Phyllis Hyman (July 6, 1949 – June 30, 1995) – You Know How To Love Me (1979)
The legendary singer's most-loved song was a #12 R&B hit, co-written and produced for her by the genius duo of Reggie Lucas and James Mtume.
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Phyllis Hyman was a phenomenally talented singer/songwriter and actor with a magnificent stage presence and powerful voice whose career should have been much bigger than it was.
Phyllis Linda Hyman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in Pittsburgh. She attended music school, and sang with several groups in the early seventies including the New Direction and the Miami-based soul band All The People. She lived in Miami for several years, where she met her manager and future husband Larry Alexander. Together they formed the group Phyllis Hyman and the P/H Factor and eventually moved to New York City.
Her first single was released in 1975 on Private Stock Records, which had been founded the previous year by Larry Uttal after Clive Davis replaced him as head of Bell Records. The stellar disco jam “Leavin’ The Good Life Behind” gave the world an early glimpse of her powerful vocals. Written by Alvin Darling, it was arranged by Bert Keyes, produced by George Kerr, and mixed by Tom Moulton.
Soon after its release, she was signed to the independent Roadshow Records/Desert Moon label run by Sid Maurer and Fred Frank. They put out another of her singles produced by Kerr, the dancefloor slow jam “Baby (I'm Gonna Love You)” (1976), written by her husband.
Her first interview for the UK magazine Blues & Soul was conducted in March, 1977 at her midtown Manhattan apartment on West 55th Street by British music journalist
. She explained how soon after arriving in New York, her group had been booked for an extended gig:“It’s destiny or karma or whatever you want to call it but we started working straight away at Rust Brown’s Restaurant [located on Manhattan’s upper West side] – doing contemporary material, originals, album cuts that no one knew! I guess we were there for about one and a half months and a whole lot of things came out of it…”
Nathan lived around the corner on West 56th Street, became friends with the singer, and interviewed her several more times over the next two decades. As he recounted in 2021 to mark the release of Old Friend – The Deluxe Collection (1976-1998), a 9XCD box set of Hyman’s recordings, that residency at Rust Brown’s brought her to the attention of many superstars who caught her performances, including “George Benson, Roberta Flack, Nick Ashford & Valerie Simpson, Lamont Dozier, George Harrison, (and) Cuba Gooding.”
Another musician who heard the buzz about Hyman was Buddah Records A&R manager and recording artist Norman Connors, who was working on his breakthrough solo album You Are My Starship (1976). He was unable to get Jean Carne to appear on the LP, but went to hear Hyman perform after a Jon Lucien concert at Carnegie Hall on July 3, 1975. Connors offered her the job as vocalist, which she accepted.
She sang on two tracks on the album. Both were released as singles, made the R&B charts, and helped the LP go gold. The opening cut “We Both Need Each Other” was a duet with bassist Michael Henderson, who also wrote it (and coincidentally was born on July 7, 1951). It was issued as the album’s first single and reached #23 R&B.
She was also featured on a smooth jazz cover of “Betcha By Golly Wow” by the Stylistics, featuring her neighbor Gary Bartz on sax, co-written by Thom Bell and Linda Creed. It hit #29 R&B when released as the album’s third single. The LP itself peaked at #5 on the R&B charts, and cracked the top-40 on the Billboard 200 at #39. Its success launched her career and propelled both Henderson and Connors to new heights.
Major record companies like Atlantic, CBS, and Warner Bros. were now interested in Hyman, but she signed with Buddah for her self-titled debut album.
It was recorded during 1976, in three studios on both coasts. A total of four producers were credited including Jerry Peters (who co-composed the soundtrack to Melinda in 1972 with Jerry Butler) and John ”Monster” Davis.
The LP’s epic opening cut “Loving You, Losing You” was written by Thom Bell and his nephew Leroy Bell, and also recorded by Johnny Mathis around the same time. His version came out in February, 1977, and Hyman’s was released as the album’s lead single two months later in April. The track was produced by Jerry Peters and recorded in Los Angeles, as was the album’s #58 R&B second single “No One Can Love You More,” written by Skip Scarborough, and the extended disco gem “Beautiful Man of Mine,” written by her husband. All three tracks featured Peters on keyboards plus West Coast backing vocalist legends Jim Gilstrap and Maxine Anderson.
Other highlights included the album’s lyrically uplifting closing cut ”Children Of The World,” written by Hubert Eaves III and featuring Reggie Lucas on guitar, who a few years later would co-write and produce one of Hyman’s masterpieces.
The funky cut “One Thing On My Mind” was originally co-written by songwriter Richard Germinaro and blue-eyed soul singer Evie Sands for her 1974 album Estate Of Mind. Produced by John Davis and arranged by Eaves, it was recorded at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia and featured an all-star Philly soul backing band with Davis and Richie Rome on keyboards, plus drummer Charles Collins, bassist Michael “Sugar Bear” Foreman, Norman Harris’ cousin Dennis Harris on guitar, and the Sweethearts of Sigma on backing vocals.
Around the time her debut album came out, by accident Hyman found a lucrative side gig singing jingles for commercials. Over the next few years she taped some classic seventies ads for Mastercard, Clairol, Welch’s Grape Soda, and Burger King.
Her second LP Sing A Song was also released on Buddah in early 1978, co-produced by her husband and Skip Scarborough. But it did not chart, its promotional efforts a casualty of Buddah Records shutting down and being bought by Clive Davis’ new label Arista later that year.
A half-dozen of the tracks from Sing a Song were then repackaged for her third album Somewhere in My Lifetime (1978), which Arista put out in late 1978. They included the beautiful, inspirational “Gonna Make Changes,” which she wrote herself. In 1984, at a televised special on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday to celebrate his new national holiday, she performed it live.
Somewhere in My Lifetime also contained three tracks produced by Philly producer Theodore Life, who at the time was on a hot streak producing Evelyn “Champagne” King and was also working on Vicki Sue Robinson’s latest LP. The upbeat disco jam “Lookin’ For a Lovin’” was co-written by songwriters Barry Goldberg and Phyllis Brown. Life co-wrote the superb disco-funk workout “So Strange” for her, which was released as an extended 12” disco single.
Although this third album did reach #15 on the R&B album charts, her best showing yet, she still hadn’t broken through to wider fame. Part of the problem was that from the start, Arista never seemed to prioritize her as an artist. This may have been because she was a holdover from the Buddah Records roster.
During a 1987 interview with David Nathan, she stated candidly, “I'd say about 70% of the time being in the company was a nightmare.” As he later recalled:
“Off the record, during the time she was at Arista, she would often tell me how much she disliked working with Clive Davis, the label's president. In our personal conversations, she would say how she felt that Arista never gave her the full treatment afforded to other artists signed to them by Clive. She resented what she perceived as the company's inability to deal with her as a strong, Black - and to be honest - opinionated woman and it didn't help matters much that husband - manager Larry, who often spoke on her behalf as a cushion between her and Clive, was on his way out of her life on both counts.”
In 1979 she was paired with the hot new songwriting and production duo Reggie Lucas and James Mtume, who had penned Roberta Flack’s massive 1977 hit “The Closer I Get To You.” They had also just finished producing Stephanie Mills’ third album What Cha Gonna Do with My Lovin' (1979).
Nathan went along to the session where they recorded the LP’s title track, an upbeat disco-funk jam they co-wrote titled “You Know How To Love Me.” As he recalled in 1995:
“I was at Sigma Sound in New York. Producers James Mtume and Reggie Lucas were working with Phyllis on the final vocal for “You Know How To Love Me.” Mtume, a man with much wisdom, wit, and a penchant for truth telling, no matter what the circumstances, was trying to get Phyllis to hold on to one note - for a long time! She started getting mad with him and it was her anger and frustration that triggered her to actually end up doing just what he wanted!”
Released as the album’s lead single in October, 1979, it reached #12 R&B and #6 on disco charts, becoming her biggest-ever dance record and arguably her signature song. Remade in the nineties by Lisa Stansfield and Robin S, it remains a worldwide dancefloor-filler. In the epic tribute thread he posted when Mtume passed in January, 2022, no less a musical authority than Philly DJ Cosmo Baker declared it to be “the greatest song in the history of music.”
She memorably performed it on an episode of The Mike Douglas Show that aired January 30, 1980.
The album’s second single was the superb disco jam “Under Your Spell,” but it only made it to #37 R&B in early 1980. The LP reached #10 on the R&B album charts and #50 on the Billboard 200, destined to be her all-time best-selling album, but superstardom still eluded her. Hyman became yet another artist whose best work commercially suffered by having been released right when the racist, homophobic anti-disco backlash was in full swing.
Tragically, Hyman struggled with mental health issues and drug and alcohol addictions, which increasingly began to impact her career during the eighties. In a 1991 interview with Nathan around the time her album The Prime Of My Life was released on Philadelphia International Records, she offered some insight into what she had been going through:
“I haven't been happy for the past 25 years. I've been through a lot of therapy and I discovered that I'd been playing the game of life, smiling on the outside. I was a very insecure person, suffering from low self-esteem. I acted my way through my life, through my career. I guess things came to a head when I reached a really low point last year. Up until five years ago, I didn't listen that much to myself...When people would say they loved my voice, I'd wonder, ' why are you moved?'. Now I'm beginning to understand how people can be turned on by my singing...I've been told that people can feel a lot more love and calm coming from me these days.”
Hyman spent the next four years without releasing another album and began experiencing financial difficulties. On June 30, 1995, she was scheduled to perform with the Whispers as part of their 30th anniversary celebration at the Apollo Theater that night. Instead, she wrote a suicide note and took her own life by overdose in her New York City apartment, six days before her 46th birthday. Later that summer Nathan wrote a very touching tribute for Blues & Soul about their conversations that is a must-read to better understand her life and personal struggles.
Happy 75th Heavenly Birthday to the legendary Phyllis Hyman.
Further info:
“Phyllis Hyman Jazz Singer, 45,” obituary, The New York Times, July 1, 1995.
“A Personal Tribute...Phyllis Hyman,” by David Nathan, Blues & Soul, 1995.
“Phyllis Hyman's Demons,” by Jenice Armstrong, Philadelphia Inquirer, July 11, 2007.
“Phyllis Hyman: Joyously Honoring An Old Friend...,” by David Nathan, SoulMusic.com, August 6, 2021.
“Phyllis Hyman: An Appreciation,” by Peter Robinson, We Are Cult, March 9, 2022.
“The Underrated Legacy of Ms. Phyllis Hyman,” by Ciera Barnes, Medium.com, 2023.
#soul #funk #disco #JamesMtume #ReggieLucas #PhyllisHyman