MP3 Delia Gartrell - Starting a Movement

R&B, soul, funk, jazz.

9 MP3 Songs in this album (33:42) !
Related styles: URBAN/R&B: Deep Soul, URBAN/R&B: Retro-Soul



Details:
Delia âD.D.â Gartrell Remembers

One of my earliest recollections of growing up in Atlanta is my older sister Evelyn Malone encouraging me to get on stage at school dressed as a âcabbageâ and singing â1-2-3â over and over. She wanted to be a teacher, so I was her one and only student. She insisted that I learn everything she liked. (Mama had told her to keep me busy because I tended to be a bit âflighty,â as she put it.) As I got older and turned into ME, I realized how I liked learning all of the things that she had taught me, especially the music. Dancing, singing, and learning how to sew and embroider were some of the lessons that she taught me, so I started acting in school plays at Crogman Elementary School, and doing church skits at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Pittsburg. I even started my own âtheater companyâ in my backyard on McDaniel and Mary Street with my little neighborhood friends. With a few cardboard boxes and some crepe paper, we were a hit! The âcompanyâ broke up when a girl named Mildred beat me up because her crepe paper dress got torn. My sister was one of my first musical influences. There would be many more.

I loved getting on the bus and going all the way across town to Mrs. Stephensâ house for piano lessons. Going there by myself made me feel grown-up. Mrs. Stephens lived on Griffin Street. She was really a hard teacher and had kids my age, and we used to play together after piano lessons. She taught me to appreciate music and to increase my curiosity for learning. She would always give me a piece of sheet music to learn, which introduced me to classical composers like Bach and Chopin. Iâll also never forget my sixth grade music teacher, Mrs. Edwards, at my elementary school. She taught her students piano and three-part harmony, and how to get ready for our first chorus recital. WOW! WHAT A HIGH!

The radio was always on in our house, tuned to one station, WSB. Without realizing it, I was being exposed to all the great jazz divas, like Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. I loved Billy Eckstine and Count Basie. I just really loved anyone who was making music come out of that little box. But I had to sneak and listen to the R&B stations. Ms. Ella Belle Malone (my mama) hated that music. She called it âbarrelhouse music.â All I know is, âbarrelhouse musicâ made my heart flutter and my feet move. But Mom hated that music until the day she died (except for Ray Charles). By this time, I just wanted to be Ruth Brown or Eartha Kitt. âI could sound just like Eartha!â I thought.

I had a wonderful childhood, filled with music, fun, friends, and family. I graduated from Henry McNeal Turner High School and did what was expected of me by my mother and my sister, who was now a schoolteacher herself. I enrolled in Spelman College as a music major and sang in the Glee Club. Little did I know that life as I knew it was about to change! You see, there was this boy named OâNeal Gartrell who had my little heart and all I wanted to do was be with him! So I dropped out of school, married him, and promptly had three kids. I mean, three kids in three years. By then the marriage was over. Neal knew nothing about being a husband, and I knew even less about being a wife.

Fast-forward to the mid-sixties (three kids make you grow up real fast). I had totally forgotten about music. I was a young mother with no clue. Luckily I had a supportive family who were always there for me. THANK GOD! One rare night out with friends at a birthday party, I realized that I knew one of the musicians, Jewell Tucker. He had grown up with my sister, and by now had traveled the world playing keyboards with Ruth Brown and some other big acts. I was impressed. So we were fooling around during intermission, and I told him that I could sing. He dared me to come up and sing out loud on the mike! I was petrified, but I sang and I got a regular job with his trio. Jewell refused to play R&B anymore, and I knew all the standards from listening to all that WSB radio growing up. Our union was a great match!

Jewell became sort of a big brother to me, teaching me a lot about the business of singing, like timing and singing clearly. The music scene in Atlanta at that time was soooo cool! We were all a very close-knit group and everybody knew each other. We were all friends, working all the clubs and after-hours joints, going on the road, coming back, learning and partying together. By this time one of my favorite singers ever, Grover Mitchell (who had a voice like an angel), had taught me how to sing R&B. So I worked constantly, jazz clubs one week and R&B joints the next. I was soon appearing at the famous Royal Peacock for acts like Jackie Wilson, Jerry Butler, and Mary Wells. As my career expanded, I began singing at the Birdcage and La Carousel with acts like Charles Earland, Johnny Hammond Smith, Doc Soul Stirrer of Baltimore, and Irene Reid. She taught me a lot about performing. I watched her with my mouth open; she was a class act and a true professional!

I had always said that I would never marry again, especially a musician or entertainer. After all, I had been hanging out with them for years and had seen things happen with them. However, around 1970 I was working a club called Billâs Play Lounge, and I was the opening act for an entertainer out of California who called himself the Mighty Hannibal. We met and talked briefly, and I decided that I couldnât STAND him! We were total opposites. But I continued to run into him and eventually we became good friends. I didnât believe that he could produce records until I heard one of his songs on the radio. At the time, he was producing for Venture Records, and I had been tied up for four years with Duke/Peacock Records but had recorded only one session. Duke/Peacock never released anything with me, and I found out that it was all just a tax write-off. That was another lesson learned! Hannibal told me he could get me out of the contract if I did a session with him. I did, and he produced my first record, called âWould It Break Your Heart,â on Venture/Maverick. All of the Atlanta musicians played the session, and Doug Hudson did the arrangements. Oh, yeah, Hannibal and I were married in 1970 and we moved to Los Angeles. Never say never!

I remember a lot of Atlanta musicians moved to Los Angeles and other places like New York and Europe around that time, such as Doug and Jean Carne, pianist Ernest Vantrease, Kathy Rubico, and Hannibal and me. Those were bittersweet times; thatâs how I remember them. We all spread our wings. By this time, I had recorded a song by musician Tee Fletcher. The civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War had changed us all, and by the early seventies a lot of our friends and relatives were coming home from Vietnam addicted to drugs. We were seeing some really depressing things, and out of frustration with the effects of the war, we wrote our provocative hit record âSee What You Done Done,â a song about a mother who tells the story of her son who became a drug addict while fighting in the Vietnam War. We recorded it in L.A. with Spooner Oldham on keyboards and Dennis St. John on drums. Nobody believed in this project but us. So we spent all of our money and released it on our own label. Then one day we got a call from Carl Procter of Right On Records in New York. He loved the record and wanted it! It was so controversial that it got banned in some places, then it blew up in New York, it went national, and the rest is history! I got to play the world-famous Apollo Theater with legendary singer Al Green.

After this whirlwind of events, I was still trying to adapt to the L.A. lifestyle. When I had first arrived there, I thought it was the most beautiful place that I had ever seen! Iâd never leave, and anyway, it was Hollywood, baby! The lifestyle was really different from what I was used to, and Iâm sure I went a little Hollywood. One of the easiest jobs in the world was to work as a movie extra. We did a lot of waiting around to shoot different scenes all day and socialized. There were a lot of actors and actresses, singers and musicians working between gigs, many who are famous today. We finally got into a California groove working the clubs at night, such as the Parisian Room, Pied Piper, and Stage One. As the seventies progressed, I managed to work on a southern college tour, opened up for Kool and the Gang, traveled abroad, and rediscovered the country.

It had been more than eight years in L.A. for me, with the occasional job or midnight session in the studio. But as the seventies rolled on, the R&B sound was beginning to fade. The onset of the âdiscoâ era brought about a major change for many entertainers. The pulsating beat of disco dance music swept the country like a huge wave. Many singers were forced to conform to creating disco or be pushed out of the music industry altogether! Creativity in the music industry would never be the same as we had known it.

Letâs fast-forward again to the year 2000. During the early eighties, I had left Los Angeles for New York City, the Big Apple. Iâd been living in New York now for 20 years. Aside from the occasional club gig or theatrical performance, I had been running my own clothing business for over ten years (learning to sew finally paid off). Iâd been custom-designing childrenâs clothing for years. I had tired of the smoky rooms and all-night gigs, and music had taken an unexpected turn, especially during the mid- to late eighties. The onset of negative images and lyrics had further changed the face of music forever, or so I thought. Drugs in the African American community had wreaked havoc, and many entertainers had fallen under its wrath. I had forgotten about music again. Eventually I moved back to Atlanta and began living a sort of peaceful existence. Well, time really does have a way of changing things. One day I got a phone call: âDo you know youâre on the Internet?â What? Me? Doing what? I ignored the voice and kept living my life.

In 2007, I got another call from Herman Hitson saying, âDid you know that your record is a hit in England?â What record? I asked. A song called âBeautiful Dayâ that I had recorded in the seventies and that was never released. And there was a lot of other stuff that I had done back in the day that had been discovered by the âold schoolâ movement in Europe!

So here I am back again in the game. Last summer I stepped on the stage again at the Earl in Atlanta, where it all started. It was a reunion show with Herman Hitson and Freddie Terrell opening up for the Mighty Hannibal. What a show it was! All of those young kids knew the lyrics to all of our old songs (some of which I had forgotten!). We rocked the house, and there was a documentary being made about us. That put me over the moon!

So I present to you on this CD some of the songs that I had forgotten that I knew. Thanks to everyone I was ever in the studio with, my family that took the journey along with me, my fans, and oh, yeah, my sister Eve, wherever you are!

Love,
Delia
February 2008