Modern vocal groups such as Take 6, Rockapella, The Nylons and Boyz II Men all cited “The Kings of A Cappella” as a primary influence. The L.A. Weekly once wrote, “The Persuasions are to singing what Muhammad Ali was to boxing—invincible, innovative, original, beautiful.”
The five Persuasions—Jerry Lawson, Jimmy Hayes, Joe Russell, Jayotis Washington, and Herbert “Toubo” Rhoad—fell together by chance in 1962, harmonizing on outdoor basketball courts in Brooklyn after pick-up games. They went on to release 25 albums and to perform or record with artists including Liza Minelli, Bette Midler, Stevie Wonder, Lou Reed, Van Morrison, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle, Little Richard, Nancy Wilson, The Neville Brothers, Country Joe McDonald, B.B. King, John Hiatt, Leon Redbone. Their music has turned up in films from “Joe and the Volcano” to “The Heartbreak Kid,” “Streets of Gold,” and “E.T.”
The Persuasions’ first record deal was with Frank Zappa in 1968. He “discovered” them over the phone when their friend (and eventual producer) David Dashev, phoned Zappa from a New York studio, declaring, “you’ve got to hear this.” They debuted to the world with the LP A Cappella on Zappa’s Straight label. Said Zappa many years later ” I could tell, even over the phone, that these guys were something special. Rock critic and author Greil Marcus once called The Persuasions’ style a “perfect marriage of passion and intelligence,” and Rolling Stone rated their 1977 album, Chirpin’, as one of the hundred best works of the 1970s. Mix Magazine proclaimed “The Persuasions are four parts of one voice, one spirit.” Cash Box correctly noted, in 1996, “These all-vocal, instrument-free heroes paved the way for today’s platinum A Cappella acts, Take 6, and Bobby McFerrin, as well as the retro-hip-hop styles of Boyz II Men, and Color Me Badd.”
Who could imagine (to quote Frank Zappa’s “It Can’t Happen Here”) that The Persuasions would get their big break via the legendary leader of The Mothers of Invention? In this clip from the documentary film From Straight to Bizarre: Zappa, Beefheart, Alice Cooper And LA's Lunatic Fringe, Jerry Lawson talks about his first meeting with Zappa, and the Persuasions’ first experience opening for The Mothers.
The Persuasions recorded the Zappa tribute Frankly a Cappella: The Persuasions Sing Zappa in 2000.
As I noted last month in “Black people create, white people profit: The racist history of the music industry,” everything isn’t always rosy on the business side for Black musicians; far too many wound up on the short end of the stick financially. This sad truth also applies to The Persuasions, who are still fighting to receive their due today.
As Billboard reported last spring, the group alleges they are owed royalties going back nearly 50 years.
Brooklyn a cappella group The Persuasions are suing Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Capitol Records, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and Concord Music Group for alleged unpaid royalties spanning 48 years, Billboard reports and Pitchfork can confirm via court documents. The surviving members of the group have taken the suit to New York Supreme Court.
The Persuasions claim that they never saw any royalties from album sales or streams between 1971 and the present day. When Billboard, spoke to the Persuasions’ attorney Larry Zerner, he stated: “They never paid my clients any of the money. We asked them for the contract. We said we are not getting paid. You are licensing these songs. Where is the contract that gives you the basis for that? Do you think you have the right to do that and not pay my clients? We tried to get an answer and we got no response.” Zerner believes the damages could be worth “millions of dollars.”
The current members of the Persuasions include Jerry Lawson, Jayotis Washington, and Raymond Sanders. James “Bro” Caldon Hayes, Herbert “Turbo” Rhoad, and Jesse “Sweet Joe” Russell, are no longer alive; however, the surviving members allege that none of their former bandmates’ estates have received money owed by the labels. They also insist that they never signed away their intellectual property rights.
For a deeper dive into a cappella and doo-wop, I suggest you read Doo-Wop Acappella: A Story of Street Corners, Echoes, and Three-Part Harmonies, by Lawrence Pitilli.
As Kenny Vance and the Planotones suggested in their classic song “Looking for an Echo,” every doo-wop acapella group’s mission—the search “for a sound, a place to be in harmony, a place we almost found”—was more than the story of street kids seeking recording glory. It is the tale of urban change, mass migrations, ethnic acculturation, a changing radio and recording industry, and the dynamics of cultural change in the “sounds”—sonic and linguistic—that every generation seeks to make and re-make for itself.
In his study of this neglected period, Pitilli uncovers a rich musical tradition practiced largely by amateurs in an almost mythologized urban America. Although most of these practitioners were musically untrained, their lack of formal music education and financial support neither diluted their passion for singing or their quest for possible fame and fortune. In this engagingly written and celebratory work, Pitilli further demonstrates that doo-wop acappella was closely tied to broader issues, including the self-invented individual, gender roles, ethnicity, race, and class.
Professor Pitelli teaches at St. John’s University in New York, and his students were treated to an amazing class about doo-wop, with live performers, two years ago.
Close to a thousand miles away from the street corners of Brooklyn, and almost 20 years later in time, on the campus of Oakwood University—a private, historically Black university (HBCU) in Huntsville, Alabama owned and operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church—the next a cappella phenomenon was born. Oakwood, established in 1896 to educate recently freed African-Americans in the South, has had a long gospel music tradition.
The name of the group formed at Oakwood was Take 6.
Take 6 has come a long way from their days at Huntsville, Alabama’s Oakwood College where Claude McKnight formed the group as The Gentleman’s Estates Quartet in 1980. When tenor Mark Kibble heard the group rehearsing in the dorm, he joined in the harmonies and performed on stage that night. When Mervyn Warren joined shortly afterward, they took the name Alliance. Yet, when they signed to Reprise Records/Warner Bros. in 1987, they found that there was another group with the same name, so they became Take 6. Says McKnight: “Take 6 was all about a democratic process of sitting in a room together and throwing a couple of hundred names at each other and Take 6 was the one that got the most yay votes [laughing.] It pretty much was a play on the Take 5 jazz standard and the fact that there are six of us in the group, so it became Take 6.” Their self-titled debut CD won over jazz and pop critics, scored two 1988 Grammy Awards, landed in the Top Ten Billboard Contemporary Jazz and Contemporary Christian Charts — and they’ve never slowed down...
The members of Take 6 talk about their genesis, and evolution in this 2017 interview with Hawaii Public radio.
I’ve never forgotten the first time I heard their 1988 self-titled debut album; I’ve been listening to them ever since. They took the jazz world by storm, and many music listeners who did not get raised in the gospel tradition became lifelong fans. Here’s a live performance of “Mary Don’t You Weep,” which appears on the album.
Take 6 continues to “Spread Love,” another hit cut from that first album.
In a response to the COVID-19 pandemic they’ve issued a #SpreadLove2020Challenge.