Day: February 21, 2025

new york — Jerry Butler, a premier soul singer of the 1960s and ’70s whose rich, intimate baritone graced such hits as “For Your Precious Love,” “Only the Strong Survive” and “Make It Easy on Yourself,” has died at age 85.

Butler’s niece, Yolanda Goff, told the Chicago Sun-Times that Butler — whose show business nickname, “The Iceman,” was given to him for his understated style — died Thursday at his home in Chicago.

A member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a three-time Grammy Award nominee, Butler was a voice for two major soul music hubs: Chicago and Philadelphia.

Along with childhood friend Curtis Mayfield, he helped found the Chicago-based Impressions and sang lead on the breakthrough hit “For Your Precious Love,” a deeply emotional, gospel-influenced ballad that made Butler a star before age 20.

A decade later, in the late ’60s, he joined the Philadelphia-based production team of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, who worked with him on “Only the Strong Survive,” “Hey Western Union Man” and other hits. His albums “Ice on Ice” and “The Iceman Cometh” are regarded as early models for the danceable, string-powered productions that became the classic “Sound of Philadelphia.”

Butler was also a songwriter, collaborating with Otis Redding on “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” a signature ballad for Redding; and with Gamble and Huff on “Only the Strong Survive,” later covered by Elvis Presley, among others. His credits also included “For Your Precious Love,” “Never Give You Up” (with Gamble and Huff) and “He Will Break Your Heart,” which Butler helped write after he began thinking about the boyfriends of the groupies he met on the road.

“You go into a town; you’re 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 that girl hasn’t been sitting in town waiting for you to come in. She probably has another fellow and the other fellow’s probably in love with her; they’re probably planning to go through the whole thing, right? But you never take that into consideration on that particular night.”

Link to Mayfield

Butler was the son of Mississippi sharecroppers who moved north to Chicago when he was 3, part of the era’s “Great Migration” of Black people out of the South. He loved all kinds of music as a child and was a good enough singer that a friend suggested he come to a local place of worship, the Traveling Souls Spiritualist Church, presided over by the Reverend A.B. Mayfield. Her grandson, Curtis Mayfield, soon became a close friend. (Mayfield died in 1999.)

In 1958, Mayfield and Butler, along with Sam Gooden and brothers Arthur and Richard Brooks, recorded “For Your Precious Love” for Vee-Jay Records. The group called itself the Impressions, but Vee-Jay, eager to promote an individual star, advertised the song as sung by Jerry Butler and the Impressions, leading to estrangement between Butler and the other performers and to an unexpected solo career.

“Fame didn’t 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 early solo performances was a 1961 cover of “Moon River,” the theme from the film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Butler was the first performer to hit the charts with what became a pop standard, but “Moon River” would be associated with Andy Williams after the singer was chosen to perform it at the Academy Awards, a snub Butler long resented.

His other hits, some recorded with Mayfield, included “Find Another Girl” and “I’m A-Telling You.” By 1967, his formal style seemed out of fashion, but Butler was impressed by the new music coming out of Philadelphia and received permission from his record label, Mercury, to work with Gamble and Huff. The chemistry, Butler recalled, was so “fierce” they wrote hits such as “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.”

By the 1980s, Butler’s career had faded, and he was becoming increasingly interested in politics. Encouraged by the 1983 election of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, he ran successfully for the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 1985 and was re-elected repeatedly, even after supporting a controversial 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 with her had twin sons. Many of his generational peers had struggled financially and he worked to help them. He chaired the Rhythm & Blues Foundation, which provides a wide range of assistance to musicians, and pushed the industry to provide medical and retirement benefits.

Butler considered himself relatively lucky, even if he did pass on the chance to own a part of Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International recording company.

“You know, I have lived well. My wife probably would say I could’ve lived better,” Butler told the Chicago Reader in 2011. “Did I make 40, 50 million dollars? No. Did I keep one or two? Yes. The old guys on the street used to say, ‘It’s not how much you make. It’s how much you keep.’ ”
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MUMBAI, INDIA — Even for the world’s most-populous nation, the scale of a Hindu religious festival being held in India’s northern city of Prayagraj since mid-January is staggering. Surpassing previous numbers, the Maha Kumbh Mela that wraps up Wednesday has drawn more than half a billion devotees in the last six weeks, according to officials.

The government of Uttar Pradesh, where the festival is being held, claims that this year’s event is the largest congregation in human history for a religious, cultural and social event.

Those who have taken a holy dip in waters that Hindus believe cleanses them of their sins and helps attain salvation include ordinary devotees from all walks of life, billionaires, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, politicians and Bollywood stars. Others went to simply witness the mesmerizing panorama of the religious spectacle that unfolds along the confluence of two rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna, where Hindus believe a third, mythical river also exists.

Among the first rush of pilgrims to attend the Kumbh Mela when it began last month was Deepinderr Singh Bindra, a resident of Gurugram in North India. “It was the accumulation of my spiritual journey following my visit to several Hindu pilgrim sites in the last few years,” he said. He took an early morning dip on three consecutive days and “found it a surreal, deeply satisfying experience.”

The pull of the Maha or great Kumbh Mela, which is held every 12 years, became even greater for many devotees because this year’s event was considered special — it coincided with an alignment of the planets and stars that occurs once in 144 years.

The festival was marred by a stampede on Jan. 29 that killed 30 pilgrims who were trampled amid the rush to take part in the bathing on a day considered particularly auspicious.

That tragedy, however, failed to dampen the fervor as millions continued to pour into the vast temporary tented township that covers a stretch of 4,000 hectares, or 40 square kilometers, along the banks of the river. The tented township includes roads, hospitals, toilets and free community kitchens run by volunteers. A platform made of sandbags stretches along the Ganges riverbank for devotees to take part in the ritual immersion.

But for many like Mumbai resident Nikhil Shirodkar, joining the festival was not just about the dip in the river but a once-in-a-lifetime experience that offered a chance for a connection with age-old Hindu traditions.

“I went more as a spiritual seeker and not with the belief that the dip cleanses one’s sins,” he said.

He spent three days sleeping on the floor like an ascetic and helping serve meals to people.

“It was an eye opener. Everybody was reaching out to each other. On the roadside some would be serving tea, others biscuits, to the pilgrims who kept pouring in. It had an impact on my outlook,” Shirodkar said.

Others, especially overseas visitors, were drawn to it by a sense of curiosity. Twenty-one-year-old Lucinda Pernell, who had come from Australia to India to attend a yoga camp, decided to attend after learning from her photographer friend about the festival’s immense scale.

“It was overwhelming because there were just so many people, which a Westerner like me has never seen. But I found it amazing. It was a kind of organized chaos, but what I will take back with me is that people respected each other. There was a sense of belief,” she said, recalling the experience.

On one of the days that she was there, considered an especially auspicious day, an estimated 35 million took a dip in the waters in Prayagraj — that’s more people than the population of Australia.

She visited the camp for Naga sadhus, the ash-smeared, often naked Hindu ascetics, who armed with tridents lead the religious spectacle. It’s one of the most dramatic sights of the festival.

At this year’s festival, the sacred coexisted with high technology, as underwater drones and artificial intelligence systems were used to monitor the crowds and improve safety.

The Kumbh Mela also reflected the growing synergy between religion and politics since Prime Minister Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata party came to power 10 years ago, according to political analyst Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay. Giant billboards of Modi stood high at the festival site.

“The open, publicized participation of top political leaders at a religious festival is not something you witnessed in the past,” he said, pointing out that lines between religion and the state have been increasingly blurred. Besides Modi, who took a dip in the river, the Uttar Pradesh state government, led by a Hindu monk, held a Cabinet meeting at the site of the festival.

Reasserting a Hindu cultural identity has been part of the BJP’s agenda. Under the rule of the country’s erstwhile Mughal rulers, the city where it took place was earlier known as Allahabad. It was renamed Prayagraj in 2018 by the BJP state government in a bid to restore its identity as a Hindu pilgrimage center.

Mukhopadhyay also pointed out that the elaborate facilities built for the festival at a cost of over $8 billion, included upscale accommodations, airport and railway expansions and new roads. “With facilities like air-conditioned tents and roads, the rich and upper middle classes no longer had to trek for miles as devotees did in earlier days. So for many of them, attending the Kumbh transitioned from a purely religious pilgrimage into a social talking point,” he said.

Questions have been raised about the water in which the devotees immerse themselves. A report by the federal government’s Central Pollution Control Board earlier this month said that there were high levels of contamination in a key bathing place. But the Uttar Pradesh state government rejected the report, saying authorities were continuously monitoring water in the rivers to maintain its quality.

At last count provided by the state government, 550 million had attended the festival. With five more days to go until it culminates on Wednesday, which is considered another auspicious day, those numbers will rise.

Among those who plan to travel to Prayagraj on that day is Bindra, the resident of Gurugram. “I will be going again to take another dip,” he said. “It is a calling for me.”
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