The thing about soul – soul in the musical sense – is that you’ve either got it or you haven’t. You only have to listen for a moment to know that Jerry Butler, who died this week, had soul.
Like so many soul and blues singers, Butler was born in the South, the son of cotton-picking sharecroppers in Mississippi, before they joined the Great Migration to Chicago when he was three.
Like many before him, he started singing in church alongside the minister’s grandson, his childhood friend Curtis Mayfield, and in their teens they joined a group called The Roosters with three Tennessee transplants.
For Your Precious Love was their first single, written by Butler with two other members of the group, Richard and Arthur Brooks, and featuring Mayfield on guitar, released under a new group name, The Impressions.
It was an immediate Top 20 hit, earning the new group three encores at the legendary Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Butler had even greater success when he went solo two years later, hitting the Top 10 with He Will Break Your Heart, blending Butler’s soulful voice with Mayfield’s high harmony vocals on a song reminiscent of Sam Cooke.
Over the next two decades, Butler had many more hits, but was often out-charted by others who came along later to cover the same songs. He was the first to record Henry Mancini’s Moon River in 1961 – though MoR crooner Andy Williams would have the bigger hit.
He was the first to record Bacharach and David’s Make It Easy On Yourself – a huge hit for The Walker Brothers with an almost identical arrangement. And his duet with Betty Everett on another standard, Let It Be Me, reached the Top Five before it became an even bigger hit for The Everly Brothers.
He also teamed up with Otis Redding to co-write (and record) I’ve Been Loving You Too Long, which would become one of his signature tunes and (Butler once said) earned him more royalties from the many cover versions than every other song he had written put together.
Teaming up in the ’60s with Philly legends Gamble & Huff, Butler had more hits including Only The Strong Survive, Moody Woman and Hey, Western Union Man (below), releasing albums that alluded to the nickname he had been given by a radio DJ for his restrained stage persona – The Iceman.
In later life he moved into politics, inspired by his school days in Chicago where he learned about black pride from one of his teachers. By then he was already a legend among soul fans – including Bruce Springsteen, who covered two of his songs on his recent album of classic soul covers, named after this song.
RIP Jerry Butler (1939-2025)