Mable John, Soul Singer With a Star-Studded Résumé, Dies at 91

By Alex Williams
Sept. 10, 2022, 4:37 p.m. ET

Beyond her many other accomplishments — collaborating on a hit single
with Isaac Hayes, singing backup for Ray Charles — Mable John earned a
place in the music pantheon as one of the first female artists signed to
the Motown Records empire, which altered the face of pop music in the 1960s.

But none of it might have happened if Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown
Records, had not needed a ride.

Ms. John was an aspiring blues singer working for a Detroit insurance
company owned by Mr. Gordy’s mother, Bertha, in the 1950s when she found
herself serving as the de facto chauffeur for the future music mogul, a
former Lincoln-Mercury assembly line worker who had sky-high ambitions
as a songwriter and music impresario and was hustling around town
looking to conjure hits.

It did not take long for him to recognize the vocal power of the woman
behind the wheel. Before long, with Mr. Gordy serving as her pianist and
mentor, Ms. John joined the Detroit nightclub circuit.

“I was groomed for a full year before I did anything anywhere,” she
later said, “because that was Berry’s motto — he wanted to make you an
act, not a gimmick.”

As a pioneering Motown act, Ms. John never churned out hits like those
of Stevie Wonder, the Supremes or other stars of the Motown roster. But
her influence on music was soon felt.

With a voice that could reach breathy depths and then soar to the upper
registers, Ms. John moved on to Stax Records in Memphis, known for an
earthier kind of R&B, where she scored a hit single in 1966 with “Your
Good Thing (Is About to End),” a wistful ballad of heartache that was
later covered by Lou Rawls, Bonnie Raitt and others. She eventually
spent more than a decade as a member of the Raelettes, Ray Charles’s
backing vocal group.

Ms. John died on Aug. 25 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 91. Her
death was confirmed by her nephew Keith John, a longtime backup singer
with Stevie Wonder.

“She was definitely R&B royalty,” said the author David Ritz, who has
written biographies of Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and others, and who
collaborated with Ms. John on a series of semi-autobiographical novels
centered on an R&B singer turned minister.

In broad terms, Ms. John’s musical odyssey might be seen as a metaphor
for the Great Migration of Black Americans who fled the South in the
middle decades of the 20th century, looking for opportunity in the
North. She was born in Bastrop, La., on Nov. 3, 1930, the eldest of 10
children of Mertis and Lillie (Robinson) John, who moved the family to
Cullendale, Ark., shortly after her birth. When she was 12, her father
left a grueling job at a paper mill and moved the family to Detroit in
search of a better life. He found work in an automobile factory.

With its swelling Black population, Detroit was a hotbed of African
American music, and it became an ideal place for people to pursue their
musical ambitions. Lillie John led a family gospel group, and by the
mid-’50s Mable’s younger brother William had found fame as a singer
under the name Little Willie John, scoring multiple R&B hits with songs
like “All Around the World,” “Need Your Love So Bad” and “Fever,” which
hit No. 1 on the R&B charts in 1956 and later became an enduring anthem
of desire for Peggy Lee.

With her sights on a music career of her own, Ms. John was soon singing,
in a voice both sassy and vulnerable, at hallowed Detroit clubs like the
Flame Show Bar, where she opened for Billie Holiday shortly before her
death in 1959.

Her career ambitions, and her decision to tour with her famous brother,
got her booted from a statewide Pentecostal choir. “They disapproved of
the music,” she said in a 2008 interview with The Guardian. “I had gone
over to the Devil.”

But she was on her way. In 1959, Mr. Gordy formed his landscape-altering
sister labels, Tamla and Motown, and he soon signed Ms. John, who
recorded “Who Wouldn’t Love a Man Like That,” written by Mr. Gordy and
others, in 1960.

A handful of singles over the next few years failed to make a splash. By
1966, Ms. John was living in Chicago and married to a preacher, and she
told Mr. Gordy that she wanted to be released from the label. In a 1999
interview with the magazine, “Living Blues,” she recalled telling him:
“The direction the company is going into, I don’t think I can measure
up, because I’m not a pop singer. I’m a blues singer.”

Her career, however, was far from over. She moved on to Stax, Motown’s
bluesier rival, which proved more amenable to her musical vision.

“At Motown, they gave you your songs and told you how to dress and how
to dance,” Tim Sampson, the communications director of the Soulsville
Foundation, which operates the Stax Museum in Memphis, said in an
interview. “At Stax, they just brought you in and said: ‘Tell us your
story. What makes you happy? What makes you sad? That’s what your music
is going to be.’”

Before long, Ms. John found herself meeting with two of the label’s top
songwriters, David Porter and a not-yet-famous Isaac Hayes. In search of
a song to record, she told them about an early marriage to an unfaithful
man. As she spoke, Mr. Hayes began to play the piano, and Mr. Porter
began to scribble lyrics.

“I had no idea how the music or the melody should go,” she told The
Guardian. “I just knew it was a story that was inside of me. It was a
pain, and it needed to get out. And when we got finished that night, we
had ‘Your Good Thing (Is About to End).’”

The song reached No. 6 on the Billboard R&B chart, but her tenure with
Stax was brief. In 1969, she joined Ray Charles as a backing vocalist.

Living up to Mr. Charles’s exacting musical standards was an
accomplishment in its own right, Mr. Ritz said: “He was an
uncompromising taskmaster in terms of musical excellence. You played the
wrong stuff and you were out.” Ms. John, who had a strong moral sense
and whose nickname was Able Mable, he added, also did her best to steer
the band away from the temptations of the road.

For Ms. John, her years with Mr. Charles were an opportunity to expand
her musical horizons.

“At the beginning, I thought I could only sing gospel,” she said in a
2007 interview with NPR. “With Berry Gordy, I found out I could sing the
blues. I went to Stax, and I find out I could sing love songs. I got
with Ray Charles, and we sang country — everything. And we could play to
any audience. I wanted to sing what was in my heart to everybody that
loves music, and Ray Charles was the place for me to be, to do that.”

Ms. John’s survivors include a son, Limuel Taylor; a brother, Mertis
John Jr.; and several grandchildren.

She continued to perform off and on over the years. She also wrote three
novels with Mr. Ritz: “Sanctified Blues” (2006), “Stay Out of the
Kitchen” (2007) and“Love Tornado” (2008). And she dabbled in acting,
portraying a seasoned blues singer in John Sayles’s 2007 film,
“Honeydripper.”

But Ms. John also felt a higher calling. She followed the
stage-to-the-pulpit path taken by the likes of Little Richard and Al
Green, and founded a small Baptist ministry in Los Angeles that
organized food and clothing drives for the homeless.

In a sense, she might have been heeding the wisdom that she recalled
Billie Holiday imparting to her long ago: “Baby, if you intend to make
it in this business, there is one thing you’re going to have to
remember. You’re going to have to know when you’ve given enough, and
then you have to stop.”

From my blog:

https://60459fe07898a.site123.me/unsung-heroes-of-soul/mable-john