“Day by Day”: Jimmy Scott Steals Time by Mark Anthony Neal
With a devotion to August Wilson’s “single shot” depiction of mid-20th century Black Pittsburgh and perhaps as a homage to Pittsburgh photographer Charles “Tennie” Harris, aka “One Shot Harris,” Denzel Washington’s direction in Fences (2016) is a master class in “sitting with time.” Wilson created BlackSpaces where language functions as music — as the rhythm and melody of his storytelling. And yet, one of the most arresting moments in Fences is a musical one. Washington deploys Jimmy Scott’s “Day by Day” as a narrative disruption that sonically captures the interiorities of the film’s main characters where language fails. It’s as if Scott steals time, and forces us to sit in the moment, with those characters; indeed it is a metaphor for Jimmy Scott’s career.
Originally recorded in 1969, Scott’s phrasing on this rendition of “Day by Day’ is impeccable. But then there is Scott’s voice — emotive and “ungendered”. Scott was born with Kallmann syndrome, a genetic disorder which literally stops the puberty process. In Scott’s case it left him with boyish features throughout his adulthood and a uniquely high-pitched voice. Blues guitarist B.B. King was a disc-jockey in Memphis, Tennessee in 1950 and recalled his response to hearing Scott’s first, and ultimately only big hit, “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool”: “First off, I thought it was a woman. But then, no, it’s a man. Young man who sounds like an alto sax. Young man with a sound all his own.”
Scott might have been a singer with a “sound all his own,” but it was not on a record that was all his own. Scott was simply a singer in Lionel Hampton’s band, and when the record was released, it simply stated “Lionel Hampton, Singer with Orchestra.” It would not be the only time this would happen to Scott. When a live session from 1950, in which Scott sings “Embraceable You” with Charlie Parker was released almost thirty years later, the vocals were mistakenly attributed to female vocalist Chubby Newsome.
Nevertheless, Jimmy Scott launched an influential solo career in the 1950s. Standout recordings, from this period like “I’m Afraid The Masquerade is Over” and “When Did You Leave Heaven?,” influenced a generation of singers. As Marvin Gaye told his biographer David Ritz, “I heard Jimmy back in the fifties…My entire career I longed to sing ballads — like Frank Sinatra or Nat Cole or Perry Como — but with the depth of Jimmy Scott.” Vocalist Nancy Wilson was even more emphatic, noting that she was “eighteen years old when I first heard [“When Did You Leave Heaven”]…I was playing clubs around Ohio and, because of Jimmy’s version, I fell in love with the song.” Wilson adds, “I had fallen in love with Jimmy’s sensitivity the moment I’d heard ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool’. From then on, I followed his career and based my style on his.”
“Dealing with the Devil” is an apt description of the Black music industry in the 1950s. In the case of Jimmy Scott, the devil was embodied in the figure Herman Lubinsky, the owner of Savoy Records, with whom Scott signed in 1955. As David Ritz offers Savoy Records “is famous in the annals of American music for producing a large number of important classic recordings” — Rev. James Cleveland recorded for the label during his great ascent in the 1960s — but Lubinsky was “infamous for his underpayment and even nonpayment” of artist. Scott’s time with Savoy, was marked by the denial of his his full financial worth as an artist, and a lack of respect for his talent. Scott, not so ironically, referred to Savoy Records as the “slave barracks.”
Scott recorded three albums for Savoy between 1955 and 1960, and a fourth album in 1975, after Lubinsky’s death, which were largely commercial failures. According to Scott, in the era in which Sam Cooke and The Coasters were breaking through to the Pop mainstream, “Lubinsky wanted me to make more rock-sounding records” as Scott laments, “I just wasn’t willing…I couldn’t be sincere.” Scott understood that his audience was never going to be teenagers, but those who appreciated mature interpretations of the Great American Songbook, like Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday. Scott returned to his native Cleveland until a chance encounter with Mary Ann Fisher, a former vocalist with Ray Charles, led to another opportunity for success.
Ray Charles, who had long been a fan of Scott’s, leapt at the chance to record Scott on his ABC Records distributed label Tangerine. The resultant album Falling in Love is Wonderful (1962), featured arrangements from Gerald Wilson and Marty Paich, who both arranged tracks on Charles’s groundbreaking Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. According to Wilson, with Charles accompanying Scott, Falling in Love is Wonderful is “really a long and intimate conversation between Ray’s sensitive piano playing and Jimmy’s sensitive voice.” Ritz describes Falling in Love is Wonderful, as comparable with some of the best albums of the genre, notably Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours and Holiday’s near closing statement Lady in Satin.
Few heard the album though; shortly after it was released, the album was recalled, after Lubinsky claimed that Scott was still under contract with Savoy. Charles’ Tangerine label capitulated. Scott had already experienced some erasure with the album when the cover image featured male and female models on the cover, as if Scott was simply the invisible conjurer of these collective moments of romance. Yet the erasure became even harsher when several years later, Tangerine released the original instrumental tracks, with organist Will Bill Davis replacing Scott’s vocals, on an album titled, Wonderful World of Love (1969). By the time the Davis album was released, Scott was embroiled in yet another drama in which his ability to make a living from his art was again undermined by specious claims of contractual obligations to Savoy and Lubinsky.
Producer Joel Dorn was a radio disc jockey in Philadelphia in 1963 when Falling in Love is Wonderful was released. Dorn was working as a producer at Atlantic Records in 1968 when on the advice of Duke Wade, a one-time manager of Ruth Brown and Ray Charles, Scott came to visit. Soon Scott was in the studio to record The Source, which featured eight tracks including stellar interpretations of The Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody”, “Our Day Will Come”, which was most famously recorded by Ruby in the Romantics, and the aforementioned “Day by Day”.
Dorn called the album The Source, because “for modern jazz singing — especially modern female jazz singers — Jimmy really is the indisputable source.” Dorn attempted to capture the spirit of the Tangerine session, with Bill Fischer and Arif Mardin — who produced Chaka Khan’s first three solo albums — providing string arrangements. The sessions even included Charles’ longtime sideman, saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman. The result was, to date, the most accomplished recording of Scott’s career, of which “Day by Day” was the clear standout. Part of Sinatra’s early repertoire, much of the genius of Scott’s rendition of “Day by Day” comes in the pacing. As Ritz describes it, Scott “takes it to a tempo half the pace of Sinatra, elongating notes and rewriting melodies in a manner that seems to defy musical reason.”
Viewed from a contemporary standpoint, where Maxine Waters’ famous claim that she was “reclaiming her time” become a popular digital meme, Scott is indeed reclaiming his time; his pacing almost seems to recover — in one song, no less — all the time that had been lost already in his career. Recalling the relationship between maroons and the plantation, where they stole moments with loved ones, Scott’s performance becomes a metaphor for stealing time, as the song’s title serves as reminder of the “one day at a time” ethos that shaped Black political agency right up into the era in which Scott recorded the song.
Dorn recorded with Scott again in 1972 for an album that both knew would never be released, but as Dorn laments, “I couldn’t stand the idea that Jimmy Scott, at his absolute prime, was still not being documented.” The Source is one of the few available examples of Scott at the peak of his artistic skills; he would not record on a consistent basis until he was well into his sixties, and “discovered” by a generation of hipsters in the 1990s. In the years after its recording “Day by Day” wouldn’t be available to the larger public until the compact disc/digital release of Lost and Found in 1993, which included five tracks from The Source and five tracks from the 1972 session that was never released. Scott died in June of 2014.
