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24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
Celebrities Who Got Normal Jobs
Lots of people go into the entertainment industry dreaming of fame and fortune, but for most, it sadly doesn't work out. Sometimes, even performers who've been successful fall on hard times or struggle to get work. Many of them make the very commendable choice to get a job outside of the industry. Here are 21 celebs who took on "normal" jobs: Amid reports that she was working at a salon, Hairspray star Nikki Blonsky tweeted, "Its true Im workin@ Superstar Salon as a makeup artist & more Im proud 2 b workin & helpin pay bills BUT ill NEVER loose sight of my dreams." Her agent, Bill Viloric, told Newsday, "She's working part-time in a salon while she continues to audition for TV and film roles. She hasn't given up on her dreams." Nikki has also continued acting, most recently appearing in the movie Bosco. She's also reportedly quite popular on Cameo. Anneliese Van Der Pol has continuously worked on stage and onscreen, but at one point after the end of That's So Raven, she "worked in New York in several restaurants." On a 2023 episode of her podcast Big Name B*tches, she said, "I was really proud of myself; you had to do a lot of multitasking." However, meeting fans or even fellow actors while on the clock wasn't always a positive experience. She said, "The disappointment, the look, the drop of faces when [people] recognized me, was truly gut-wrenching. It's almost like I had to say, 'I'm okay. I'm actually really happy that I don't have to audition and am doing something I know I'm good at.' I know when I clean a table or bring a meal that, I can do that, and there won't be any mistakes. I won't be judged. Essentially, I kind of was judged...I remember one time, I ran into Ashley Tisdale, and I had to serve Ashley Tisdale. I wanna say she was lovely, didn't do anything, but she was uncomfortable for me. She was so uncomfortable. It was like I had to [be like], 'I'm fine, girl!" At the height of his fame in the early '90s, MC Hammer was reportedly raking in $33 million a year. However, lavish purchases, such as 17 cars, a $9 million mansion, and a Boeing 727, quickly depleted his bank account, and he wound up $14 million in debt. In 1996, he declared bankruptcy. A year later, he experienced a "visitation from Jesus" and decided to become an ordained minister in the Church of God in Christ. He told the LA Times, "Whether the bankruptcy played any role in my refocusing, that's great. Hallelujah, I hope it did! But the most important part of what occurred to me was love, missing the love of God in the way that I had known it." Jamie Walters, who's most known for Beverly Hills 90210 and singing the #1 hit "How Do You Talk to an Angel," quit acting to become a firefighter in Los Angeles. He told The US Sun, "A lot of years have gone by, and I don't think people are expecting when the fire department shows up that the guy in uniform might be somebody from a TV show in the '90s. I'm thankful that I was able to switch gears and do something that I'm proud of and that my kids find interesting and cool. I still have a lot of friends that are in that business, but it's a tough business. Unless you're doing well, it's a struggle to raise a family." "I started having second thoughts about this [acting] career path, and I'd always been interested in becoming a firefighter. The more I researched, I was like, oh man, it's hard to get this job. This is really competitive. It took like three years, the process, from the time you take the written and you have medical exams, background checks, psychological, more physical agility checks. I finally got my job offer to come to the training academy in 2003," he said. He briefly returned to acting for a guest appearance on BH90210, where he played a fictionalized version of himself. As Ke Huy Quan grew up, he realized that roles for Asian actors were, unfortunately, rare and therefore very competitive. So, he decided to go to film school at USC as well. After he graduated in 1999, famous action director and choreographer Corey Yuen offered him a stunt choreographer job on X-Men. Following his role in the 2002 Hong Kong film Second Time Around, he didn't act again for almost 20 years. He continued working various positions behind the camera. He told Vulture, "I was happy working behind the camera, but this entire time, something felt missing. When those opportunities dried up, I spent a long time trying to convince myself that I didn't like acting anymore. I didn't want to step away with the feeling that it was because there were no opportunities. I was lying to myself." Then, the success of Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 inspired him to try again. Within a few weeks of hiring a new agent, he booked Everything Everywhere All At Once, which he went on to win an Oscar for. "I Wanna Be Bad" singer Willa Ford left music and became an interior designer after the failure of her second single. She told Billboard, "A lot of people don't realize this, but my second single was released on September 11, 2001. Everything that happened that day froze; the world stood still, as it should have. My second single didn't do well because anything that launched that day kind of got canned. I know that sounds silly, but on radio, they slate things, but it really fell to the wayside. I didn't think it was a big deal because we were making a new album anyway. The record company I was with at the time got acquired by another record company, and the president of our record company left the company. So, I ended up in no man's land." Her new career came about unexpectedly. She said, "I'm just a creative human: if I'm not creating, I'm dying. In my first marriage, I moved to Texas, and I was pretty bored there. I started working on the house with an interior designer at the time named Amy Nolan, and we really ended up doing the house together. I found this absolute love for it. I came back out to LA after my divorce, and I was acting, but there's so much dead time. I just needed another outlet. I started doing it for friends, and everyone was loving what I was doing. It was word of mouth. I did a movie, and the producer of the movie asked me to work on their home. Before I knew it, I was doing really high-end homes. Now I have three employees and myself with the new firm. It's constantly changing and growing. I love it." After Drew Barrymore emancipated herself from her mother at 14, she "found a place in the back of a building where [her] friend Justine was living." In her memoir Wildflower, she wrote, "I needed a job. Justine worked at a coffeehouse in the Valley, but she had a car, and I was two years away from getting my driver's licence, so I went to the coffeehouse near us, the Living Room, which happened to be one of the big LA hot spots at night. It was the start of the 1990s, and coffeehouses were where everyone hung out. People poured out on to the street every night. I wasn't great at my job. I wasn't really great at anything. I had only done two things: acted and had wild life experiences." She also wrote, "I could tell my boss, who had hired me on the novel idea of having a washed-up former child actor behind the counter, was patient with all my learning curves, but was also irritated with me. He came in when I was doing dishes (which, come to think of it, probably helped me realize you actually had to 'do' dishes rather than just put everything in the sink and pray, like I did at home), but he walked in and said, very sharply and exasperatedly, 'Don't use the abrasive side of the brush! All the pastry cases are getting scratched and foggy, and you can't see what's inside!'" She, of course, got back into acting, next appearing in Motorama and Poison Ivy. In 2018, photos of The Cosby Show actor Geoffrey Owens working at Trader Joe's went viral. He told Good Morning America, "This business of my being this Cosby guy who got shamed for working at Trader Joe's, that's going to pass. But I hope what doesn't pass is this idea that people are now thinking, this rethinking of what it means to work, the honor of the working person and the dignity of work." He quit his job when the pictures starting spreading, but he also said that the support he received from both fans and his peers was "really overwhelming, in a good way." After seeing Geoffrey's interview, Tyler Perry decided to offer him a role. He told GMA, "I said, 'Hmm, I got something for you. I'll write a senator in, make you a senator in [The Haves and the Have Nots]. I called him up, and the next week I had written him into 11 shows. But when he showed up the first day, I saw him in costume, I had 20,000 more ideas running in my head for him." Then, in 2024, Geoffrey told V-103 Atlanta's The Big Tigger Morning Show, "Even today, right now, as we speak, I still struggle to make a living. I struggle every day to make my ends meet, and people can't get their heads around that because they see me in movies. People have the impression, 'You're making a lot of money. What's the problem? Why are you having financial troubles?' They don't understand the specifics of how my industry works." In support of Geoffrey, many actors shared their experiences using the hashtag #ActorsWithDayJobs. Broadway and voice actor Liz Callaway — whom you'd probably recognize as the single voice of the titular character in Anastasia — tweeted, "After 3 Bway shows and a Tony nom. my unemployment ran out so I got a job at a gift shop. One a day a customer said, 'has anyone ever told you you look like Liz Callaway?' I confessed it was me. He said 'good for you!!' That was Ira Levin, who wrote Deathtrap." In a since-deleted tweet, Julie Berman said, "Got a job as a hostess when I left General Hospital. Many didn't understand why I'd leave #GH without another acting gig waiting for me. (If only we could all be so lucky). This is what dedication to your artistic happiness actually looks like." After The Traitors UK, Wilfred Webster went into full-time influencing. However, because of his career, he wasn't able to secure the kind of mortgage he wanted. So, he planned to pivot to a part-time job in teaching or the charity sector to supplement his income. He told Vice, "The thing with social media is it's always fluctuating. So it's never guaranteed income all the time. That's hard, especially with a family." Reality star and beautician Sarah Goodhart told Vice, "When I came out of Geordie Shore, I'm a working class person, so I needed to return to work. Whereas if I was able to take more time off, I probably could have tried to become an influencer – but you have to wait a few months for the money [from the show] to come in." After roles became harder to come by, American Pie actor Chris Owen took a job as a server at a Santa Monica sushi restaurant. In 2014, he told the New York Daily News, "Life doesn't always go the way you planned. I love acting, and this job lets me stay in the fight...I get recognized a lot. I walk up to the table and see the look in their get excited, and it feels good. I like connecting with people for that brief moment in time." He's continued acting, most recently appearing in the movie Money Game. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial actor Robert MacNaughton told Yahoo, "I was pursuing [acting] in Los Angeles till I was about 30, and I found I'd kind of lost the joy for acting. I was auditioning for things I didn't really want to do even if I got the part, just to keep my agent happy. I was really not happy. I was happy when I was doing theater, but it was infrequent. And so I visited Arizona during that time, and I just liked the pace, and I liked it better than where I was living in California. So I decided I wanted to move there. And then I tried still going back for auditions and everything, and that didn't work. It was too much, driving from Arizona to Los Angeles twice a week. So then I had to get a real job, and I started working for the postal service. I've worked for them since 1995. And I was able to get a transfer to the New York area when I married my wife." However, more recently, he's gotten back into acting a little bit. He continued, "So then what happened was, I didn't really plan on getting back into acting, but my wife is an actress and she had the lead in a mob movie called Laugh Killer Laugh. And the director, Kamal Ahmed, asked if I wanted to work on the movie. He had a part for me but it was working one day, just a few scenes. And it was kind of a funny part, and I said OK; he was a friend, and I did it for no money. I didn't plan on getting back into acting. In fact, it was the first time I picked up a script in 25 years. So I just did it sort of as a one-off. And then while I was doing that, this guy who was doing a horror movie asked if I wanted to do that. And I went, 'Yeah, I never was in a horror movie!' So I did that. But it wasn't any kind of planned comeback or anything." After leaving Jon and Kate Plus 8, former reality star Jon Gosselin reportedly began working as a sales marketer for Global Green Property Service. Life & Style reported that it was a "modest job" without a huge salary, but he wanted to make money to help support his kids. An alleged insider told the outlet, "Jon doesn't long for fame at all. He's much more content blending in and being able to live his life without the world watching." Jon eventually moved on from the sales job. In 2016, he was a full-time DJ and part-time cook at TGI Friday's. He told Entertainment Tonight, "I only work there eight hours a week, because I like to do it. Why can't I work at a restaurant? I like to cook. My buddy needed help, so I said, 'OK, why not?'" However, he left the job after a picture of him at work was leaked. Then, in 2020, he told Entertainment Tonight that he was a healthcare facility's IT director. He said, "We see the undocumented and uninsured. We're doing telemedicine and telephonic, and we're using Ring Sensual for Zoom to see patients. So we're not physically seeing patients right now. My job was to set up and teach providers, which are doctors, on how to use telemedicine. So I developed a procedure rather quickly, and my boss, the CIO, bought software that we never used before. I had to learn it in five, six hours." Devon Werkheiser tried to find his next "big thing" after Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide. He "pushed and pushed at ages 16 to around 24." He told Business Insider, "My savings, which I'd been living pretty modestly on, inevitably ran out when I was around 25. I just wasn't paying attention, and suddenly it was like, 'Oh shit, I need to start making a living.'" "I was never ridiculous with my money, but I would eat out or go on trips when I wanted to. I'd always be living on my savings until the next job came and refilled it, then I'd live on my savings some more. Over the years, supporting-role jobs started paying less in the industry, and at the same time, I was booking less and less. The only thing I knew to do was to go get some hourly job and start working my way out of my situation. I got a 9-to-5 for the first time in my life. It was a real wake-up call for me," he said. The experience partially inspired him to start his first podcast, Growing Up with Devon. Former Looking Glass singer and guitarist Elliot Lurie wasn't able to find commercial success as a solo artist after his band disbanded in 1974. Ten years later, he relocated to LA and began working a a music supervisor for movies and TV. Eventually, he became an executive at Twentieth Century Fox, where he was in charge of music. However, in more recent years, he's gotten back into playing shows. On his official website, he said, "I started playing out again, beginning with occasional oldies shows, sitting in as a 'special guest.' Although I've constantly remained involved with music over the years, I was reminded that the most direct connection is still performing live to an audience." The Goonies actor Jeff Cohen grew up to be an entertainment attorney thanks to the support of director Richard Donner. He told Variety, "Dick Donner and Lauren Shuler Donner, because they were kind, paid for my college when I went to Berkeley. The story is when my acting career started to peter out, I still loved show business, and Dick let me be a production assistant for him." He continued, "I worked for him at Warner Bros. When I was applying to college, I said, 'Hey Dick, can you write me a letter of recommendation for college?' And he said, 'Sure kid.'...He asked me to put some notes together to give him an indication of what he should say. In the note to him, I told him about my life and some of the struggles that I went through as a kid — my father not being there and other issues that I dealt with. And he called me on the phone, and instead of merely writing a letter of recommendation to college, he told me that he and Lauren had read my letter, and they were going to pay for my college. I was absolutely flabbergasted. I was shocked. I had to sit down, because, for me, paying for college was going to be a problem. That changed my life. Not only economically, but it showed that Dick and Lauren believed in me." Maggie Yu Miao, who was a TV star in Hong Kong, reportedly left acting and became a server in Dongguan, China. In a social media video, she said, "Life in Dongguan is fulfilling! Working here today, somewhere else tomorrow — there's always income. Acting, on the other hand, feels uncertain. Sometimes you wait six months or a year just for a single role. In Dongguan, I feel like hard work pays off, so I'll keep going." Similarly, Kiko Leung reportedly left her acting career in Hong Kong and took a job at a friend's restaurant, where she cleans, takes orders, and prepares food. When fans recognize her, she takes pictures with them. She told QQ, "Whether acting or waiting tables, both are jobs. There is no distinction in terms of prestige, only different in nature. Now, I need to change my mindset and expand my horizons to learn new knowledge." She also said she wants to open her own food store. And finally, after appearing on Love Island, Paige Thorne "just felt under this enormous pressure all of a sudden to 'become' an influencer." However, that career path made her feel "constantly filled with anxiety," and she drank "all the time" at events. So, she quit influencing and went back to being a paramedic. She told Vice, "This whole influencer world isn't forever. It's such a volatile situation, so it's important to have a backup." She also told Cosmopolitan that, after being dropped from the show, she struggled with getting a serious job offer. She said that, in one interview, "I really felt like they'd only asked me in so they could laugh at me; I don't think they had any intention of hiring me."
Telegraph
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘Rock 'n' roll music does not belong to white men'
'I wish I had been there, in the late 1930s, when Sister Rosetta Tharpe first plugged her guitar into her little transistor amp,' says Beverley Knight. 'That's when this young black woman – with her beautiful little dimples – created the sound we've come to associate with all those white, male rock gods. She originated the guitar solo. She was playing with feedback and distortion, she was... the godmother of rock 'n' roll.' Today, it's only a kettle that Knight, the 1990s singer-turned-musical-theatre-star, is plugging in, during a break in rehearsals for the UK premiere of Marie and Rosetta, a musical bio-play by the Illinois-born George Brant, in which Knight plays Tharpe. But, briskly dropping teabags into our mugs, she comes to a righteous boil over the lack of recognition granted Tharpe these days. 'All those early, male rock 'n' roll artists were cool enough to give her credit,' she says. 'Elvis was obsessed with Rosetta. Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, all spoke about being inspired by her. Chuck Berry said his entire career was a tribute to her. Keith Richards knew she was one of the architects of the genre.' She shakes her head and tuts. 'But as the decades rolled on, that sound – along with its power stance – became the preserve of white dudes. To this day, overwhelmingly, the guitar is the preserve of men, and an extension of the phallus.' But Knight doesn't just blame the white rock dudes for Tharpe's erasure from musical history. She takes equal aim at the black Pentecostal Church in which Tharpe and, decades and miles apart, Knight herself were raised: the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). Why? 'Because the Church gatekeeps reputations and legacies,' says Knight. 'Although Tharpe began and ended her musical career as part of her worship, she made a few sexy, secular records in the middle and [the Church] believed she should only have used her gifts to praise 'the gloreeey o' God',' she growls out the phrase in jowl-wobbling mockery of a macho American preacher's voice, then rolls her eyes. 'So friggin' stupid of them!' Steam blown off, Knight settles down onto the sofa beside me and slips into the pedagogical storytelling mode that will be familiar to listeners of her long-running BBC Radio 2 show, Beverley's Gospel Nights. She reminds me that Tharpe was born in 1915 in the little town of Cotton Plant, Arkansas. Her parents were both singers, but after her birth, her father, Willis Atkins, 'ran out on them and went on to have about 17 more children'. Tharpe was raised entirely by her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, a singer and mandolin-playing deaconess missionary and women's speaker for COGIC, who encouraged little Rosetta to sing and play guitar. She quickly displayed such virtuosity that she was performing in public by the age of six. 'Her mum was smart enough to see she had a prodigy – or a 'miracle' – on her hands,' says Knight. She could also see that the girl 'had too much swing in her hips' for a small town in 1920s America, 'so she took her Mozartesque child to Chicago'. There, in 1934, Rosetta married Thomas Thorpe, a COGIC preacher, only to leave him four years later (though keeping a version of his surname for her professional pseudonym) and move to New York with her mother to record gospel songs for Decca. Early singles such as Rock Me and That's All were instant hits and led to her playing at Harlem's Cotton Club alongside secular blues and jazz artists such as Cab Calloway – but they outraged the conservative COGIC community. While she started out giving a lively new rhythm to spiritual songs, she was soon rocking out with more risqué material. Most scandalous was I Want a Tall Skinny Papa (1939), on which she sang of needing a man who had 'to do what he's told / And bring sweet mama that gold / Satisfy my soul / He's gotta be tall.' That may sound pretty tame by modern standards, but I've just watched Knight rehearsing a scene in which her Tharpe chuckles over all the men who hid that vinyl in the sleeves of holier records. Brant's play – first performed off-Broadway in 2016 – is set in the 1940s, as Tharpe is trying to find her way back into the COGIC's good books. She's beginning rehearsals for a tour with her young protégée, Marie Knight (played in the UK production by the Zimbabwean-British Ntombizodwa Ndlovu in her London stage debut), who initially appears meeker and straighter-laced than her mentor, but turns out to be a secret fan of Tharpe's wilder side. 'I'm fairly sure Rosetta and Marie had a sexual relationship,' says Knight. 'She didn't come out as queer because of the Church. But I've been reading Gayle F Wald's brilliant biography of her [2007's Shout, Sister, Shout!] and apparently there were a lot of people who saw them together, claimed to have caught them 'in flagrante'. So... yeah. It was the same with a lot of those pioneering blues women making it in a man's world, women like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. They may have married men, but they were queer women living their own lives and refusing to stay in their lanes.' Although Knight is straight (and has been happily married to James O'Keefe, a former lighting technician, since 2012), she relates to Tharpe's struggle to live on her own terms. Born in Wolverhampton in 1973, Knight was raised by Jamaican-born parents in the strict Pentescostal Church, where her mother, Deloris (who had come to England to train as a nurse), often led the congregation, and her father was known to the local community as 'the singing builder'. Little Beverley was 'singing my heart out in the pulpit from the age of four' and still credits the Church with 'teaching me to sing with everything I am, because that kind of ecstatic worship requires you to praise the Lord with everything you are… or it does until you hit puberty as a girl. At which point it wants to shut some parts of you away and lock them up.' Knight – who has a degree in theology – credits both her parents' tolerance and 'the invention of the Walkman' for her teenage embrace of secular music. She says her family, 'all still massively into their church', gradually 'accepted that I had my own point of view and that I was the kind of kid who would really argue it. They had also seen the darker side of what keeping a kid in a religious straitjacket could do: the rebellion, fear, estrangement. They had seen it with friends and with family.' Meantime, Beverley 'was listening to Prince on my Walkman and they didn't have a clue! You could write any label you wanted on those old cassettes, couldn't you?' As an adolescent, Knight was inspired by the way Prince's music transcended the genres traditionally prescribed to black people. 'He was exploratory, on an adventure with Lovesexy and Sign o' the Times. My mum and dad hated the posters I had up in my room. But he was teaching me to think outside of the box and I will always be grateful to him for that.' Knight got her first record deal in 1994, making three critically-acclaimed albums and scoring hits with Shoulda Woulda Coulda (2002) and Come as You Are (2004), but, despite comparisons to Whitney Houston, never achieved superstardom, partially because of her insistence on performing on her own terms. As a self-defined 'square peg in a round hole', she refused to adopt the sexualised image of a pop star, but neither would she toe the gospel line. Having only drunk alcohol once (accidentally) in her life and abstaining from drugs, she was never a party girl and of little interest to the tabloids. Some heavyweight musical insiders always championed her, though. Gary Barlow and Jools Holland are long-term fans and, after she left her record label in 2007, her childhood hero Prince stepped in to invite her on tour with him. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Rose Theatre (@rosetheatrekingston) Did her parents see her music as ungodly? 'Yes, ultimately,' she winces. 'Because it's not explicitly Christian music. But I think they now understand that I'm not peddling things that are harmful. They know what I'm doing is not to the detriment of society. I've not 'backslidden'!' Knight's pyrotechnic vocals have been exploding from West End stages since she took the lead in The Bodyguard musical (based on the 1992 Whitney Houston film) in 2013. She's since starred in Cats, Sister Act, The Drifters Girl and, in 2023, Sylvia, a musical about the suffragette movement for which she won an Olivier award. Today, she tells me it's more important than ever to see 'black women, people of all types' on our stages as President Trump pushes on with his 'horrendous' reversal of diversity, equity and inclusion policies in the US. 'We are in the 21st century and a lot of progress is being rolled back,' she says as she carries our mugs to the sink and begins washing up. 'It is terrifying that they are defunding libraries and museums. They are trying to erase history and that is so scary.' For example, she says, the US government is 'trying to pretend that Medgar Evers did not serve in the military'. (Last month, a section dedicated to 'Notable African American Graves', featuring Evers, the civil-rights activist, among others, was removed from the Arlington National Cemetery website.) She's cross again now. 'Those people would also like to erase the maverick story of Sister Rosetta Tharpe from our history. But many of us are pushing back.' She points out that Amazon is developing Rosetta, a film in which the pop star Lizzo will play Tharpe. 'We have to keep the truth alive and rockin',' she says. 'And we have to be fearless about that.' Marie and Rosetta is at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames ( from Fri-May 24, then touring to Wolverhampton and Chichester
The Guardian
23-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jerry Butler obituary
When a Philadelphia radio disc jockey gave the young Jerry Butler the nickname of 'the Iceman', it was in recognition of the singer's avoidance of on-stage histrionics rather than any lack of warmth in his polished but ardent delivery. Butler, who has died aged 85, had hits across three decades, with records that spanned the evolution of African-American popular music, from the gospel-influenced doo-wop of For Your Precious Love, aimed at the teenagers of the 1950s, through the suave balladry of Moon River and Make It Easy on Yourself in the 60s, to the sophisticated boudoir soul of I Want to Do It to You in the 70s. There was a background to his unruffled demeanour. In his 2004 autobiography, titled Only the Strong Survive: Memoirs of a Soul Survivor, Butler gave credit to a teacher in the fifth grade at his elementary school in Chicago. Her name was Ernestine Curry and she taught 'maths, English, history, music, etiquette and how to box'. She also told her class of 11-year-olds about such great figures from Black history as Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, the world heavyweight champion boxer Jack Johnson and the jazz composer and bandleader Duke Ellington, while getting them to read the works of the historian WEB DuBois and the poet and novelist Countee Cullen. 'Mrs Curry gave us a sense of pride and dignity that has carried me and many other of her students through life,' Butler said. In later life Butler went into politics. He took a master's degree in political science and became a commissioner for Cook County, whose county seat is Chicago, serving on the 17-member board from 1985 to 2018. His place in the affection of soul fans was retained long after the end of his recording career. When Bruce Springsteen released a collection of cover versions of soul classics in 2022, he included two of Butler's best known songs: Only the Strong Survive, which gave the album its title, and Hey, Western Union Man,. Butler was born in Sunflower County, Mississippi, where his parents picked cotton as sharecroppers. He was aged three when the family became part of the Great Migration, moving to Chicago. His father, Jerry Sr, worked two jobs to feed the family, for the city's sanitation and streets department and for the Illinois Central Railroad. His mother, Arvelia (nee Agnew), took her children – two girls and two boys – to worship and sing at the Church of God in Christ. Every Sunday morning they listened to the three-hour sermons of the Rev Annie Bell Mayfield, whose grandson Curtis was a contemporary and became a friend. Butler was soon joining Annie Bell Mayfield's Travelling Souls Spiritualist gospel caravan, touring throughout the US in his school holidays as a member of a group called the Northern Jubilee Singers and experiencing at first hand the sounds of the great gospel groups of the time, including the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Soul Stirrers, with Sam Cooke. Butler was 14 when his father died suddenly of a heart attack, forcing him to begin taking night jobs in factories to help the family's finances while attending Washburne Trade School, where he trained to become a chef. It was seeing Nat King Cole in a Chicago nightclub that showed the teenaged Butler the kind of performer he aspired to be. In 1956 he stopped going to church and started singing with his first R&B group, a quartet called the Quails. After they split up, he and Mayfield got together to form a group that became the Impressions. For their first single, released on a local label, Butler and two of the other members of the group, Richard and Arthur Brooks, wrote a ballad called For Your Precious Love. Its blend of doo-wop cadences, gospel harmonies and Butler's pleading vocal not only gave them a Top 20 hit but induced the audience at the Apollo in Harlem to call the young men back for three encores of the same song. Two years later, having been persuaded by the record company to pursue a solo career, Butler achieved even greater success – No 1 in the R&B chart, No 7 in the pop chart – with the lovelorn He Will Break Your Heart, co-written with the record's producer, Calvin Carter, and Mayfield, who also sang the distinctive high harmony part on the chorus. Mayfield and the Impressions would go on to greater things, but Butler's subsequent career burned on an intermittent flame. He was the first to record the Henry Mancini-Johnny Mercer song Moon River in 1961, but saw it become a bigger hit for Andy Williams. A year later his version of Make It Easy on Yourself, by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, was also the first to be released. In 1964 his swooning duet with Betty Everett on Gilbert Bécaud's Let It Be Me, with an English lyric by Manny Curtis, reached the top five. In 1965 he and Otis Redding wrote I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now), a ballad that might have been the sequel to For Your Precious Love. It became one of Redding's early hits and was covered by many other artists, accruing royalties that Butler claimed outstripped all his other earnings put together. In the late 60s he teamed up with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, the gifted and ambitious Philadelphia-based songwriters and producers, for a string of heavily arranged hits that included Hey, Western Union Man, Only the Strong Survive and Moody Woman, and several albums, such as The Iceman Cometh and Ice on Ice, whose titles exploited the nickname bestowed upon him many years earlier. He made frequent appearances as the host of oldies shows on television and served a term as the chairman of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, a charity set up to provide belated support for black artists unfairly treated by the music business. In 1991 he and the four other original Impressions were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His brother Billy, a singer and guitarist with whom Butler ran a workshop for young artists, died in 2015. His wife, Annette (nee Smith), whom he married in 1959 and who had been one of his backing singers, died in 2019. He is survived by their twin sons, Randall and Anthony, four grandchildren, and a great-grandchild. Jerry Butler, singer and politician, born 8 December 1939; died 20 February 2025
Yahoo
18-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Springfield honors late Bishop Bryant Robinson Jr.
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WWLP) – The Springfield community honored the life of religious leader, bishop Bryant Robinson Jr. who passed away earlier this month at the age of 88 years old. The memorial service was held at Macedonia Church of God in Christ, where he had been the bishop since 1985. Prior to that, he worked in the public school system as a teacher and assistant superintendent. He was also the first black acting superintendent in the city's history. 'He was a man of faith,' says Maurice Powe, Jurisdictional Secretary of the Greater Massachusetts Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction of the Church of God in Christ. 'He led his community through tough times—through the burning of this building that we are standing in today—he rebuilt it and watched the congregation grow over time. He lived a life that was amazing—88 years of dedicated was an educator, leader, and influencer in so many ways.' The memorial services continue on Tuesday starting at 10 am. Robinson will be buried at the Massachusetts Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Agawam. WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Faith groups promote economic justice, civil rights in Kansas City events
Bishop William J. Barber II of the Poor People's Campaign waits for President Joe Biden to speak to a crowd gathered March 5, 2023, for the Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee in Selma, Alabama. (Marvin Gentry/Alabama Reflector) Kansas City events Justice Renewal Worship Service featuring Bishop William Barber, 6:30-8 p.m. Feb. 13 at Oak Ridge Missionary Baptist Church, 9301 Parallel Parkway, Kansas City, Kansas. From Redlining to Redemption: A Rally on Housing & Homelessness, 10:30 a.m. to noon Feb. 14 at Mt. Carmel Church of God in Christ, 2025 N 12 St, Kansas City, Kansas. TOPEKA — Kansas faith groups say the impacts of historical redlining and discriminatory housing practices are alive in the Kansas City metropolitan area. They recruited a national civil rights figure, Bishop William Barber II, to remind the public and local officials this week of their duty to poor and vulnerable people. Barber is a Protestant minister, activist, author, public speaker and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign. He is set to join faith groups Thursday in Kansas City, Kansas, to inspire justice in the community. Those faith groups will initiate a call at a Friday event to local public officials to take housing and homelessness issues more seriously. Faith groups in Johnson and Wyandotte counties 'have separately identified the growing homelessness and shortage of affordable housing as (a) crisis with historical parallels to the exclusionary practices of redlining and racial covenants in the 1900s,' said a news release from a national network of grassroots organizations called the Direct Action and Research Training, or DART, Center. The Rev. Bruce Draper, president of Churches United for Justice, a coalition of 17 churches in Wyandotte County, and one of the organizers of the events, said continuing disinvestment in portions of Wyandotte County and a denial of homelessness in Johnson County are the results of historical redlining and ignorance of poverty. Redlining has an established history in Kansas City, Kansas, and metropolitan areas across the country. The discriminatory practice involved government, loan and insurance agencies withholding services to people — mostly Black people and other ethnic minorities — who lived in certain neighborhoods that were deemed financially risky. 'White folks would move out to the places where they could get loans,' Draper said. 'Redlined areas wouldn't have any investments.' People moving into redlined neighborhoods weren't given loans, families couldn't build equity and property values declined. A strategic disenfranchisement and discrimination effort snowballed into generational poverty that still permeates areas like Wyandotte County, which has the highest poverty rate among counties in the Kansas City, Kansas, area. In Johnson County, which Draper said has benefited from redlining, homelessness has become increasingly apparent. 'The government officials want to deny homelessness and they want to deny there's a housing issue,' Draper said. Faith groups are pitching to officials in Johnson and Wyandotte counties the creation of affordable housing trust funds, which would dedicate steady revenue streams toward building new affordable housing or repairing existing housing so people can remain in their communities. 'We need affordable housing, particularly in historically disadvantaged areas,' Draper said. In Lawrence, an affordable housing trust fund that was created in 2019 with the help of the DART-affiliated organization Justice Matters, the city has helped build an estimated 810 affordable housing units, according to a city of Lawrence dashboard. The city allocated $1.2 million from the trust fund in 2025 for a variety of projects including repairs for low-income seniors, rental assistance for families experiencing homelessness and new housing developments.
