ME AND MR PAUL
efined by the music business, and the world at large, by his US Number 1 1972 hit Me And Mrs. Jones, a sophisticated Philly soul hymn that shifted the classic cheatin’ soul song from The Dark End Of The Street of the ’60s into a lusher and more comfortable setting for the following decade, Billy Paul was at heart a frustrated jazz singer. Raised in North Philadelphia in a jazz-loving family whose 78s he’d eagerly study, the young Paul Williams was a contemporary of Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons and McCoy Tyner, and by the age of 12 was singing on local radio. He went on to study music at Temple University, West Philadelphia Music School and the Granoff School Of Music, before his first paying gig, aged 19, came at the city’s Earl Theatre supporting Dinah Washington. In local clubs he worked with, and learned from, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, by which time he’d made his recording debut on Jubilee with Why Am I. At 21 he was called up and served
Din the US Army in West Germany where his contemporaries were again
Sociopolitics, Philly soul and a jazz voice, Billy Paul left us on April 24.
stellar – Elvis Presley and Gary Crosby, son of Bing. Billy started a jazz band with the latter. Demobbed in March 1959, he worked in a department store and as a stevedore but also reintroduced himself to the Philly scene, and fellow jazz buffs like Kenny Gamble. Having released singles on small labels, the singer – who’d changed his name to Billy Paul to avoid confusion with white singer-songwriter Paul Williams – recorded his debut album, Feelin’ Good At The Cadillac Club, not a live album but recorded with a jazz trio at Virtue Studios for that label. Before its release, Billy bumped into Gamble and it was issued later, in 1968, on the
Philly mainstay’s label, starting a long, productive, though not always smooth journey together. Indeed, Gamble’s empire building stalled when their Neptune label, in a deal with Chess, stalled in the wake of Leonard Chess’s heart attack. It took several years to regroup. When they did, however, the impact of Philadelphia International and the Philly soul sound was, and remains, profound. After Ebony Woman (1970) and