Barry White, Velvet Voice Of Love
By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 5, 2003; Page C01



Women yearned for Barry White's crushed-velvet pillow talk, contained in a series of glorious '70s singles: "I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby" . . . "Never Never Gonna Give You Up" . . . . "Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe" . . . "You're the First, the Last, My Everything" . . . "What Am I Gonna Do With You?" "I'll Do for You Anything You Want Me To" . . . "It's Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me."

Men -- most notably "Ally McBeal's" John Cage -- simply copied these romantic sentiments, hoping for results, hoping for empowerment.

But all lacked Barry White's silken, irresistibly sensuous, rumbling baritone that could swoop into an intensely profundo basso. It was a voice that could make the most mundane words seem rich with possibility. To prove that, David Letterman once enlisted the R&B legend to read a Top 10 list, "Words That Sound Romantic When Spoken by Barry White":

"Gingivitis . . .

"Doohickey . . .

"Gubernatorial . . .

"Jazzercise" . . .

Funny thing: They did sound ridiculously romantic when spoken by Barry White, the Maestro of Love, the Sultan of Soul, the Buddha of the Bedroom. White died yesterday in Los Angeles at age 58. His manager, Ned Shankman, told reporters that White died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where he had been battling kidney failure brought on by high blood pressure. He suffered a stroke in May.

Barry White was the most unlikely looking of stars, a man of massive girth, sometimes derided as the Walrus of Love. But when it comes to romantic balladeering, African American audiences, in particular, have always been more impressed with the contents than the packaging, which partly explains why in the '70s, White and his studio extensions, Love Unlimited and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, sold close to 100 million records worldwide.

The orchestra was the first to hit No. 1 in 1974 with "Love's Theme," and love was, indeed, the theme, then and through various cycles of success and failure that attended White over the next three decades. White's songs were more lyrically implicit than explicit, extolling old-fashioned concepts such as fidelity and respect. They were also great fun in their sensuous insistence, lush orchestrations and over-the-top energies.

Visiting Washington in 1994 in the midst of his latest comeback, White expressed disappointment that the love songs of the '90s had too often become simply sex songs. He insisted his music was about making love, not about having sex. "There is a big difference," he told me. "I don't deal with sex, lust, greed. I'm dealing with pure love. As simple and as crazy as it may sound, that's the most powerful feeling the human body ever feels."

Barry White didn't have a particularly great voice -- his gruffly warm baritone made up in character what it lacked in range. But it seemed so effective in its bedroom campaigns that it was a source of both envy -- no one really replicated it -- and parody. White also joked that had he taken a few dollars from everyone who ever asked him to tape a personalized message for their telephone answering machines, he would have been a far richer man.

White was born in Galveston, Tex., but his family moved early on to the Watts neighborhood in south-central Los Angeles. When he was 5, his mother bought a used upright piano and taught him to harmonize. From that point on, White says, "music was constantly in my head." All kinds of music made its way there, and though White never learned to read or write music, he learned how to listen, how to hear, and how to imagine. What his mother ingrained in him was that "it's not reading and writing, it's feeling."

White did teach himself to play a variety of instruments and became his church's organist at age 10; a year later, he made his recording debut playing piano on Jesse Belvin's doo-wop hit "Goodnight My Love (Pleasant Dreams)." White also sang in his church choir, but was not always the ideal choirboy. He loved to recall how he burglarized houses in his youth. Not for money or jewelry, but for music. "I had one of the heaviest record collections in my neighborhood," he would brag, "albums stacked to the ceiling."

In his teens, White was caught stealing tires and was sent to a juvenile prison for four months. His incarceration proved to be a turning point, albeit not an immediate one. He switched from gangs to vocal groups such as the Upfronts and the Atlantics. But White's breakthrough came when he moved from the microphones to the producer's chair with a group called the Majestics -- a surf band!

White's early résumé is all over the place: He worked with the Bobby Fuller Four ("I Fought the Law"), had his first success with two Felice Taylor singles, "It May Be Winter Outside" and the presciently titled "I'm Under the Influence of Love," and wrote and produced for Hanna-Barbera's "Banana Splits" television cartoon. White also recorded several singles that went nowhere; mostly, he listened and learned and began to develop a particular sound, often with the help of arranger Gene Page.

It wasn't until the early '70s that White began to make his mark after he took session singers Diana Taylor and sisters Glodean and Linda James and turned them into Love Unlimited (he also married Glodean). After crafting "Walkin' in the Rain With the One I Love" -- also the first record to feature a distinctive Barry White vocal coda, as his gravelly voice rumbled through a telephone -- White created the 40-piece Love Unlimited Orchestra, and took them all to the top of the charts with "Love's Theme." White's lush production and sweeping orchestral settings built off the models of Motown and Philadelphia International, and even Phil Spector. America loved it and Barry White's sound would reign supreme for much of the decade. He became an unlikely sex symbol.

Though only a few of his early songs fit the format, White's music was lumped in with the emerging disco movement and, later, the disco backlash. He came to symbolize the worst musical, social, sexual and fashion excesses of that era. That deeply offended White, even as he claimed a founding father's role. "Very few people know what 'disco' is and I'm one of the inventors of it," he noted.

"Ain't but one thing that distinguishes disco from any other music -- four on the floor" -- he beat out the rhythm deliberately on the table in his hotel suite. "Every disco song's got that in it. I only made three records with that beat, and they were big, but the world's producers took that and ran with it on every record they cut."

There was a more serious problem as White's once-successful formula eventually felt stale, and his commercial prospects dimmed. After selling millions of records for 20th Century, he moved to CBS in 1979, signing for $14 million and getting his own label, Unlimited Gold. The gold, as it turned out, was severely limited. In five years with CBS, White never had a Hot 100 hit and did poorly on the R&B charts. For much of the '80s, he was off the charts, though still a popular act on the concert circuit, where he was known for wiping torrents of sweat off his brow with a black hankie as he delivered his love counsel.

His comeback began in 1990, when Quincy Jones teamed White with El Debarge, Al B. Sure! and James Ingram on "The Secret Garden (Sweet Seduction Suite)," a No.1 R&B hit that introduced him to a new generation. White made it back to No. 2 with 1991's "Put Me in Your Mix," and to the top of the R&B charts the next year with "Practice What You Preach." "The Icon Is Love" became White's first platinum album in 16 years. He also guested, as himself of course, on several episodes of "Ally McBeal" and "The Simpsons."

You didn't have to be real to seek Barry White's advice, and he didn't have to appear in person to have an empowering effect on the heart. He had so much to give.


© 2003 The Washington Post Company