Donny Hathaway, a soul legend from the 70s

Donny Hathaway, born in 1945, was a prodigy. Aged three, he played piano and sang his first solo How Much I Owe Love Divine at his local Chicago Trinity Baptist Church. At four, with his grandmother he performed around the American midwest as Donnie Pitts, the nation’s youngest gospel singer, wearing a sailor suit and accompanying himself on a ukulele. At 18 he studied fine arts at Washington DC’s Howard University where his roommate was the singer Leroy Hutson and he played piano in classmate and drummer Ric Powell’s trio. At 24, he moved back to Chicago where he became The Impressions’ live musical director, arranging their 1969 album The Young Mod's Forgotten Story. That same year he made his recording debut on I Thank You Baby, a duet with June Conquest issued as June and Donnie.

His solo debut came in 1969. Signed to Atlantic’s Atco after Jerry Wexler was tipped off to his talent by sax player King Curtis, Hathaway delivered The Ghetto, his almost seven-minute soundtrack to inner city life that mixed the consciousness of the post-civil rights era with the spirituality of the black church and presaged the shift in soul music that would come the following year with Marvin Gaye’s What's Going On.

His three solo albums — 1970’s Everything Is Everything, 1971's Donny Hathaway and 1973’s Extension Of A Man — built on it, foregrounding black community and culture, peaking with Extension... His voice charged with vulnerability, sensuality and honesty and his songs fusing blues, jazz, gospel and classical music and filtered through a social conscience, were something completely new in soul music and culminated on Someday We’ll All Be Free — a prophecy of emancipation both political and spiritual. “Keep your self-respect — your manly pride,” Hathaway sings, borne on a luxuriant blanket of keys, horns and strings. As the song’s lyricist, Ed Howard would later note, it was a plea addressed in part to the singer himself who, throughout his life, suffered with depression. Hathaway would tragically fall from a window to his death in 1979.