Remembering Maurice White is to recall when black folks smelled of incense, Egyptian Musk Oil, sweat from dancing along to Soul Train and Afro Sheen.
White, the Jazz drummer-turned-bandleader of the Funk, Jazz and Soul group Earth, Wind & Fire, died Feb. 4 after a serious and prolonged illness that kept him home and out of the touring group — down to three original members and a slew of talented stand-ins — for many, many years.
But Earth, Wind & Fire is and shall always be Maurice White’s. We had never seen Negroes like these before.
Sure, there were plenty of Funk outfits here and on the horizon, like Sly and the Family Stone, Con Funk Shun, Ohio Players, Tower of Power, et al. But what separated White and Earth, Wind & Fire members was their hairpin horn arrangements, Philip Bailey’s scorching and soaring male soprano and their lyrics of uplift, personal spirituality, love (especially that of the self) and unity.
In fact, when White had a version of Earth, Wind & Fire together and left his hometown of Chicago, one stop the combo made was a fateful one: Denver, Colo., not especially known as a breeding ground for Funk and Soul singers. But they came across Bailey, either still in high school or just barely graduated.
Bailey has always said he had not seen or smelled anything like White and his band of merry funksters, either, reeking of incense and herbs. He snagged an audition and got in the van. When I lived in Denver from 1984 to 1986, the musician at our church was also a high school music director, and Bailey had been in her choir.
I used to make her tell me that story over and over. One day she told me he still lived in Denver.
This would have been during the era Earth, Wind & Fire reunited with The Emotions, the sister trio whose careers they reignited with the classic 1977 album Rejoice, which sounds like an all-female revue of Earth, Wind & Fire music — because it is.
It is an album of flawless harmonies, stabbing horns, funked-up rhythmic turns and Earth, Wind & Fire-worthy positive lyrics. And, like “Reasons,” The Emotions had their big, blue-lights-in-the-basement love song, “Don’t Ask My Neighbors.” Further, White makes an uncredited duet appearance on “Key To My Heart,” a black waltz that finishes with staccato operatic vocal punches.
A church friend and I drove around until she found the new, gated community where Bailey and his family lived. We slowly drove into his cul-de-sac one warm spring evening, and there was Bailey rearranging his sprinkler on his front lawn.
Of course, I could not resist calling out.
“Philip Bailey!” He looked up. “I love you maaaaan!” He stood up fully, smiled big, waved and said, “Thank you!”
I started regaling my friend/fellow stalker with stories growing up with Earth, Wind & Fire as a perpetual soundtrack, each song a marker to my family’s 1970’s road to perdition and our ongoing march to redemption and self-reinvention.
They were the band that sweaty and stinky black teenagers created choreography to, sang along to or mimicked to take their bedroom fantasies of singing like Bailey public and onto the stages of ghetto gymnasiums and black community centers named for great Black-History-Month-blacks like the Booker T. Washington Community Center in countless talent shows.
The big number was also Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Reasons,” wherein Bailey is vulnerable in a classic black Valentine of yearning and pleading. Singing it convincingly is akin to someone satisfactorily pulling off Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” in their American ldol audition.
I studied the liner notes of Earth, Wind & Fire albums like they were science texts for a big chemistry exam I never had to take. I learned about African thumb pianos, horn arranger Tom Tom 84 (Tom Tom Washington), saxophonist Andrew Woolfolk and White’s brother, the fantastically underrated Verdine White.
I stockpiled my favorite Earth, Wind & Fire songs, and my list excludes “September” or “Boogie Wonderland.” They are deeper cuts: “Happy Feeling,” “Evil,” “Spirit,” “Thinking Of You” (with The Emotions), “Reasons” and “Devotion,” among others.
“Keep Your Head to the Sky,” especially, with its dark opening drums, shakers and bells and its telling, or retelling, of a conversation with The Master, can still bring me to tears because of the era of my little life it sends me hurtling back toward and its overriding message of taking personal responsibility for our own inner strength and direction.
Some Sunday mornings I put the song on endless repeat and I hear a different nuance each time. In 1973, when the album of a similar name was released, Head to the Sky — the band standing and sitting shirtless among an array of wildflowers with a turbaned female singer who did not appear on any other Earth, Wind & Fire albums — we were still coming home from Vietnam. We were about to be introduced to the relentless TV ghetto struggles of the Evanses on Good Times.
Personally, my family was recuperating from a summer of living in the station wagon, from sofa surfing and sleeping, from living in hotel rooms across West Virginia when there was money and from eating Vienna sausages and canned potted meat after our mother staged a walk-out on our father.
So, “Keep Your Head to the Sky” in many ways saved my 8-year-old self and simultaneously made me still more melancholy, insular and inward-looking.
Somehow, despite or perhaps because of our abject poverty, our mother always found ways and a meager budget to buy music in the forms of 8-tracks and records.
She had the group’s entire oeuvre that I could ultimately flip back and forth through and DJ my own sets when I grew into an older teenager trusted enough to babysit my little sister, and we would dance to Earth, Wind & Fire all evening long.
I so admired Maurice White: for his lifelong devotion to one mission; for the strategic way he and Earth, Wind & Fire re-blackened 1970s radio when everything was going straight to Rock and Country/Rock; for spreading the message of deeper, truer love to black folks when we so needed it, even if we had to dance through our circumstances to get the message.
White’s was music that transcended Funk, good times and bell-bottoms. It was surely spiritual music; as spiritual as any Sunday morning.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Feb 10-17, 2016.