album, but not a whole lot of the depth...other than the players and where it was recorded. I guess we just weren't meant to know enough about Donny other than his great songs.

[Yimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars because it's one of two books about Donny Hathaway and the only one that tells you about his music and life; or vice versa--vice versa. Being the best Donny Hathaway book counts for something. An extra star. Four instead of three. It could be better. It make a curious claim about Donny's schizophrenia. Like millions do with "Someday We'll All Be Free," it makes something about mental health and makes it about race--the universal into exclusivity.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice analysis of one of my desert island discs. Glad to see that there are experts who agree with me that Hathaway had a big influence on Stevie Wonder from Talking Book on. Was also real nice to listen to the album several times during the reading and to dig into some of the deeper live tracks that were released subsequent to Hathaway's tragic death.

[Paul Sims · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was great expansive book about a forgotten music genius. Who died real young. I wish that there would be a biography written on his live and music!

I thought it was well written and had a lot of surprising things about his. Well researched and archived! Bravo!

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

More than just a celebration/analysis of one of the finest live albums ever released, it is also a surprisingly comprehensive and insightful reflection on Hathaway’s remarkable (and saddening) life and career.

[Robert Lawson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book.

[Alex Szotak · Rating 5 out of 5]

😭😭😭😭😭😭

[Egghead · Rating 4 out of 5]

Floating on the wind
Petals dance, fingers conduct
lives along piano.

[Seth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anything that spreads the gospel of Mr. Hathaway is 5 stars to me.

This was well researched and written. I was especially happy to learn the details behind a recording I've been amazed by for a long time. The way the audience sings the backup harmonies of "You've Got a Friend" is so perfect on this record that I thought it was an actual rehearsed choir the first time I heard it. I've always wondered how the audience knew how to contribute in this almost too-good-to-be-true manner. I learned that it was not just blind luck but due to several factors: the way Hathaway's live shows were promoted and attended, his particular church-honed call-and-response performance style, even the vocal mix of the studio version which was being played on the radio a lot. Also, the pure magic that occurs when a master of the craft is in the right place at the right time with the right band and audience.

I am very glad the 33 1/3 series has added this book to its catalogue. I'll be looking out for more writing from Ms. Lordi.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emily J. Lordi's argument about Donny Hathaway Live is that the 1972 live album catches out Hathaway's intimacy with his audience, a beloved community that Hathaway's work was always creating among its Afro-centric audience: Hathaway's live performances, on this account, created the conditions of memorialization for spaces that were by the late Sixties disappearing, spaces where black audiences "went to church" in the immediacy of their relationship with a performer whose religiosity was exposed by the secular space of the music club. Hathaway's live album, and more generally live albums by Afro-centric performers (e.g., there are two great live records, quite different, by Sam Cooke), are just so documentary "records" of an almost sacral intensity in "getting together."

An intriguing argument. Not least in that it bypasses several existing views about Hathaway that have come to dominate, let's say, at least, the lore of Hathaway and his performances.

A St. Louisan, Hathaway left St. Louis at 19, on a scholarship to Howard, where he met those musicians with whom he'd play the rest of his life, including King Curtis, who introduced him to Jerry Wexler. Wexler signed him. It is via Wexler that we are informed about the "deep uncertainty" of Hathaway's sexuality, which in St. Louis-terms is quite legible to even the present writer, a white St. Louisan a generation younger than Hathaway. Hathaway grew up in a Baptist pentecostal church on the northside of St. Louis, where "the closet" did not exist as a concept. That's just a door like so many of the self's other doors, and we don't need to look in there. It's sex that's the door. It opens rarely enough. Hathaway's verbal dexterity and digressiveness would prove a perplexing phenomenon to witness (and in 1971, 26 years old, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia). Lordi notes Wexler's remarks only once, though when she remarks on the "inappropriable origins" of Hathaway's music, she has Afro-centric soul on her mind. I'm here to remind her of what her book evades (perhaps because Hathaway's family is still very much with us -- his daughter a successful recording artist) that desire, too, can also seem "inappropriable" if not always "originary."

A quibble. But what can't be ignored, for it's the complex source of Hathaway's interpellating his audience's desires, is his amazing voice. An instrument the range of which is as complex or more so than Stevie Wonder's, and yet to a certain segment of his immediate audience, in the extraordinary period in which he first appeared, something in Hathaway's approach was un-assimilable. The White Rock Critic didn't get it. A minor point, at this juncture. However, their not getting it points to certain interesting circumstances: "the idealistic credulousness of . . . an overall black style," vide Robert Christgau. Hathaway's approach seems not only to have hailed homosexual poets, but women, as well. A "smoothing out" of gospel, jazz, and folk balladic materials, and not without the concert hall very much in its consideration. That's for the idealization -- let's say, of the cabaret. Josh White faced this, too. To a certain folk (or as Gramsci had it, "organic") intellectual of the Second Folk Revival, Josh White smacked of the cabaret. A place where "folk" were passing. White's quiet verbal dexterity and showmanship are not unlike Hathaway's. Perhaps the folk "heaviness" in both Hathaway and Roberta Flack (co-lead on his biggest hits)'s vocal style hail Hathaway's vibrato.

[Eileen Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another fascinating book from Bloomsbury Academic concerning the late, great Donny Hathaway.
Allegedly he committed suicide by throwing himself out of an hotel window in Manhattan, but no one has fully given the definitive cause.
He left a cornucopia of great standards which will last forever.
A great read and highly recommended.
I was given a digital copy of this book by the publisher Bloomsbury Academic via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review.