Donny Hathaway had already been exposing the splendors and indignities of American life when he arrived at the Troubadour in West Hollywood in the last week of August 1971.
Hathaway, a classically trained pianist with a declamatory voice shaped by his years in church, closed Side 1 of his 1970 debut with an original called “Tryin' Times” (“Maybe people wouldn't have to suffer,” he sang, “if there was more love for your brother”) and ended the LP with a majestic rendition of Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” Months after the album's release, she dropped a joy bomb with a Christmas single, “This Christmas,” which unapologetically made space for a black experience in the Christmas industrial complex.
Donny Hathaway performs at Mister Kelly's in Chicago in 1971.
(Val Mazzenga/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Yet Hathaway captured something indelibly American during her week of shows at the Troubadour, which were recorded (along with a later concert at New York's Bitter End) for the singer's classic “Live” album, which came out in February 1972. On an LP packed with chilling performances, the undeniable highlight is Hathaway's cover of Carole King's “You've Got a Friend”: a lucid yet optimistic portrait of resilience and cultural exchange.
King, who had made a name for herself in the 1960s as one half of a prolific Brill Building songwriting duo with her husband, Gerry Goffin, wrote “You've Got a Friend” after leaving Goffin and moving to Los Angeles with her two young daughters. Here she remade herself as an understated singer-songwriter offering wise but understated melodies about love, home and family, part of a gentle reset of pop's mood after the turmoil of the previous decade.
Cut like the rest of the album at A&M Studios on La Brea Avenue, “You've Got a Friend” helped propel King's 1971 LP “Tapestry” to sales of more than 10 million copies and a host of trophies (including album, record and song of the year) at the Grammy Awards; The singer's friend James Taylor, with whom she first performed in the late 1970s at the Troubadour, topped Billboard's Hot 100 with his own version of “Friend” featuring Joni Mitchell's background vocals.
Following the advice of Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, Hathaway also recorded “Friend” as a studio duet with Howard University alumna Roberta Flack; her performance charted in the Top 20 of Billboard's R&B chart when Hathaway began her career at the Troubadour, popular enough that the “Live” audience erupted at the sound of Hathaway's first organ hit.
Carole King at A&M Studios in Los Angeles in 1970.
(Jim McCrary/Redferns via Getty Images)
In fact, the crowd is what's really important in this live version of “You've Got a Friend.” Hathaway and her band, including guitarist Phil Upchurch, bassist Willie Weeks and 16-year-old Fred White (soon to be part of Earth, Wind & Fire) on drums, are cooking, to be clear; the beat is funky and viscous, and Hathaway's voice is magnificent, especially in her agile improvisations.
But it's his interaction with the few hundred people in the room that elevates the recording to a deeply moving work of art.
For King (and Taylor), the song's promise of tireless support is an intimate one-on-one affair; Their performances use homey acoustic arrangements to create an image of two people exchanging confidences. In Hathaway's hands, “Friend” is about community: Before he asks, the audience replaces him as the lead voice in the song's chorus, a congregation in all but name.
Given its proximity to the civil rights movement, it is impossible to listen to Hathaway's “You've Got a Friend” disconnected from the struggles of black people. On Troubadour (as in his duet with Flack), he rejects the song's second verse to more quickly reach the bridge, in which he describes a cold world full of those who would “hurt you and try to abandon you,” even “take your soul if you let them.”
As Emily J. Lordi notes in her 2016 book on “Donny Hathaway Live,” the crowd sits back during the bridge before reuniting with Hathaway for the song's second chorus; The decision, somehow spontaneous and collective at the same time, is an expert display of recording by an audience who, according to legend, had not been told that the concert was being recorded.
“From this perspective,” Lordi writes of Hathaway's fans (some of whom had surely taken advantage of the Troubadour's bar, as she points out), “they're not stealing the show but rather holding it back, making sure he doesn't sing the duet alone.” Together, performer and audience are returning (not that they necessarily had a choice) to the ugly truths that singer-songwriter music sometimes sought to leave behind.
In this way, Hathaway's “Friend” becomes a reinvention of a reinvention: an act of moral imagination as American as it gets.
This was not the only case of a black soul singer performing a song King had written when she was a single mother newly arrived in Los Angeles: in May 1972, the Isley Brothers released a sultry version of “It's Too Late”; A month after that, Aretha Franklin's “Amazing Grace” live album combined “You've Got a Friend” with “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” completing the evangelism Hathaway had begun in a bastion of white rock culture temporarily rebuilt as an African-American church.
However, in Hathaway's “Friend” you can hear the whole story that American music tells about identity and belonging (and about commercial ambition).
“This could be a record here,” Hathaway tells the crowd near the end of the song, and so it was: a document of adaptation, a testimony of borrowing, a bulwark against pretty fictions.
