Ignored             Obscured              Restored

The Donny Hathaway story is one of the most tragic in 20th-century popular music.

Hathaway was a musical prodigy.  He attended Howard University where he met some of the people he would later work with in the music industry, including drummer Ric Powell and the talented Leroy Hutson.  Hutson co-wrote one of Hathaway’s most political, and well-known songs – “The Ghetto.”

In February 2019, Emily Lordi wrote in The New Yorker:

At the start of the 1969 hit “The Ghetto,” the legendary soul singer Donny Hathaway plays a deep bass line on electric piano and swoops up to his falsetto, as if to outline a shape that the song will fill with guitar, bass, congas, soul claps, and fragments of speech. (“Leave her alone, man,” someone says. Someone else says, “Pass the joint.”) Gradually, the song, in defiance of the two-dimensional image of the depraved “inner city” that was pushed by sociologists in the wake of the urban riots of the sixties, paints a portrait of the ghetto as a site of complex pleasures, untold stories, and unwritten rules.

This song doesn’t depend on lyrics – it mostly relies on the title being changed over and over — but it has an irresistible groove.  It has been covered and sampled a jillion times.

Some view the highlight of his career as the duets he recorded with Roberta Flack, who also attended Howard.  Together they scored a #5 hit with “Where Is the Love.”

Hathaway’s creative gifts and success were unable to help him overcome his mental illness.  He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, a condition that impaired his musical career and personal relationships.

On January 13, 1979, Hathaway was found below the 15th-floor window of his room in New York City’s Essex Hotel, the victim of an apparent suicide.  He was only 33.

But he left us with a legacy of beautiful music to remember him by.

Enjoy… until next week.