Soul ballads don’t come more soulful than this gem, the title track of Jimmy Holiday’s debut album in 1966.
Holiday never became a star, dogged by heart trouble that brought his singing career to a premature end, and became better known as a songwriter, co-writing Jackie DeShannon’s 1969 hit single, Put A Little Love In Your Heart.
By that time Holiday had been grinding away at the soul circuit for more than a decade without much success. And his career faded away in the ’70s before becoming the star he could have been.
Born in 1934 in Mississippi and raised in Iowa, Holiday first flirted with a career as a boxer before devoting himself to music, playing alto sax in jazz combos before transitioning to R&B.
He released his first single, Voice of the Drums, on the Los Angeles-based Four Star in 1958, but it flopped and it took him a while before he wound up on Everest Records in the early ’60s.
They put out How Can I Forget in 1963, and it unexpectedly took off, climbing all the way to eight on Billboard’s R&B charts (and 57 on the pop charts), but further singles for Everest didn’t go anywhere.
He tried his luck with several smaller labels – KIT, Tip, Diplomacy – before signing with the New Orelans-based R&B label Minit Records in 1966.
His first single for them, Baby I Love You, gave him his second hit and turned out to be his biggest, though the album The Turning Point hit the Billboard R&B charts. This is the title track.
In 1967, Everybody Needs Help was a minor hit and the funky Spread Your Love did better the following year. But by then his health was starting to go: he collapsed after a concert in June 1968 and needed to have open heart surgery.
Holiday spent much of the next year writing instead of performing, but he returned to recording in 1969 with I’m Gonna Use What I Got, while turning more of his attention to songwriting.
Holiday’s final single for Minit, A Man Ain’t Nothin’ Without a Woman, showed up in 1970 but also failed to sell so his time with the label came to an end and he moved to Dial, releasing Save Me in 1971.
In the mid-’70s he showed up on Ray Charles’ label Crossover with the single When I’m Loving You, but when that flopped too, he decided to concentrate on writing.
Eventually, he moved back to Iowa, where he had been raised, and died of heart failure in 1987.