Ain't Miss Beehivin'

"Miss Beehive" leads off Howard Tate's new full-length Blue Day with a Chess Records groove made humorous by Nashville producer Jon Tiven's riffing saxophones—and that's appropriate, since it's a funny song. "Everybody knows she's putting something up her nose / And she don't want to go to rehab," Tate sings. "Miss Beehive likes to misbehave." Tate, who turns 69 later this month, gives the song a sagacious, slightly sardonic lift, but "Miss Beehive" is more than a novelty tune about the well-known British singer whose stylized phrasing, trademark hairstyle and self-destructive urges amount to a strange new take on soul music.

"I saw her on the Grammy Awards where she did that rehab song, and I thought she was fantastic," Tate says of the song's subject, Amy Winehouse. "Looking at her picture, she's the cutest little thing you've ever seen, to be so out-of-control like that. You know, she wants to be so tough. I was laughing the whole time I did the song, and all the while I was praying for her." That might sound like an ambivalent statement, but Howard Tate's 40-year career brims with missed chances and the kind of critical acclaim any American musician would welcome. If success seems to impel Winehouse toward self-abuse, failure did the same thing to Tate in an earlier, less celebrity-obsessed era.

Born in Eberton, Ga., on Aug. 14, 1939, Tate moved with his family to Philadelphia as a child. In the early '60s he performed as part of doo-wop group The Gainors and toured with organist Bill Doggett. He began his long association with producer and songwriter Jerry Ragovoy in 1964 with "You're Lookin' Good," an amalgam of pop and soul that featured Tate's avid phrasing and uncanny falsetto. (Along with tracks by Irma Thomas and Dionne Warwick, "You're Lookin' Good" appears on the new compilation The Jerry Ragovoy Story: Time Is on My Side 1953-2003, which nicely encapsulates the producer's career.)

Working with Ragovoy, Tate recorded a series of late-'60s sides that combined Southern fervor with East Coast cool. "Stop" and "Get It While You Can" are among the greatest soul records, while Tate's reading of Little Johnny Taylor's "Part Time Love" outclasses the original. The records were brilliant, but Tate and Ragovoy parted ways for Howard Tate's Reaction and only reunited for 1972's Howard Tate, on which the singer covered Bob Dylan's "Girl of the North Country." He cut one more single with Ragovoy—1974's appropriately titled "Ain't Got Nobody to Give It To"—and that was it. After disappearing into a haze of cocaine addiction and homelessness, Tate wouldn't resurface for 25 years.

Now living in Southampton, N.J., Tate has made his way out of the black hole his truncated career created. Found by a New Jersey DJ in 2001, Tate started working again and made Rediscovered, another Ragovoy production. In 2006 he released A Portrait of Howard, an ambitious effort whose highlight is a superb version of Lou Reed's "How Do You Think It Feels."

Recorded in Nashville with a band that includes bassist Sally Tiven and drummer Chester Thompson, Blue Day recasts Tate as blues singer. (Vocalist Mike Farris proves himself a Tate disciple on their duet, "If God Brought You to It.") Jon Tiven writes or co-writes every song, making the collection a rocking blues record with dark undertones. "Miss Beehive" takes aim at Winehouse's pretensions with suppressed glee, while "Stalking My Woman" features an ominous motif played on guitar and saxophone and a lonely, weird piano part.

"I was able to handle 'Miss Beehive' because it was a reflection back on the time when I was there," Tate says. "I was determined to do that song, even though it's a novelty song. I had these songs sent to me by Jon for two years, had 'em laying around. I thought if I could put my vocal on it and handle these songs, we could come out with something. I was right."

Tiven says the Blue Day sessions went quickly, with Tate in magisterial control of the material. But the project's business machinations were more tortuous. "It took us forever to figure out how to do this record on the business level, because Howard is very loath to sign agreements with anybody," he remembers. "He came down here right before Christmas last year, and the very first thing that he said when he got off the plane was, 'I want my advance for the record that you owe me at this point,' and I said, 'OK,' and we went over to the bank." In soul music as in life, money talks, and from such fortuitous circumstances Howard Tate's art makes itself known to the world once again.