Soul Survivors - Gwen McCrae
Sep 12th, 2006 by The Judge
In London they call her “the queen of rare groove.” In Miami, Henry Stone of TK Records calls her “one of the greatest soul singers of our time.” But back in Pensecola, Florida, her kids call her “mama” and her grandson calls her “grandmama.” You see, Gwen McCrae was born and raised in this town, and except for a few hard years in West Palm and a few more in Orange, New Jersey, this place has always been home.
No matter how big she gets overseas, back home Gwen McCrae stills shops for her own groceries and cleans her own car. She goes to church every Sunday and sits quietly among the clergy of Pastor John Miller’s Warrington Baptist, singing hymns she’s loved since childhood. “‘Holy, Holy’ – You remember that one,” she asks excitedly, before belting out a few bars. “I love that one.” This music is second nature to her now. Back before she could walk, Gwen was singing these tunes with her mother, Ms. Minnie Moseley, on the piano. “I really didn’t want to do this,” she explains of her present profession. “I didn’t want to do no R&B. I was wanting to do some gospel, singing church songs. But then this came up on me.”
What “came up on her” is what we call secular music. It pulled at Gwen McCrae just like it pulled at Ray Charles. Nobody wants to blaspheme, and the struggle between non-secular and secular music will always be there. It’s the reason she still has trouble performing her hit “Damn Right It’s Good.” “I just couldn’t bring myself to say that word,” she explains, “and now I never really sing that song.”
When she turned 20, Gwen met her match. She fell for a sailor named George McCrae. They were soon married, and while Gwen was fronting two gospel groups (the Independent Gospel Singers and the Lafayette Gospel Singers), George was constantly begging her to join his burgeoning R&B group called the Jiving Jets.
Finally, in a moment of weakness, Gwen agreed to perform with the group. It was a quite a departure for her. For the last twenty years she’d performed only in the church and in church-related functions, and now she found herself in dimly-lit and occasionally seedy nightclubs. But, it was in these clubs that Gwen discovered her true calling. The Jiving Jets were eventually pared down to just George & Gwen and the duo decided to move its operation to West Palm Beach. “We did a lot of work around West Palm,” Gwen remembers. “We did Sunset Lounge, and that’s how I got my break. A lot of people saw me and they like me, but like I said, I wasn’t into [R&B]. But when I saw that they liked me I said ‘hmmm, this is good!’”
As Gwen began to get more and more comfortable with the R&B style of singing, more and more people began to take notice. One night, Brooke Benton came up to her and told her she was going to be a star, and another night, Betty Wright met her backstage at The Riviera and told her that she was “baaaad.” Betty then went back to Miami and convinced Brad Shapiro of TK records that he should check her out. A week later, Gwen and George were recording for TK in Miami. “She did some background work,” remembers label owner Henry Stone, “and of course, I heard her voice and I said ‘hmmm. Maybe we should record her!’”
The rest, as they say, is the stuff of legends. Her first sessions were leased to and released internationally on Columbia Records. And although her first hits were slowed by an ill-timed disc jockey strike in 1969, she continued to thrive locally, outshining her husband in the process. By the early ‘70s, rumors of infidelity swirled around the couple and the George & Gwen McCrae show soon became the Gwen McCrae show. “Everybody knew that I was bad,” Gwen laughs about it today. “Remember, I’m the show monkey. I’m the one who carried the whole thing!”
Now, at this point, the only thing that could make their rocky marriage even rockier was a hit solo record by Gwen McCrae. Her bad/good fortune would come one day, when Gwen arrived at TK and heard a tune she liked. “When I pulled up to the studio and I heard this guy JT singing this song and he sounded terrible! I said, ‘Darn. Why can’t I ever find a record like that?’ So as I walked into the studio, JT saw me and said ‘Hey Gwen. How are you doing?’ I said ‘Good.’ He said ‘You like this record?’ I said ‘Yeah’. He said, ‘Do you want to do it?’ and I said ‘Sure, why not.’ And he gave me the record.” The record was “Rockin’ Chair” and it was a smash hit for TK. It quickly topped the international R&B charts and even made it on the pop charts, but not everyone was happy about it. “Boy, you can imagine what I was going through with that one, can’t you? [George] told me, ‘If you’d have shut your damn mouth, all this wouldn’t be.’”
Gwen’s husband became more and more envious. “He was always jealous. Not like a man of a woman, but like a woman of another woman.” When the money from her hit record started rolling in, George McCrae began to get violent. “He probably knocked me on every end,” she explains. “I was hurting. I was hurting real bad.” Just before she recorded a song about dangerous dependency (“90% of Me is You”), George McCrae cheated on her with a white girl named Judy (whom he ended up marrying). “Man that one hurt so bad,” Gwen says. “It still hurts. Do you know no matter how much you try to shove things deep down inside… but if you don’t talk about it, and if you don’t bring it up sometimes it’ll kill you. It’ll hurt you.” She cried her way through the session, and the result was the incredibly dark “90% of Me is You” and the appropriately titled “It’s Worth the Hurt.” “I was really thinking of George, inside,” reveals Gwen McCrae today. “Because I was being hurt, but I never told anybody. I just sang it, and it came out like that.”
Although Henry Stone insists that the couple were nothing but professional in the studio, on the road it was a different story. On one tour, things got so bad that George gave Gwen a black eye. He told her not to go downstairs because “somebody might see her.” “So I’m laying in the hotel room,” she remembers, “and I can’t pull the curtain back because my eye was all messed up and the light would have killed me. And some woman called in the hotel looking for George and I said, ‘Well, I’m his wife!’” While Gwen was upstairs nursing her wound, George was apparently sleeping with a woman in another hotel room! The next night, when the band saw her black eye, the tour was almost cut short. “The band was going to quit that night, because of what he did to me.”
Gwen and the band managed to finish that tour, but after a string of incidents including George firing the band while Gwen was in Vegas, then canceling her credit cards while she was in Chicago, and later even accusing her of hiring two men to rob him in New York, Gwen McCrae finally decided to divorce George. “I had to,” she states simply. “He was a dog. That boy really hurt me real, real bad… But I’m over it now, baby!”
She returned to her humble beginnings in the church and eventually even became an ordained Pentecostal minister. Gwen sold the house in West Palm with the heart-shaped swimming pool that she’d once shared with George and moved her three children to Orange, New Jersey for a fresh start. There, she was already signed to Atlantic Records and soon began working with producers like Kenton Nix and Webster Lewis. The result was a series of successful albums and another smash hit called “Funky Sensation.” Gwen McCrae became one of the few 70’s R&B artists to not only survive the disco era, but to thrive in the synthesizer & drum machine-laden backdrop of the ‘80s.
But, just as quickly as Gwen McCrae rediscovered success, she turned her back on it. She left Atlantic Records, left the record business, left New Jersey, and brought her kids back home to Pensacola. “I did a very unselfish move,” the essentially-single-mother explains. “I gave up that to raise my kids. That’s what’s more important to me than anything.” She never remarried, and managed to raise three beautiful kids on her own. “I don’t have to have a man by my side,” she proudly states, “and you know what? I don’t need one. I’ve got Jesus. That’s all I need.” She’s intensely proud of her kids, more so than any of her hit records. Sophia, Leah, Alex, and first grandson Dominique, are Gwen McCrae’s crowning achievement, despite what London or Miami might have to say. “Here I am,” she reflects on her long, good life, “and like my momma used to say, ‘I’m still here!’”
