Luther Vandross is remembered as one of the most gifted male pop vocalists of his generation, and in particular, for his ornate readings of the R&B ballad, elevating the form to works of art that remain peerless. Yet amidst the longings for love and the intimacy that frame so many of his ballad performances, are deeply expressed fears of rebuke and betrayal, that resonate beyond the hetero desires that popular understandings of Vandross’s music have been largely limited to.
“Anyone Who Had a Heart” was written and composed by Hal David and Burt Bacharach and recorded by Dionne Warwick in 1963. Released months after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, few, I imagine, would ever link that song — written by two White male songwriters and performed by a Black woman — to that moment of terror. Indeed, Warwick’s music in the period, generally speaking, was thought to be the very antithesis of music that we readily assign, now, as the soundtrack to the Civil Rights Movement.
Yet, two decades later, Vandross found value — in the melodies, the lyrics and the emotive possibilities, perhaps — in these seemingly forgotten pop ballads from the 1960s, as they served the needs of his performance of, as Jason King so brilliantly named it, a “sentimental” Black masculinity. Vandross’ version of “Anyone Who Had Heart” appears on his 1986 recording Give Me the Reason and is one of four songs written and composed by Bacharach and David, and explicitly associated with Warwick that he records throughout his career, including his signature track “A House is Not a Home.”
Like Warwick’s music before him, Vandross’ channeling of Black sentimentality (and respectability), was generally thought to be out of sync with popular Black responses to Reagan-era anti-Black social policies and the explosion of crack-cocaine in Black urban centers, except to the extent that Vandross’ music served the desires of some Black folk to reconstitute heteronormative Black families (and by extension shamelessly deny and ignore Vandross’ attendant queerness, while mocking his “fat” corporeality — all of which Vandross also contributed to).
Then, as before, as now, anger and rage (or forgiveness) do not have a monopoly on Black emotionality in the midst of death, trauma and continued dispossession; if we are to allow that Blackness is diverse, our emotions are also so. And if this is the case, perhaps Vandross’ commitment to sentimentality has something to teach us.
In his essay “Still Life” (Small Axe 40, March 2013) the late political scientist and cultural critic Richard Iton addresses another moment of R&B sentimentality, produced three years before Vandross’ solo debut Never Too Much. Chic’s “At Last I am Free” appears on their 1978 release C’est Chic, on which Vandross provides backing vocals.
Though the album was largely driven by the dance hits “I Want Your Love” and “Le Freak” (which topped the pop charts), Iton found himself drawn to the obscure ballad “At Last I am Free,” in part, because of the gap between how vocalist Alfa Anderson perceived the song’s sentimental lyrics about the end of a love affair, and the original intent of the song’s lyricist. Chic co-founder Nile Rodgers originally wrote the lyrics in an explicit political context when he was a member of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s.
Of the version of “At Last I am Free” that appears on C’est Chic, Iton writes, “it is hard not to hear in the title and the tone, anthemic chorus, and epic structure of Chic’s recording a reference to the familiar spiritual ‘Free at Last’ interpolated by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his ‘I Have a Dream Speech.’” Iton continues, “more broadly, one might argue that any black invocation of freedom, whatever the context, is at least subliminally entangled with the long histories of slavery, other practices within the colonial matrix, and their affects and effects.”
The shifting modalities of Black musical protest, as embodied by Chic and theorized here by Iton, provides a social context to examine what Vandross might have meant, or what we might have heard or wanted to hear, or choose to hear now, when he sings “anyone who had a heart, would take me in her arms, and love me too.”
To be sure, Vandross’ masking of same sex desire — ”in her arms” — is a deliberate response to the possibility of rebuke, scorn and ultimately betrayal at the hands of those who ostensibly knew him best — his voice evoked and invoked at the apex of Black intimacy.
Yet there is the question as to why we chose to hear Vandross that way…why we needed to hear Vandross that way, given a tradition of masking our rage, anger, disappointment — and again that word betrayal — in the face of retribution and false empathies and sympathies, all coerced by the state.
To hear Vandross as simply a sentimental, queer, R&B singer was to displace the realities of that moment: crack, a fraying of the Black public, the assault of Black bodies — to recall those of another era like Michael Griffith, Yusef Hawkins, and even Tawana Brawley, because she represented the truth of what we know and what we have always known.
Decades later Vandross still sings “Anyone Who Had a Heart…” and the betrayal is rendered emphatic; America has no heart; America don’t love us.
Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. The author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities and Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, both from NYU Press. His next book Save a Seat for Me: Meditations on Black Masculinity and Fatherhood will be published by Simon & Schuster.