Charlie Smalls (October 25, 1943 – August 27, 1987) – Don't Cry Girl (1975)
The unsung songwriter best known for composing The Wiz and his famous cameo on The Monkees wrote this quiet storm masterpiece for the Harold Wheeler Consort.
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Composer and songwriter Charlie Smalls won a Tony and a Grammy for composing the music and lyrics to the original Broadway musical The Wiz, which were then used for the soundtrack to its big-budget film adaptation in 1978.
Born in Queens, New York City, Smalls was a musical prodigy and studied for seven years at Juilliard, starting in 1954 when he was only 11 years old.
For John Cassavetes’ cult film Faces (1968), Smalls wrote the heartfelt love song “Never Felt Like This Before.”
He became close friends with Monkees lead singer Davy Jones in New York, and in one of their television show’s last-ever episodes (aired on March 4, 1968) made a guest appearance. The sequence showed he and Davy working on songs together and Smalls explaining the different rhythms of soul and other forms of music to a national television audience.
Smalls toured as a member of the New York Jazz Repertory Company in the early 70s before writing the music and lyrics for playwright William F. Brown's musical The Wiz, the funky, updated version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Featuring an all-Black cast, the show opened October 21, 1974, at the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre in Baltimore before moving to Broadway in January, 1975.
It played for four years on Broadway, starring Stephanie Mills as Dorothy, and inspired a big-budget film adaptation in 1978 that bombed at the box office but became a cult classic. The film version’s commercial failure gave Hollywood studios an excuse to stop making and financing the Black films that had been regularly produced during the so-called Blaxploitation era of the seventies, which is also considered by many to have been the golden age of Black cinema.
The original Broadway cast recording of The Wiz was released in 1975 and featured Smalls’ disco-funk masterpiece, the instrumental jam “Tornado.” It was released as a single from the album, both as a 7” and an extended disco 12” version, remixed and edited by Harold Wheeler, the show’s arranger.
Wheeler went on to form his own group, the Harold Wheeler Consort. Their only album, the 1975 LP Black Cream, featured the little known quiet storm gem “Don't Cry Girl.” It was from The Wiz, but not included on the original Broadway cast album. The song was however part of the score for the musical’s 1984 Broadway revival.
#soul #funk #TheWiz #CharlieSmalls