Imagine for just a moment a small nightclub in Newark, New Jersey. It is late on a week night somewhere near the end of the 1960s. The neon sign over the door buzzes the way old neon does, and the letters spell out a name that you sitting here today would not recognize. Inside, the room smells of stale beer, old cigarettes, and the kind of cheap floor polish that nobody bothers to apply on top of the previous coat.
There are about 20 people in the room. Most of them are drinking alone. A man in a frayed dark suit stands on a small wooden platform that someone in this place still has the dignity to call a stage. He is thin. He looks older than he is. His suit was tailored. You can tell that.
But it was tailored for a younger and slightly heavier man. And it hangs on him now the way a coat hangs on a hook. His shoes are polished. That detail matters. A man whose shoes are still polished is a man who has not yet given up entirely. Even on the nights when he has every reason to. He opens his mouth and a voice comes out.
And here is the thing I want you to hold in your mind for the next hour or so because this entire story turns on it. The voice that comes out of that tired man in that nearly empty club is one of the most important voices in the history of American popular music. Not one of the better voices, not one of the more interesting voices.
one of the voices without which an entire genre. The genre we now casually call rhythm and blues, the genre that became soul music, the genre that fed straight into everything from Mottown to the Beatles, would not exist in the form we know it today. His name is Clyde McFatter, and by the time he is singing in this small room in Newark, the country that owes him so much has, for the most part, forgotten he is alive.
That is the puzzle we are going to unravel together. How does a man invent a sound, train a generation of singers, sell millions of records, top the charts on two continents, and then end up in a half empty club singing for tip money, dying of complications most people would associate with someone twice his age? How does America lose track of one of its own founding voices while he is still standing on its stages? And maybe most uncomfortable of all, what does his story tell us about the price that talent sometimes pays in this country, in that era, in any era? I promise you, by the end of this, you will never hear an old rhythm and blues record the same way again. Because once you know who Clyde McFatter was, you start to hear him everywhere. in the phrasing of singers who came after him, in the church trained ache that became the
standard sound of pop ballads, in a particular way of bending a note that until he did it on a record in 1953, almost nobody on the radio was doing. So, let us go back to the beginning. Let us go back to a small wooden house in Durham, North Carolina in the early 1930s and listen to a little boy sing.
Clyde Lensley McFatterder was born on the 15th of November 1932 in Durham. His father, George Mcfatter, was a Baptist minister. His mother, Bula, was the organist and choir leader of the same church. So before young Clyde ever knew there was such a thing as a microphone, before he ever knew there was such a thing as a recording studio, he knew that his mother sat at an organ in a small wooden room with colored light coming through the windows and that on Sunday morning the room would fill with the voices of people he loved. You have to picture this for a moment because everything that follows in his life is anchored here. a boy of four or five sitting on a hard pew at the back of a church swinging his legs because they do not yet reach the floor. The pastor is his father. The organist is his mother. The choir in its dark robes is made up of neighbors and uncles and women who have known him since he was born. And
when his mother lays her hands on the keys and the first cord opens up, the boy feels something in his chest that he will spend the rest of his life trying to put into other rooms, in other towns, on other stages, in front of strangers who have no idea where the feeling actually comes from.
His mother taught him to sing. Now, I want to be careful here because we have to separate what is documented from what is family memory passed down through interviews. What every credible source agrees on is that Bula McFatter was a serious church musician, that she taught her children to sing, and that Clyde from a very early age stood out.
Family accounts describe him singing solos in his father’s church when he was still small enough that people in the back row had to crane their necks to see him. Whether the exact age was 5, 6, or 7 varies depending on who is telling the story, but the picture is consistent. a tiny boy in a tie his mother had straightened that morning, opening his mouth in a room full of grown-ups and producing a sound that made some of those grown-ups put their hands over their mouths.
There is one detail about this period that I want you to hold on to because it explains a great deal about the rest of his life. The Baptist church in the rural south in the 1930s was not a casual place. Singing in it was not a casual act. The line between sacred music and worldly music was drawn with a heavy pencil, and crossing it was not a small thing.
When his mother taught Clyde to sing, she was teaching him a way of opening his throat in front of God. And when years later, he would take that same way of opening his throat and use it to sing about a girl or a Cadillac or a Saturday night, a part of him would always feel the weight of that crossing. He never quite stopped being the preacher’s son.
The world he later entered would reward him for the technique, but it could not give him back the simple, uncomplicated permission he had felt as a child to sing in his mother’s church. The Mcfatter family did not stay in Durham. Sometime in the early or middle 1940s, when Clyde was still a boy, the family moved north.
Advertisements
Like millions of other black families in those decades, they were part of what historians call the great migration, the long, slow, riverlike movement of black Americans out of the rural south and into the industrial cities of the North and Midwest. The McFatters eventually settled in New Jersey in the area around T-neck and the larger Newark region where Clyde would come of age.
I want you to picture just briefly what that move would have meant for a sensitive, musical boy. He had grown up in a place where everyone in his world looked roughly like him, where the rules, harsh as some of them were, were at least familiar. He arrived in a northern industrial corridor where the rules were different.
Where the racial line still existed, but was drawn in different places, where the streets were louder, the buildings were taller, the schools were larger, and the music coming out of car windows was not the music he had heard in his father’s church. And here is where the next layer of his life begins.
Because in those northern neighborhoods, a black teenager in the late 1940s who could already sing the way Clyde McFatterder could sing was quite simply a marked man. There was a whole network of street corner vocal groups of school talent shows of amateur nights at theaters of neighbors who knew somebody who knew somebody.
The doo-wop tradition, the harmony tradition, the close vocal group tradition was being invented in real time on those corners. And young Clyde, by every account, was right in the middle of it. He sang with a group of his peers at Chelsea Vocational High School and on the local amateur circuit. He won talent contests.
He developed a reputation. And around 1950, when he was 17 years old, he came to the attention of a man who would change his life and eventually break his heart. That man was Billy Ward. Billy Ward is a name that today is mostly remembered by specialists, but in 1950, he was a serious figure.
He was a trained musician, a former boxer, a disciplined man with very specific ideas about what a black vocal group ought to sound like. He had decided to form a vocal group of his own and to train its members the way a strict music teacher trains gifted children. He was looking for voices.
And when he heard the 17-year-old Clyde McFatter, he knew by all accounts immediately that he had found his lead singer. The group Ward built around Clyde was called the Dominoes. And here is where you sitting and listening to this story need to understand something about how the music business worked in 1950. The model that Ward used was not unusual for the time, but it was unusually strict in his case. He owned the group.
He chose the songs. He set the salaries. He set the rules of behavior. He fined the members for missing rehearsals, for showing up late, for being out of uniform, for any number of small infractions. By a number of later accounts from former group members, the discipline could be very harsh.
I want to be careful here because some of the strongest descriptions of Ward’s methods come from interviews given decades later by men who had reasons of their own to remember him unkindly. But the basic picture that this was a tight controlled salarybased arrangement with the lead singer earning a modest weekly wage while the group earned far more than that for its owner is consistent across the sources.
So picture young Clyde now he is 17, 18, 19 years old. He has the voice that in a fair world would already have made him a wealthy man. He is touring the country with the dominoes. He is staying in segregated hotels, eating in segregated restaurants when he can find them, traveling long stretches of highway in a car or a bus with the other members of the group, and he is being paid by most accounts on the order of $100 a week.
That is not nothing in 1951, but it is not a fortune either, and it is certainly not what the lead singer of a hitmaking group ought to be earning when the group is filling theaters. In 1951, the Domino’s released a record called 60-minute man. I will not dwell too long on this song because the lead vocal was actually sung by Bill Brown, the bass singer of the group, not by Clyde.
But the record is important to our story because it became an enormous hit. One of the biggest rhythm and blues records of the year. A record that crossed over to white audiences in a way that very few black records were doing at that point. and it put the Domino’s and Billy Ward on the map.
Clyde’s own moment came in 1952. The Domino’s released a record called Have Mercy Baby. This time the lead was his. And I want you, if you have a quiet moment later today, to find this record and listen to it, because what Clyde McFatter did on that record at 19 years old, was something that had not really been done on a popular American record before.
He took the technique he had learned in his mother’s church, the gospel cry, the held note that breaks at the top, the way of bending a syllable so that it sounds like it is half singing and half weeping. and he applied it with the full force of his church training to a secular song about a girl. Have Mercy Baby went to number one on the rhythm and blues charts.
Other singers, other producers, other arrangers heard it and something began to shift in living rooms and recording studios across the country in what people thought a pop record was supposed to sound like. But here’s the thing. While Have Mercy Baby was sitting at the top of the chart, while the Dominoes were the most talked about vocal group in black America, while audiences in theaters from Harlem to Chicago were standing up on their feet when Clyde stepped to the microphone, the young man himself was still pulling in his weekly salary. And a story has come down through more than one source in interviews given years later that captures the moment when he started to understand his own situation. I want to be careful with this one because the exact details vary across the tellings and we should treat it as the kind of memory that has been polished by retelling rather than as a
documented event. But the substance is this. By a number of accounts, Clyde was walking down a street in Harlem one afternoon and he passed a record shop. In the window there was a display of his own record, Have Mercy Baby. He stopped to look at it. the way any young man would. And by the version of the story that circulates in interviews with people who knew him, he looked at the label and noticed that his name was not on it.
The artist credit on the label read simply Billy Ward and his dominoes. The voice everybody was responding to was his. The face on the publicity photographs was his, but the name on the label belonged to the man who owned the group. Whether the moment happened exactly that way on exactly that street with exactly that record in the window, I cannot tell you.
The anecdote belongs to that category of stories that people remember and pass on because they capture something essentially true, even if the specific details cannot be verified. What we do know from his own later interviews is that by the early part of 1953, Clyde McFatterder had decided he could not stay in the dominoes much longer.
He left or he was let go, depending on which version you believe, in the spring of 1953. Different sources tell the story differently. Some say Ward fired him for showing up late, for getting too proud, for breaking the famously strict rules of the group. Others say Clyde simply walked out because he had had enough. The truth, as it usually is in these situations, is probably somewhere in between and probably involves a final argument whose exact words we will never recover.
What matters for our story is that by April of 1953, the lead singer of one of the most successful vocal groups in America was a 20-year-old young man with no group, no contract, and no clear idea of what came next. He was about to find out because somewhere in the offices of a young record label in New York City, a man with a sharp suit and a sharper ear had just heard that Clyde McFatterder was available.
And that man was about to walk straight into Clyde’s life and change it for better, and in some ways we will get to soon enough, for worse, forever. The man with the sharp suit and the sharper ear was named Ahmed Erdigan. And if that name does not ring a bell for you immediately, let me tell you why it should.
Ahmed Erdigan was the son of a Turkish diplomat, a young man who had grown up partly in Washington DC, partly in London, partly in the diplomatic households of his father’s postings, and who had somewhere along the way fallen so deeply in love with American black music that he had decided, against the wishes of nearly every adult around him to spend his life producing it.
with his brother Nessuhi and a partner named Herb Abramson. He had founded a small independent record label in 1947. The label was called Atlantic Records. Today, when you hear the name Atlantic Records, you think of a major corporation with skyscrapers and global distribution. In 1953, it was a small operation working out of cramped offices in Midtown Manhattan with a handful of employees, a tight budget, and an unshakable belief that the music being made in black neighborhoods across America was the most important thing happening in American culture. They had already had hits with Ruth Brown, with Joe Turner, with the Clovers. They were paying attention to every singer in the country. And when they heard that Clyde McFatterder had walked out of the dominoes, Ahmed Erdigan did not wait. By his own later account, he got into a
car, he started driving, and he tracked Clyde down in person. I want to give you a small picture of this scene, although I should tell you honestly that the exact dialogue between Erdigan and McFatter that day has been reconstructed differently in different interviews over the years. The version I’m about to give you is a reconstruction drawn from the substance of what Erdigan later described in conversations with biographers, not a transcript.
Treated as such, Erdigan finds Clyde at his family’s apartment. The young singer is, by every account, a little stunned to see this elegant foreign accented man on his doorstep asking in essence what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Erdigan in the substance of his later recollection tells Clyde something very simple.
He tells him that the voice he has been hearing on the Domino’s records is a great voice that he wants to build a new group around it and that he wants Clyde to choose the singers himself, not Billy Ward’s rules. Clyde’s rules. Clyde’s name, Clyde’s lead. Now, think for a moment about what that proposal would have sounded like to a 20-year-old who had just spent 3 years being paid a weekly salary while another man’s name went on the label of his hits.
It would have sounded like a door opening. Clyde said yes. The group they built together was called the Drifters. And I want to pause here for a second because I know some of you listening already have an image of the Drifters in your head. You are thinking of Under the Boardwalk. You are thinking of Save the Last Dance for Me.
You are thinking of that smooth, orchestral, sweet sounding group with the lead singers who all seem to be named Ben or Rudy. That group is also called the Drifters, but and this is one of the great strange facts of music history, it is essentially a different group with a different sound from the one Clyde McFatter founded.
The original Drifters, the group Clyde put together in the summer of 1953, was a gospelrooted vocal quartet built around his church-trained lead. Clyde personally recruited the other singers. He drew on contacts from the gospel world and from his old neighborhood. He brought in a tenor named Bill Pinkney, a baritone named Andrew Thrasher, and a few others who rotated through the lineup in those first months.
They rehearsed, they worked out arrangements, and in August of 1953, they walked into a studio for Atlantic Records and they recorded a song called Money Honey. If you have never heard Money Honey, I would ask you to do yourself a favor today and listen to it because what is happening on that record in 2 and 1/2 minutes is essentially the invention of a sound. The shuffle rhythm is there.
The piano triplets are there. The saxophone is there. But on top of all of it, Clyde McFatterder is singing in a way that nobody on a pop record had quite sung before. He is preaching. He is pleading. He is bending notes the way his mother had taught him to bend notes. But the subject is no longer the kingdom of heaven.
The subject is the rent, the landlord, and a girl who left. Money Honey went to number one on the rhythm and blues chart and stayed there for 11 weeks. 11 weeks. To put that in perspective, that is essentially the entire fall of 1953. If you were black in America in the autumn of that year and you turned on a radio anywhere in the country, the chances were excellent that sooner or later you were going to hear Clyde McFatterder telling you that money was what he needed.
Oh, what he needed, honey. The records that followed in the next 12 months are a kind of masterclass in early rhythm and blues. Such a night which Elvis Presley would later cover. Honey Love, which became a huge hit and was banned in some markets for being too suggestive, which tells you more about the markets than about the song.
White Christmas, which is, and I do not say this lightly, one of the most beautiful and influential vocal arrangements of a holiday song ever recorded, and which directly influenced the way Elvis would later approach the same song. There is a straight line that you can draw from Clyde McFatter’s lead vocal on the Drifter’s White Christmas in 1954 to a great deal of what we now think of as the sound of rhythm and blues vocal harmony.
And then just as the world was opening up in front of him, the United States Army called. In May of 1954, Clyde McFatter was drafted. He was 21 years old. The Korean War had ended the year before, but the draft was still in operation and his number came up. He reported for duty. He served, according to military records and his own later interviews, for about 2 years, including a stretch overseas, with some of that time spent in Japan and Germany, depending on which account you read.
He came back to the United States in 1956. Now, I want you to pause for a moment and think about what those two years meant for his career. Two years in the music industry of 1954 was an eternity. The whole landscape of American popular music was about to change. Elvis Presley was about to break nationally.
Chuck Barry was about to release Maybelline. Little Richard was about to record Tutti Frutti. The thing that had been called rhythm and blues was about to be repackaged in part as rock and roll marketed to a much larger and much whiter audience and turned into one of the biggest cultural forces of the 20th century. And Clyde McFatterder, the man who had helped invent the vocal style that was about to power all of this, was in an army uniform.
While he was away, the Drifters continued to perform. The group was not owned by Clyde. It was owned through a complicated arrangement by their manager, a man named George Treadwell, who held the rights to the name. So when Clyde left for the army, Treadwell replaced him as lead singer and kept the group on the road. Different singers rotated through the lead position over the next few years.
The group that Clyde had personally built with the singers he had personally chosen kept going without him and the name on the marquee remained the same. When he came home from the army in 1956, Clyde discovered something that would shape the rest of his professional life. He no longer had a group.
The Drifters as a name and a brand belonged to Treadwell. Clyde could not simply walk back in and take his old place. What he could do and what he did was sign a new contract with Atlantic Records as a solo artist. And here in the late 1950s is where Clyde McFatter has, if you are keeping score, the most commercially successful years of his entire career.
He records Treasure of Love in 1956, which becomes a top 10 rhythm and blues hit. He records without love there is nothing in 1957 which crosses over to the pop charts. And in 1958 he records the song that more than any other you have probably heard even if you did not know who was singing it. The song is called A Lover’s Question.
A Lover’s Question went to number one on the rhythm and blues chart and number six on the pop chart. It was a genuine crossover hit, the kind of record that played on every kind of radio station and was bought by every kind of audience. For a brief stretch in the late 1950s, Clyde McFatter was on paper exactly what the early version of himself had dreamed of being. He was a solo star.
His name was on the label. The contract was in his name. The royalties, at least in theory, were flowing in his direction. And here is the cruel little twist of this part of the story because by every account from people who knew him, this was also the stretch of his life when the cracks started to show.
I want to be careful here because I am about to talk about his personal struggles. And the policy I want to follow in telling this story is that we do not gossip and we do not speculate beyond what the documented record supports. So let me give you only what the record supports and let me tell you clearly when I am moving into the realm of recollection rather than documentation.
What the records is this. By the late 1950s Clyde McFatter was drinking heavily. This is mentioned with regret and affection in interviews given by people who toured with him, recorded with him and managed him during those years. He was also, according to those same interviews, struggling with the shape his career had taken.
He had wanted, by his own description, to be more than a rhythm and blues star. He had wanted to be Frank Sinatra. He had wanted to be Nat King Cole. He had wanted to be the kind of singer who played the big rooms in Las Vegas, who sang with full orchestras, who was treated by the entertainment industry as a serious adult artist rather than as a black novelty act tied to a single market.
In the industry of the late 1950s, for reasons that you do not need me to explain in detail, did not let him have that career. Not because his voice could not have done it. His voice could have done it easily, but because the gates to that other career were guarded by people who, when they looked at Clyde McFatterder, saw a black rhythm and blues singer full stop and made the categories accordingly.
He also by his own later interviews was watching what was happening to his old work. Other artists, including white artists, were taking the songs he had helped popularize and were having larger hits with them in larger markets for larger paychecks. Elvis Presley, who admired him openly and credited him as an influence, was at this point selling tens of millions of records.
Clyde, who had taught much of that vocabulary to the industry, was selling a small fraction of that. The financial gap was enormous and it was not subtle and he was not the kind of man who could pretend not to notice. I will tell you something else that we can document because it shows up in the legal record and in the recollections of people who handled his money.
Clyde’s royalty arrangements, particularly for his early drifters work, were not generous. The general industry pattern in the early and middle 1950s, especially for black artists on independent labels, was for the singer to receive a small percentage of net sales after a long list of expenses had been deducted, and for the bulk of the long-term income to flow to the label, the manager, and in this case, the holder of the group’s name.
Clyde, like many of his contemporaries, would eventually find himself in the position of having sung on enormously valuable records without receiving the kind of long-term income that the records had generated. This, by every honest account, weighed on him, and one of the ways he carried that weight was with a bottle.
There is a marriage in this part of the story and a family and I want to mention them but I also want to be honest about the limits of the documentation. Clyde McFatterder married a woman named May James who is identified in several biographical sources as his first wife. They had children together.
A second relationship later in his life is mentioned in some accounts as well, but the public record on his second partner is thin and reliable sources do not consistently agree on her name. So I am not going to give you a name I cannot verify. What I can tell you from interviews given by people who knew him is that the road life of a touring singer in the 1950s and60s was not kind to marriages, his included.
Picture for a minute the rhythm of his weeks in those years. He was on tour for long stretches. He was performing in cities he barely had time to see. He was riding in cars and on buses with other musicians. He was staying in hotels of wildly varying quality in cities where depending on the year and the state he might or might not be welcome at the front desk.
He was singing his heart out at night, drinking with the band afterward, sleeping in short stretches, and getting up to do it again. Marriages have died in easier conditions than that. His did not survive intact. And then, almost without warning, the chart hits stopped coming.
It is a strange thing the way the music business turns. In 1958, he had a top 10 pop hit. By 1960, the records he was releasing on Atlantic were performing more modestly. He left Atlantic for MGM Records in 1959 and then moved on to Mercury Records, where in 1962 he had what would turn out to be his last major hit, a song called Lover, Please, which reached number seven on the pop chart.
After that, despite continuing to record, despite continuing to tour, despite a voice that by every account from people who heard him in those years was still as remarkable as ever, the hits simply stopped. And here, in the early and middle 1960s, our story enters its hardest stretch. Because the man who had helped invent a sound, the man whose vocal style was at that very moment being inherited and refined by a younger generation of singers across America and across the Atlantic was about to discover what it feels like to be famous, then less famous, then almost forgotten, all while the world he had helped to build kept moving forward without him. He had not, however, been forgotten everywhere. There was in fact a country across the ocean where his records were being studied like sacred texts. And in a few months he was going to step off an airplane in that country and find to his
own astonishment that the audiences there knew exactly who he was. The country across the ocean was England. And to understand what happened when Clyde McFatterder stepped off that airplane, you have to understand something about what English teenagers had been doing in their bedrooms for the previous five or 6 years.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a generation of English kids, most of them workingass, most of them living in port cities like Liverpool and Manchester and London, had become obsessed with American rhythm and blues records. The records arrived in England in irregular ways. Some came in on merchant ships from American ports.
Some were brought back by relatives who had traveled. Some trickled in through specialty importers. They were rare. They were expensive. And they were studied by the kids who could get their hands on them with a kind of devotion that is hard to imagine today when every song ever recorded is available in your pocket.
Among the records that those English kids studied most closely were the Atlantic record sides of the early and middle 50s, Ruth Brown, The Clovers, Ray Charles, and very near the center of that little cannon, the records of Clyde McFatterder with the Drifters as a solo artist. They learned his phrasing.
They imitated his runs. They tried in their bedrooms and church halls and skiffl clubs to do with their voices what he had done with his. A young man named John Lennon was one of them. A young man named Paul McCartney was another. A young man named Mick Jagger was another. A young man named Van Morrison growing up in Belfast was another.
The list goes on and it includes most of the names you associate with the so-called British invasion of the mid 1960s. So when Clyde McFatter arrived in England for a tour in 1964, something happened to him that almost no black American rhythm and blues artist of his era could quite believe when it happened to them.
The English audiences knew the records, not just the hits, the album tracks, the B sides, the early Dominoes sides. They called out for songs that at home in America, he could go for months without anyone requesting. They treated him in interviews and reviews and backstage conversations as a major figure in the history of popular music, which of course he was.
Although in the United States at that moment, the industry had largely stopped treating him that way. by accounts from musicians and journalists who were around him in England. Clyde was moved by the reception. He was also, by those same accounts, somewhat bewildered by it. He had come to England partly because work at home had grown thinner, and he had arrived to find himself being treated as a kind of living legend by kids half his age, who knew his catalog better than some of his own American managers did.
He toured. He performed in clubs and theaters that by every account were full and enthusiastic. He recorded some sides while he was there. He met in passing or at greater length a number of the young English musicians who would within a year or two become some of the most famous people on the planet.
And eventually when the tour ended he did what touring singers do. He got back on a plane. He flew home. And here is the part of the story that I find genuinely painful to tell because when he landed back in the United States, the difference in atmosphere was so stark that by his own later description in interviews, it physically affected him.
In England, he had been a master. In America, he was a man trying to book club dates in a market that had moved on. The music that he had helped invent was now in the form of the British invasion bands being sold back to American teenagers by white English kids in mod suits. The young black audiences who might have been his natural inheritors were listening to Mottown to Staxs to Sam Cook to Otis Reading.
And the white audiences who had bought a lover’s question six years earlier were buying records by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, both of whom, if you had asked them directly, would have happily told you that they owed a great deal to Clyde McFatterder. But people do not generally ask those questions in public, and royalty checks do not generally get written on the basis of acknowledgement alone.
So Clyde in the middle and late 1960s did what a great many singers of his generation did when the hits stopped. He worked. He worked the clubs. He worked the package tours, the rhythm and blues revival circuits that would put four or five established names on a bill together and send them through theaters in the Midwest and the South.
He worked the small rooms in cities where his name still meant something to the bookers, if not always to the audiences who showed up. And by every account from people who saw him in those years, the voice was still there. That is one of the most striking and most painful things about this stretch of his life.
He was not a man whose instrument had broken down. He was a man whose instrument was being asked to play in rooms that did not deserve it. Reviewers who caught him at small clubs in the middle 1960s wrote again and again some version of the same observation. The voice is still beautiful. The audience is small. The room is half empty.
The singer deserves more. The drinking grew worse. I am not going to dramatize this part of the story because I think drama in the case of an illness like alcoholism often gets in the way of the truth. The truth is that Clyde McFatterder, like a great many talented and disappointed people in his profession in those decades, drank to manage feelings that he did not, in the culture of his time and his industry, have very many other tools to manage.
He drank to take the edge off the disappointment. He drank to sleep. He drank to face the next half empty room. and the drinking, as drinking does, took a physical toll on a body that had been pushed hard for a long time. Friends and former colleagues in interviews given years later describe visits with him during this period that are difficult to read.
I do not want to overdramatize any single one of them because memories shift over time and the stories that get passed on about a fallen star tend to harden into a particular shape. What I can tell you in the substance that recurs across the accounts is this. People who had known him at the height of his powers visited him in this period and came away shaken.
They found him thinner. They found him quieter. They found him still capable when he stepped onto a stage of producing a sound that stopped a room. And they found him when he stepped off the stage in conditions that did not match the size of his gift. Some of these friends tried to help. There are accounts of musicians offering him work, offering him places to stay, offering him introductions to producers who might still be interested.
Some of these offers he accepted, some he did not. The pattern of an addiction and I think most of us know someone whose life has touched this in some way is that help can be offered very generously and still not in any particular moment be reachable by the person who needs it. He kept recording.
There are sides he cut in the middle and late 1960s that are worth looking up. Although they did not chart, he kept performing. He kept moving between New York and New Jersey and the occasional out of town engagement in the way that a working singer keeps moving when there is no other option. And then in the early part of 1972, his health collapsed.
I want to give you the facts here without embellishment because the facts are sad enough on their own. On the 13th of June 1972, Clyde Lensley McFatter died at his home in the Bronx in New York City. He was 39 years old. The cause of death, as it was reported at the time, and as it has been described in biographical sources since, was related to complications consistent with long-term heavy drinking, including issues affecting the heart, the liver, and the kidneys.
He had not reached his 40th birthday. Let me give you that number again because I think it is the kind of number that does not fully register the first time you hear it. 39 years old. The man who had recorded Money Honey at 20. The man who had recorded A Lover’s Question at 25. The man who had helped invent the vocal language that the entire generation of singers behind him was using to sell out arenas.
He died at 39 in a quiet apartment with nothing like the resources or the attention that his contribution to American music ought to have brought him. His funeral was small. By accounts from people who attended, the room held many of the musicians who had worked with him over the years, members of his family, friends from the neighborhoods where he had grown up and lived.
There were notable absences as well, and the size of the public coverage at the time was modest compared with what the same death of the same man would receive today. He was buried, and the world of American popular music, which was at that moment busy with David Bowie and Stevie Wonder and the Eagles, mostly moved on.
I want to sit in that silence with you for just a second because I think the silence is part of the story. When a man dies young and almost unnoticed and that man happens to be one of the founding voices of an entire genre of music, the silence around his death is not a neutral fact. It is itself a piece of information about the way the industry he worked in valued the people who made it possible.
It would take some years before that silence began to break. And when it did break, it would break in a few different directions at once, some of which would have surprised Clyde himself. The first crack came from the musicians. Singers again and again in interviews over the next decade, kept bringing up his name.
Ben E. King, who had been one of the lead singers of the later Drifters, spoke about him with the kind of respect that singers reserve for the people who taught them the trade. Smokey Robinson cited him as a foundational influence. So did Jackie Wilson, who in fact had replaced Clyde as the lead of the Dominoes back in 1953 and who had once described himself in interviews as having essentially patterned himself on what Clyde was doing.
There is, by the way, a fascinating thread to follow there because Jackie Wilson then went on to influence a young Michael Jackson, which means that some of Clyde McFatter’s phrasing reaches in a kind of generational chain all the way to the off-the-wall and thriller albums of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The second crack came from researchers and historians of popular music. As the genre that we now call soul music began to be taken seriously as an art form in books and in academic articles in the 1970s and 80s, the question of who had built its foundations became impossible to avoid.
And again and again when historians traced the lineage of certain vocal techniques, of certain ways of phrasing a ballad, of certain bridges between gospel music and pop music, they came back to a small handful of names. Sam Cook was one, Ray Charles was another, and Clyde McFatter was a third. The third crack came from the institutions.
In 1987, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which had only been founding its first class of inductees the year before, inducted Clyde McFatterder as a solo artist. He was one of the relatively early names to be recognized in that way. And then the following year in 1988, the same hall of fame inducted the Drifters as a group in recognition of the broader history of that name across its various lineups.
So Clyde McFatterder postumously became one of the first artists ever to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, once as a solo singer and once as part of a group. It was a recognition that at the time very few people had received. A few years later in 1993, the United States Postal Service issued a series of commemorative stamps honoring American rhythm and blues and rock and roll legends.
Clyde McFatterder was among the artists featured in that series. So if you happen to be sending a letter in 1993, you might, without knowing it, have licked the back of Clyde McFatter’s photograph and stuck it to your envelope. I find that small detail oddly touching, and I think it is worth sitting with for a moment, because the man who had walked past a record shop window in Harlem in 1952, and noticed that his name was not on his own hit record, the man who had spent the last decade of his life trying to book club dates in rooms that did not deserve him, was 20 years after his death on a postage stamp. The country that had not quite known what to do with him while he was alive had decided after he was safely gone that he was a national treasure. I do not know whether that is justice or whether it is the opposite of
justice. Maybe it is both at once. Maybe it is the way the ledger gets balanced very slowly in the only way that history seems able to balance it. But there is one more strand to this story that we have not pulled on yet because I have been telling you all this time about what Clyde McFatterder did to the men and women who came after him.
I have not yet told you what he sounded like in detail when you actually sit down and listen. And before this is done, I want to take you back to the records one at a time and let you hear in your own ear what was so unusual about that voice and why so many other singers spent so much of the rest of the 20th century quietly stealing pieces of it.
So let us go back to the records and I want you to imagine as we do this that we are sitting in a small room together. The lights are low and somebody has put on an old turntable in the corner. The needle drops and the first thing we listen to is Money Honey recorded in August of 1953. The intro is brief. A few bars of piano and saxophone, a shuffle rhythm, the kind of arrangement that by 1953 standards was perfectly typical of an Atlantic Records rhythm and blues side.
There was nothing unusual happening in the first 10 seconds of that record. And then Clyde opens his mouth. The thing I want you to notice, the very first thing is the attack. He does not ease into the vocal. He hits the first word the way a preacher hits the first word of a sermon with the full weight of his diaphragm behind it.
The breath already prepared. The note is not just sung, it is launched. In 1953 on a pop record, almost nobody was doing that. Pop singers of the early 50s tended to glide into a phrase. They tended to phrase smoothly conversationally in the lineage of Bing Crosby. Clyde phrases the way his mother had taught him to phrase in a Baptist church in Durham.
He starts a phrase the way you start a prayer when you really need an answer. The second thing I want you to notice is what happens at the top of his range. There is a particular technique and you will recognize it the moment you listen for it where he reaches a high note and instead of holding it cleanly he lets it break a little.
The voice cracks very slightly on purpose. It is a controlled break not an accidental one. It is the sound of emotion overflowing the container of the note. And again in 1953 on a pop record this was rare. The technique existed in gospel. It existed in the deepest blues, but it had not yet been imported in this concentrated form into the kind of record that was going to be played on the radio next to Patty Paige and Perry Como.
Now listen to what comes a year later on the Drifter’s version of White Christmas, recorded in 1954. This is a song that in the popular imagination belongs to Bing Crosby. Bing Crosby recorded it. Bing Crosby owned it. Bing Crosby’s version had been one of the bestselling records of the entire 20th century.
And here is this little vocal group on a small black independent label taking the same song and doing something to it that frankly nobody had quite done before. What they do is they treat the melody as a starting point rather than as a destination. Bill Pinkney sings the opening verse in a deep bass voice transposed down from where Crosby had taken it.
And then Clyde comes in on the bridge and the second verse. And he does not so much sing the melody as comment on it. He floats above it. He embellishes. He bends a syllable here, holds a note there, drops into a falsetto, climbs back out. The melody is still recognizably the Irving Berlin melody, but the performance has become something else entirely.
It has become a black gospel reading of a white pop standard, and it works so well that Elvis Presley, when he later recorded the song himself, leaned heavily on the Drifter’s arrangement rather than on Crosby’s. I want you to hold that detail in your mind because it is a small example of something much larger.
The pattern of an arrangement starting in one place, being transformed by black artists into something new, and then being absorbed back into the mainstream of American pop through a white performer is one of the defining patterns of American popular music in the 20th century. And Clyde McFatter with the Drifters on the White Christmas Session is sitting almost exactly at the hinge of that pattern in late 1954.
Now, skip forward four years. The record is A Lover’s Question recorded in 1958. The arrangement is more polished. There are strings. There is a vocal group behind him. The whole production is aimed squarely at the pop crossover market in a way that the early Drifters records were not.
And yet Clyde in the middle of all that polish is doing the same thing he was doing on Money Honey. He is starting his phrases like prayers. He is breaking his high notes on purpose. He is taking the breath in places where the songwriter had not necessarily intended a breath because the breath for him is part of the meaning.
If you listen carefully to a lover’s question, you will start to hear singers. You know, you will hear in the way he phrases the verses an echo of what Sam Cook would do on his own ballads a few years later. You will hear in the way he ornaments the melody, something that Smokeoky Robinson would carry into Mottown.
You will hear in the way he sits behind the beat and then catches up with it on the chorus, a technique that Otis reading would later turn into one of his signatures. None of these singers copied Clyde directly. They did not have to. The vocabulary he had built was already in the air. It had become part of the language that any ambitious black singer of the late 1950s and early60s was learning to speak.
And here is the thing I find most striking and most quietly devastating about all of this. When you read interviews with those singers, with Cook, with Robinson, with Reading, with Wilson, with Ben E. King again and again, they bring his name up themselves. They are not being prompted. They are not being polite.
They are paying their respects to a man they considered a teacher. And meanwhile, in the years when these interviews were being given, Clyde himself was often in a small apartment or on a bus to a club date in a town he had not visited in years, doing his best to keep going on a body and a career that were both starting to give out.
I want to give you one more record before we leave the listening room because I think this one captures in a way that the hits do not something essential about who he was as an artist. The record is Lover Please recorded in 1962. This was his last major hit, the song that reached number seven on the pop chart, the last time a Clyde McFatter record would crack the upper levels of the American mainstream.
What I want you to notice on Lover Please, aside from the fact that it is a wonderful pop record, is the quality of urgency in his voice. He is 30 years old at this point. He has been a professional singer for more than a decade. He is, by any reasonable measure, a veteran. And yet, there is something in the vocal that sounds almost like a young man auditioning.
He is reaching for the listener. He is leaning into the microphone. He is selling the song the way he might have sold it at 20 in front of a record company executive he had to convince. I think although I cannot prove this and I want to be clear that I am offering an interpretation rather than a documented fact that you can hear in lover please a man who knew on some level that the window was starting to close.
The British invasion was a year away. The whole architecture of American pop was about to shift under his feet. He had already lived through one career’s worth of changes, from the Dominoes to the Drifters to his solo years on Atlantic and MGM, and he was now on his third major label, Mercury, trying to find the next sound, the next style, the next way of staying relevant. He almost made it.
Lover Please bought him another stretch of working years, but it did not generate a follow-up of comparable size, and within a few more years, the pop charts had moved decisively away from the kind of record he was best at making. I do not want to leave the music behind without saying one more thing about it because I think it is easy when you tell a story like this to make the artist sound like a victim of his industry and his times. Full stop.
And Clyde McFatterder was in many ways exactly that. But he was also, and this is important, a working artist who made specific choices with his voice on specific records that nobody had instructed him to make. The decision to break a high note on purpose. The decision to start a phrase from the diaphragm rather than from the throat.
The decision to bring the cadences of his mother’s church into a song about a girl and a kiss. These were not accidents of biography. These were artistic decisions made in real time in studios with engineers watching the clock. He chose again and again to do something that the safe path of the early 1950s had not yet sanctioned.
And he was right. The whole industry in the end moved in the direction he was already going. That is a real legacy. That is not a sentimental construction. If you take the lineage of American vocal performance in the second half of the 20th century and you follow it backward song by song, singer by singer, you arrive again and again at a small set of figures from the early 1950s who did something genuinely new with their voices on commercial recordings.
And Clyde McFatter every time is one of those names. Now I want to turn before we leave him to a question that I think is hovering in the room and that I do not want to pretend I have not noticed. The question is this. How did this happen? How does a country produce an artist of that caliber give him a few years of real commercial success and then allow him to slip into the kind of decline that ended his life at 39? I do not have a clean answer for you. Nobody honest does.
But I can offer you a few pieces of the answer drawn from what we can document. The first piece is the economics of the industry he worked in. In the 1950s and early 60s, black artists, particularly those on independent labels, were generally on contracts that did not generate the kind of long-term wealth that we now associate with major recording careers.
Royalty rates were low. Expense deductions were aggressive. Publishing rights, which is to say the rights to the songs themselves, were often held by other parties. Many of the most influential black artists of the era, ended their lives with very little in financial terms to show for cataloges that have since generated enormous sums for other people.
This was not unique to Clyde. It was an industry pattern, and he was caught inside it. The second piece is the racial structure of American popular culture in his lifetime. He came up in an industry that had explicit separate charts for black artists and white artists. That had explicit separate radio stations for black audiences and white audiences.
That had explicit separate touring circuits, separate hotels, separate restaurants, separate everything. By the time he died in 1972, some of those structures had begun to break down. But the damage to artists of his generation in terms of who got to be a household name and who did not was already done.
Crossover existed, but it was rationed. The same song sung by him and then sung by a white artist could and often did sell very different numbers of copies. He understood this. By the accounts of people who spoke with him in his last years, this understanding was a heavy thing to carry around. The third piece is the personal and I want to be careful again not to moralize about it.
Clyde McFatterder drank heavily and the drinking shortened his life. That is the simple medical truth. But the question of why a person drinks is rarely a simple medical question. It is tangled up with all the other pieces with the disappointment with the financial pressure with the feeling of being one of the architects of a building from which you have been quietly evicted.
There is no responsible way to disentangle the addiction from the conditions in which the addiction grew. You can look at his life and judge him if you want to for the bottle. Or you can look at his life and notice that the bottle was sitting on a table that the industry had set for him and a great many other artists like him before he ever sat down.
I lean when I sit with the story toward the second view. But I am not going to insist that you do. I’m going to ask you to make up your own mind. What I am going to insist on is the music because the music is the part of the story that does not depend on argument. The music is on the records. The records are still here and the records are doing exactly what the records have always done, which is to wait patiently on whatever shelf or playlist or streaming service they happen to be living on at this particular moment in history for somebody to put them on. So, if there is one thing I would like you to take from this story beyond the names and the dates and the long arc of a career, it is the suggestion that you put one of those records on. Not because you owe it to him, although you might. Not because the history requires it, although it does, but because if you sit
quietly in a room with the lead vocal of a Clyde McFatter record at a decent volume, something is going to happen in your chest that does not happen with most other records of that era. The voice will reach across 70 years and find you. The held note will break just slightly at the top on purpose and you will understand in a way that no narrator can quite explain why all the other singers were paying such close attention.
And once you have heard it, there is one more part of this story I want to tell you because the story does not actually end at his funeral in 1972. The most surprising chapter in some ways came after he was already gone. The most surprising chapter in some ways came after he was already gone.
Because in the decades after Clyde McFatter’s death, something began to happen that if you had described it to him while he was alive, he probably would not have believed. The records started coming back. I do not mean that they were re-released, although they were. I mean that they started showing up again and again in places nobody would have predicted.
Played by people who had no obvious reason to know who he was. A song from a Drifter’s session in 1954 would turn up in a film soundtrack in the 1990s. A solo ballad from 1958 would appear in a television commercial in the 2000s. A snippet of his vocal would be sampled in the way hip hop producers sample old vocals into a track by an artist who had not yet been born when Clyde died.
Each of these moments taken alone is a small thing. Taken together, they describe something larger. They describe the slow process by which a voice freed from the body of the singer who originally produced it becomes part of the common atmosphere of a culture. The voice is no longer his. It is everyone’s.
It is in the air and the air slowly comes to take it for granted. I think there is something both beautiful and a little melancholy about that. Beautiful because it means the work survives. Melancholy because the survival of the work does not in itself restore the man. The records on the shelf cannot pay the rent that he could not always pay.
They cannot fill the rooms that were half empty when he was singing in them in the late 1960s. They cannot give him back the years he did not get to live past 39. But they can do one thing and this is the thing I would like us to end on. They can teach. I want to tell you a story that I have not told you yet because it belongs at the end.
There is a recurring pattern in interviews with younger singers from the 1970s. the 1980s, the 1990s, all the way up to artists who are working today in which somebody asks them about their influences and they begin to list the obvious names. They list Sam Cook, they list Otis Reading, they list Marvin Gay, they list Artha Franklin.
And then very often somebody on the panel, somebody older, somebody who actually remembers the early 50s will lean forward and say very gently, “You know where Sam Cook got that from, don’t you?” And the younger singer often does not know. This is not a criticism. It would be unreasonable to expect every working singer in the world to know the entire genealogy of every technique they have inherited.
The point is not that the younger singers are uninformed. The point is that the further upstream you go in this particular river of American music, the fewer people in general are paying attention. And Clyde McFatterder is very far upstream. He is one of the springs that fed the river. He is one of the places the water comes from.
The institutions in their slow way have tried to mark this. I mentioned earlier the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions in 1987 and 1988, the postage stamp in 1993. There have been other markers as well. He has been written about in serious histories of rhythm and blues. He has been the subject of essays by music critics who care about the lineage.
He has been mentioned by name in award speeches by singers who have gone on to win Grammys. But honors of that kind, while welcome, do not quite do the work that needs to be done. The work that needs to be done is simpler and more direct. The work is for somebody somewhere to put one of the records on, not on background, not as nostalgia.
Listening with attention long enough to notice the small, deliberate, technically miraculous things that voice is doing in 2 and 1/2 minutes of a song from 1953. Because once you have heard those things, once your ear has registered the way he attacks a phrase, the way he breaks a high note, the way he sits behind the beat and then jumps ahead of it on the chorus, you will start to hear those same things slightly modified in record after record after record across the second half of the 20th century. And the awareness once it lodges in your ear does not go away. Let me tell you before we close the last thing I think about when I think about him. I think about that small club in Newark, the one I asked you to picture at the very beginning of this story. I do not know whether such a specific night ever occurred exactly as I described it. The
image is a composite drawn from descriptions of the kinds of rooms he was playing in his last years, the kinds of audiences who were turning up, the kind of figure people who knew him described seeing on stage in 1970 and 1971. So I want to be honest about that. I gave you at the start an evocation of his last working period, not a documented account of a single particular night, but the substance of the image, the half empty room, the thin man in the carefully kept suit, the voice that did not match the size of the audience, that substance, I believe, is accurate. Multiple sources in different ways describe a final stretch of years in which his gift had outlived the venues willing to host it. And here is the question I find myself sitting with when I sit with that image. What was he thinking on those nights when he opened his mouth? Did he hear
himself? Did he hear in the room the difference between what he was producing and what the room was capable of receiving? Did he think about his mother sitting at the organ in a small wooden church in Durham, the colored light coming through the windows on a Sunday morning 40 years before? Did he think about the boy who had stood on tiptoes to be seen over the lectern singing his first solo with the whole congregation watching? I do not know. Nobody can know.
And I want to resist the temptation to make up an inner monologue for him because that would be a disservice to the actual man who was a specific person with specific thoughts that he did not by and large share with interviewers. But I will say this, whatever he was thinking, the work he had done by the time he was standing on those small stages in his last years was already finished.
The records had been made. The vocabulary had been built. The river was already running downstream from him, carrying the technique he had developed into the work of singers he would never meet. He did not in the late60s need to do anything more in order to deserve to be remembered. He had already done it in his early 20s in a studio on West 56th Street in Manhattan in the late summer of 1953.
The world simply needed time to catch up. And the world in its slow and imperfect way has been catching up ever since. I think about how much of what we now consider the basic emotional vocabulary of popular singing was either invented or significantly developed by a small group of black artists in the 1950s, very few of whom died with the kind of comfort or recognition that their work merited.
Clyde McFatterder is one example. There are others. Some of them, like Sam Cook and Jackie Wilson, have stories of their own that are equally worth telling and equally hard to tell without anger. But Clyde, in particular, sits at a place in the chain that is so foundational and so often overlooked that I think his story has a special claim on our attention.
If having listened all the way through this, you take one practical step, here is the one I would suggest. The next time you are listening to almost any soul ballad recorded between, let us say, 1960 and 1975, and you hear the singer break a high note on purpose, or start a phrase from the diaphragm with the weight of a sermon behind it, or hold a syllable just past the point where you would have expected them to let go.
Take half a second in your head and acknowledge the source. Acknowledge that the technique you are responding to did not arrive in that record from nowhere. It came from somewhere. It came from someone. And one of the someone’s very near the beginning of the chain was a thin, sharpeyed, gospel-trained young man from Durham, North Carolina, who walked into a studio in 1953 with a voice he had built in his mother’s church and used it to start changing the sound of American popular music.
That is the small thing I would ask of you. It does not cost much. It does not require you to buy anything or to go anywhere. It is just a kind of mental nod in the direction of a person whose life did not get nearly enough nods in his own lifetime. There is one other thing and then I will let you go.
If you do listen to one of his records, and I hope you will, do me a favor and try just once to listen to it without listening for the influence on what came after. Try to listen to it on its own terms. try to listen to it the way an audience in 1953 or 1954 would have listened to it with no idea what was coming with no later Sam Cook or Otis Reading or Smokeoky Robinson in their ears with the record simply being what it is in the moment of its making.
Because here is what I think happens when you do that. You stop hearing the record as a historical artifact and you start hearing it as what it actually was, which is a young man on a particular afternoon in a particular room in Midtown Manhattan standing in front of a microphone and opening his mouth and trusting that what came out would be enough.
And the remarkable thing, the thing that strikes me every time is that it was. It was enough. It was more than enough. It was in fact a great deal more than enough, even if the world around him did not always treat it that way. Clyde Lensley McFatterder, born November 15th, 1932 in Durham, North Carolina. Died June 13th, 1972 in the Bronx, New York. Father, Baptist minister.
Mother, church organist and choir leader. lead singer of the Dominoes from 1950 to 1953. Founder and lead singer of the original Drifters from 1953 to 1954. Solo recording artist on Atlantic, MGM, and Mercury Records through the late 50s and into the60s. Recipient postumously of inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as both a solo artist and a member of a group.
subject of a commemorative United States postage stamp in 1993. Voice throughout of one of the most consequential vocal styles in the history of American popular music. Those are the facts of the life in the shortest form I can give them. But the facts do not by themselves do the work. The work happens when the needle drops, when the record plays, when the voice arrives in your room. So go and listen.
Sit with it. Let the held note break. Let the phrase start from the diaphragm. Let the church trained ache of a boy from Durham, North Carolina reach across the better part of a century and find you in whatever room you happen to be in doing whatever you happen to be doing. He did the work. The records are still here.
The least we can do, the very least is hear them. And once we have heard them, once we have really heard them, the question is no longer whether Clyde McFatterder mattered to American music. The question is how it took so long and cost so much for that to become as obvious as it should always have been. Thank you for staying with this story all the way to the end.
Thank you for taking the time to learn a name that with luck you will not forget. And the next time you hear a singer somewhere break a high note on purpose in a way that makes the room go quiet, take a small moment in your own private thought and remember where that technique came from. He would have liked that.
I think in his quietest moments that is what he was hoping for all along.
