Charles Benjamin Jackson (July 22, 1937 – February 16, 2023) was an American R&B singer who was one of the first artists to record material by Burt Bacharach and Hal David successfully. He has performed with moderate success since 1961. His hits include "I Don't Want to Cry", "Any Day Now", "I Keep Forgettin'", and "All Over the World".
Jackson was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He never knew his father, and he was brought up by his grandmother in Latta, South Carolina, after his mother, Lucille, moved to Pittsburgh for work. Steeped in gospel music from an early age, he made his first radio broadcast at six years old and was a choir leader by the age of 11. Segregation led him to drop out of a scholarship to South Carolina State College and to move north to Cleveland, where he joined the Raspberry Gospel Singers.
Leaving the group after a year, he served in the US Navy before moving in 1957 to Pittsburgh, where he sang The Lord’s Prayer to Joe Aberbach, a local music promoter. Aberbach had little use for gospel music, but secured Jackson a place in the Del-Vikings, a mixed-race vocal group whose national hits included Come Go With Me (1957) and whose baritone singer was leaving.
While on tour with the group a few months later, Jackson met the singer Jackie Wilson, already an established star, who encouraged him to follow his own example and strike out as a solo artist. Jackson toured as Wilson’s support act, performing for the first time at the Apollo theatre in Harlem, and made his first recordings for small labels such as Clock and Beltone before being signed in 1961 by the producer and songwriter Luther Dixon to Florence Greenberg’s Scepter/Wand company, alongside the Shirelles, Dixon’s female proteges.
Behind the jaunty rhythm and rapturous strings of I Don’t Want to Cry (1961), Jackson’s first release on the Wand label, a kind of dignified melancholy was already evident. He and Dixon had written the song together, its lyric based on the singer’s memories of an unfaithful girlfriend. It reached No 5 on Billboard’s R&B chart, followed later in the year by the more explicitly doleful I Wake Up Crying, written by Bacharach and Hal David, which made No 13 on the same chart.
A few months later Bacharach teamed with Hilliard, his other regular collaborator at the time, to write Any Day Now, in which a piping organ introduced Jackson’s sombre reading of a lyric containing strikingly poetic images: “Any day now, when your restless eyes meet someone new / Oh, to my sad surprise / Then the blue shadows will fall all over town / Any day now, love will let me down.” In the background of Bacharach’s dramatic arrangement, built on an ominous rhythm tapped out on a broken ashtray and a muffled tom-tom, could be heard the voices of the sisters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick and their aunt, Cissy Houston.
It gave Jackson his biggest hit, nibbling the edges of the pop Top 20 while making No 2 on the R&B chart, and attracted many cover versions. Bacharach always included the song in his own concerts, but it never sounded as good as in its original incarnation, when Jackson evoked those blue shadows falling all over town. His next single, I Keep Forgettin’, was almost as big a success. Teacho Wiltshire’s arrangement made strikingly prominent use of percussion, a selection of boobams, tom-toms and a glockenspiel creating staccato rhythms held together by the singer’s powerful urgency.
A succession of uptown soul ballads, including Getting Ready for the Heartbreak, Tell Him I’m Not Home and I Need You, pleased his admirers, as did his duets with Brown, but made less impression on the charts. In 1968 he signed with Motown through his friendship with Smokey Robinson, but three albums and a series of singles made little impact. He went on to record for Dakar, ABC, Channel and EMI America, and made an album of duets with Houston in 1992 for the Shanachie label. In 1997 he released a Grammy-nominated duet, If I Let Myself Go, with Dionne Warwick, to whom he remained close. He continued to perform until the end of the 2010s before taking a well-deserved retirement.
On 4 October 2015, Chuck Jackson was inducted into the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame. His song "Hand it Over" was featured on the 2019 video game, Far Cry New Dawn. In 2021, his song "Any Day Now" was used in a Volkswagen commercial. Compilations of rare, overlooked and unreleased recordings from his early years found a loyal audience of hardcore soul fans, particularly in the UK.
Jackson died in Atlanta on February 16, 2023, at the age of 85. In his remarkable career that spanned over 60 years, Jackson charted over 20 songs on the R&B and Billboard charts. He had over 24 album releases throughout his decades-spanning career; he released his debut album back in 1961, and he released his last in 1998.
(Edited
from Guardian obit by Richard Williams, Music Times & Wikipedia)