Jackie Wilson’s voice is otherworldly. He had a four-octave range. You listen and there are times where you can’t even believe what you’re hearing.
Wilson started out in Detroit talent contests, where he had a tendency to win. Big fish small pond, although even in the 40s it was hard to stand out in music hub Detroit. Eventually, Wilson auditioned for and was accepted into the successful R&B group Billy Ward and His Dominoes, a staple in Las Vegas entertainment. (Elvis, famously, saw them perform in Las Vegas in 1956 and was so blown away by Wilson, whose name he didn’t know, that he went on and on … and ON about it, during the rap-riff session in 1956 now known as the “Million Dollar Quartet”. Wilson performed Elvis’ recent hit “Don’t Be Cruel” and you can hear Elvis’ awe: he didn’t know the song had THAT in it. 1956 was the year Elvis went national/global. “Don’t Be Cruel” was huge for him. But he performed it without exploring the depths. Wilson showed him the depths. Listen to Elvis regale Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins with the story. There’s no jealousy. It’s sheer personal and professional respect.)
Billy Ward and his Dominoes
Wilson and Elvis eventually became friends. Wilson always had nice things to say about Elvis and, of course, the reverse was true, as we have immortalized on tape.
You can get a great sense of Wilson’s style in “Rags to Riches”, where his lead voice launches out of the group in an undeniable way. He doesn’t obliterate the group, but he does seem to single-handedly justify its existence. It was 1953. He was plucked from obscurity into this position.
Wilson was always getting into big trouble. He was stabbed by a sex worker, for example.The women, the kids, the assaults, the chaos … The Dominoes were good for Wilson at first. It gave his life a structure to his talent a pltform. He stayed with the group for 4 or 5 years, but finally left, tired of the endless “residency” in Vegas. He was meant to be a solo artist. A headliner.
From his earliest days in Detroit, he was already doing the songs which would soon be regular staples of his act for years to come. Like his version of “Danny Boy”. I don’t even know what to SAY about his “Danny Boy”.
WORDS ARE INADEQUATE.
You have to go to YouTube to watch this clip of him performing “Danny Boy” live. They won’t let me embed it. It’s outrageous. So beautiful.
Here’s the recorded version but you have to see him do it live, because it drives home the point that Wilson didn’t need the studio to shine. He was, if anything, better live.
Wilson returned to Detroit at the same time a guy named Berry Gordy was starting to be make a name for himself in the local scene. One of Wilson’s first songs as a solo artist, “Reet Petite”, was written by Gordy. Wilson knew what his voice was capable of. He’d choose a key for a given song and producers/other musicians thought it would too high. Wilson knew he could hit those notes. It’s WHY he started songs up the scale. If you have four octaves in your pocket, you want to show it off.
An early hit for him was “Lonely Teardrops”, a staple of his act which went to #1 on the R&B charts. Here he is performing it on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1962:
Wilson’s heyday, like his life, was brief. The British Invasion was a game-changer for singers like Wilson. The landscape changed overnight, leaving a lot of singers behind, no matter how talented. If you didn’t write your own stuff, you were stranded. Motown exploded, but Gordy cultivated other singers for superstardom. I’m not sure why. Wilson had fallings-out with pretty much everybody (except his audience, who went batshit every time they saw him live. People fainted. People tore their hair out. People stormed the stage. He was one of the most exciting performers ever).
He’s probably most known for “Higher and Higher”, an analogy for his voice.
In 1975, he collapsed onstage while singing “Lonely Teardrops”, and went into a coma. His life stretched on for another eight years, but he never “woke up”. He was in an institution. It’s tragic. There’s a rumor Elvis donated money anonymously to pay for Wilson’s medical bills, which sounds like something Elvis would do. There were others. Benefit concerts were held. A lot of Motown artists donated money. Was Jackie Wilson conscious in there? It’s horrible to think about.
When he died in 1984, there wasn’t enough money for a headstone. Friends raised the money. He was buried with his mother in a mausoleum in a Detroit ceremony, and the plaque reads “No More Lonely Teardrops”.
Wilson’s voice was one of those eerie miracles of humanity, but he wasn’t just a voice. He was a full body performer (part of Elvis’ monologue in the Million Dollar Quartet details how Wilson moved while singing “Don’t Be Cruel”).
I found this wild clip where Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Linda Gail Lewis and Wilson come together to sing “This Land Is Your Land”. God bless the person who recorded this – who saved it – and God bless the person who uploaded it to YouTube. I love all of them but when Jackie Wilson comes on – and then grabs the microphone to do his verse – and you hear that voice – it makes me want to cry.
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