the year 2015

at the tender age of four or five, i was at some sort of convention with my parents, enjoying that nights entertainment....lou rawls. apparantly i was playing along with the back-beat, the drums, with two small cocktail straws. lou caught this out of the corner of his eye, stopped singing, and brought me up on stage. i don't think i will ever forget this baptism into the world of soul music.......

louis allen rawls
12.1.33-1.6.06

Louis Allen Rawls was a Chicago-born American soul music, jazz, and blues singer. Known for his smooth vocal style, Frank Sinatra once said that Rawls had "the classiest singing and silkiest chops in the singing game."

Rawls had released more than 70 albums, been in movies, television shows and voiced-over many cartoons. A high school classmate of soul giant Sam Cooke, Rawls sang with Cooke in the Teenage Kings of Harmony, a 50's gospel group. Rawls enlisted in the U.S. Army as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division in 1955. He left the "All-Americans" three years later as a Sergeant and hooked up with a group with whom he had sung before enlisting, the Pilgrim Travelers. In 1958, while touring the South with the Travelers and Sam Cooke, Rawls was in a serious car crash that claimed the life of one person. Rawls was actually pronounced dead before getting to the hospital where he stayed in a coma for 5-1/2 days. It took him months to regain his memory and a year to fully recuperate. Rawls considered the event life-changing.

Rawls was signed to Capitol Records in 1962, the same year he sang the soulful background vocals on the Sam Cooke recording of "Bring it on Home to Me". His first Capitol release was "Stormy Monday" (a.k.a. "I'd Rather Drink Muddy Water"), a jazz album. Though his 1966 album "Live!" went gold, Rawls wouldn't have a star-making hit until he made a proper soul album, appropriately named "Soulin'" later that same year. The album contained his first R&B #1 single, "Love Is a Hurtin' Thing". 1967 saw Rawls win his first Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance for "Dead End Street". After leaving Capitol in 1971, Rawls joined MGM and released the Grammy-winning single "Natural Man". In 1976, Rawls had his greatest album success with the platinum-selling "All Things in Time". The album produced his most successful single, "You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine", which topped the R&B charts and went to number two on the pop side and also went platinum. Subsequent albums, such as 1977's When You've Heard Lou, You've Heard It All yielded such Top 25 singles as "Lady Love".