Magnificent gospel vocalist and songwriter Dorothy Love Coates, who died April 9 at 74, wrote more than 300 outstanding tunes, many of them covered by a host of notable performers. That list includes Johnny Cash and the Blackwood Brothers, as well as Ray Charles and Mahalia Jackson. As a singer, her gritty, searing contralto always perfectly elaborated or accented the key lyrics in her tunes. She could soar over a chorus, and she could extend or shorten the pace, but she never overpowered her background vocalists.
Coates, who was born in Birmingham, Ala., started the Royal Gospel Singers in her early teens, then joined the Original Gospel Harmonettes in 1947, becoming their lead singer and songwriter. While still in her teens, she married Willie Love of the Fairfield Four. They divorced after 10 years, but she later wed Carl Coates, a gospel music business manager, to whom she remained married for 40 years.
Sadly, Coates’ contributions sometimes went unnoticed. The Mississippi Mass Choir took the melody from one of her greatest compositions, “A City Built Four Square,” changed the title to “They Got the Word” and cited Jerry Smith as the writer, despite the virtual note-for-note similarity. Marvin Sapp also failed to note Coates as the composer for his cover of “Lord, You’ve Been Good to Me.”
Yet Coates never filed any lawsuits or made any public complaints about these oversights. She finally achieved some mainstream notice when her song “No Hiding Place” was included on the soundtrack for Ghost in 1990. It garnered Coates—who during her heyday earned her principal income from concerts where the admission charge was usually only $1—the biggest payday of her legendary career. Hopefully, her long-deleted sessions for Specialty and Savoy will resurface domestically very soon.
Weldon Irvine was an incredibly eclectic, accomplished pianist, bandleader and lyricist. Regrettably, the gifted Irvine, who wrote more than 500 compositions, died of an apparent suicide April 9 in Uniondale, N.Y., at age 58. Though he was an ardent jazz lover, he prided himself on being neither an elitist nor a purist. He began his career in the mid-’60s playing piano with trumpeter Kenny Dorham and saxophonist Joe Henderson. Later, he auditioned for the notoriously tough Nina Simone and became her music director, bandleader and organist for three years. During that time, they co-wrote the anthems “Young, Gifted and Black” and “Revolution.”
During the ’70s, Freddie Hubbard, Stanley Turrentine and Horace Silver were among the musicians who recorded Irvine’s compositions. But he became interested in broadening the audience for jazz, writing works that combined jazz proficiency with R&B rhythms and electronic technology. Thus it was quite fitting that he became one of the earliest jazz musicians to embrace rap. He served as a piano instructor to Q-Tip and Common, he recorded and toured with Mos Def, and his songs were sampled by such rappers as KRS-One, Ice Cube, A Tribe Called Quest, Too $hort and Third Bass.
Recently, many of Irvine’s contributions to jazz, soul and funk have been remembered locally through the efforts of disc jockeys at Vanderbilt’s WRVU-91.1 FM. Appropriately, in a recent issue of Jazz Times, Irvine ripped conservative critic Stanley Crouch for his diatribes against jazz players who teamed with rappers. Weldon Irvine couldn’t stomach either reactionary politics or writers trying to defend artistic stagnation by attacking those willing to experiment. He’ll be sorely missed in a period when the direction of jazz music seems more troubled than ever.
