NEW YORK – Jerry Butler, a premier soul singer of the 1960s whose rich, intimate baritone graced hits like “For Your Precious Love,” “Only the Strong Survive,” and “Make It Easy On Yourself,” died at the age of 85.
Butler’s niece, Yolanda Goff, told The Associated Press that he died Thursday of Parkinson’s disease at home in Chicago. Butler, a longtime Chicago resident and former Cook County board commissioner, continued to perform on weekends under the name Jerry “Ice Man” Butler, a show business nickname for his understated style.
Butler, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and three-time Grammy Award nominee, was a voice for two major soul music hubs: Chicago and Philadelphia.
He co-founded the Chicago-based Impressions with childhood friend Curtis Mayfield and sang lead on the breakthrough hit “For Your Precious Love,” a deeply emotional, gospel-influenced ballad that propelled Butler to stardom before he was 20 years old.
A decade later, in the late 1960s, he joined Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff’s Philadelphia-based production team, with whom he collaborated on “Only the Strong Survive,” “Hey Western Union Man,” and other hit songs.
His albums “Ice on Ice” and “The Ice Man Cometh” are regarded as early models for the danceable, string-powered productions that evolved into the classic “Sound of Philadelphia.”
Butler was also an inspired songwriter who worked with Otis Redding on “I have Been Loving You Too Long,” Redding’s signature ballad, and with Gamble and Huff on “Only the Strong Survive,” which was later covered by Elvis Presley, among others. Butler’s other credits included “For Your Precious Love,” “Never Give You Up” (with Gamble and Huff), and “He Will Break Your Heart,” which he co-wrote after becoming obsessed with the boyfriends of the groupies he met while touring.
“You go into a town; you are only going to be there for one night; you want some company; you find a girl; you blow her mind,” Butler told Rolling Stone in 1969. “Now you know she has not been sitting in town waiting for you to arrive.
She probably has another guy, and he is probably in love with her; they are probably going to go through it all, right? But you never considered it on that particular night.”
Butler, the son of Mississippi sharecroppers, and his family relocated to Chicago when he was three years old as part of the “Great Migration” of Black people from the South. As a child, he enjoyed all types of music and was a good enough singer that a friend suggested he attend the Traveling Souls Spiritualist Church, which was led by the Rev. A.B. Mayfield. Her grandson, Curtis Mayfield, quickly became a longtime collaborator. Mayfield died in 1999.
Mayfield and Butler collaborated with Sam Gooden and brothers Arthur and Richard Brooks to record “For Your Precious Love” for Vee-Jay Records in 1958.
The group was known as the Impressions, but Vee-Jay, eager to promote an individual star, advertised the song as by Jerry Butler and the Impressions, causing friction between Butler and the other performers and launching Butler’s unexpected solo career.
“Fame did not change me as much as it changed the people around me,” Butler wrote in his memoir “Only the Strong Survive,” published in 2000.
One of his first solo performances was a 1961 cover of “Moon River,” the theme from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Butler was the first performer to reach the charts with what became a pop standard, but “Moon River” became associated with Andy Williams after the singer was chosen to perform it at the Academy Awards, a snub Butler bitterly regretted. His other solo hits, some of which were recorded with Mayfield, included “He Will Break Your Heart,” “Find Another Girl,” and “I am Telling You.”
Butler’s formal style had fallen out of favor by 1967, but he was impressed by the new music emerging from Philadelphia and received permission from his record label (Mercury) to collaborate with Gamble and Huff. Butler recalled that the chemistry was “fierce” and they wrote hits like “Only the Strong Survive” in less than an hour.
“Things just seem to fall into place,” Butler told Ebony magazine in 1969. “We lock ourselves in a room, create stories about lovers, compose the music, then write the lyrics to match the music.”
Butler’s career was winding down by the 1980s, and he was becoming more interested in politics. Encouraged by Harold Washington’s 1983 election as Chicago’s first Black mayor, he ran successfully for Cook County Board in 1985 and was re-elected several times, even after supporting a contentious sales tax increase in 2009. He retired from the board in 2018.
Butler was married for 60 years to Annette Smith, who died in 2019, and they had twin sons. Many of his generational peers were struggling financially, so he worked to assist them while also supporting various family members.
He chaired the Rhythm & Blues Foundation, which provides a variety of services to musicians, and lobbied the industry to provide medical and retirement benefits.
Butler considered himself fortunate, even though he passed up the opportunity to own a share of Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International recording company.
“You know, I have lived well. Butler told the Chicago Reader in 2011 that his wife believed he could have lived better. “Did I make forty or fifty million dollars? No. Have I kept one or two? Yes. The old guys on the street used to say, ‘It is not how much you make. “It is how much you keep.”
