Marlena Shaw was born Marlina Burgess in New Rochelle, New York, in 1942. Her love of music, especially Jazz, was inspired by her uncle Jimmy Burgess, who played Jazz trumpet. Her first public performance, at the age of ten, came thanks to Jimmy too, when he called her on to the stage at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem to sing with the band.
Shaw later enrolled at New York State Teachers College in Potsdam to study music, before dropping out and starting a family. Her music career then consisted of a series of Jazz club performances, mainly in the New York area, until in 1966 she was booked by Chicago’s Playboy Club. This show brought her to the attention of Chess Records, who soon offered her a contract.
Marlena Shaw’s recordings were issued on the Cadet label between 1966 and 1969, consisting of seven singles and two albums. Shaw left Chess in 1968 and spent the next four years as a member of Count Basie’s touring band. She then moved to the Jazz label Blue Note in the early seventies, before switching to Columbia Records in 1977, where she stayed for two years. Since then, she has recorded for a few smaller labels. The style of much of Shaw’s work is very much in the field of Jazz, but she was an accomplished singer, equally at home with Soul and Disco.

Marlena Shaw 1967
Photo: Trade Ad for “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” (Wikimedia Commons)
Chess launched her recording career in November 1966 with the release of a single “Let’s Wade In The Water”/ “Show Time”.

A-side is a classic spiritual, first published in 1901 in a version sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Chess stablemate Ramsey Lewis had had a hit with an orchestral version in the summer of 1966, no doubt inspiring Shaw to co-write an up-dated secular version of the old song with Lee Magid. The single was arranged by Richard Evans and produced by Billy Davis. Shaw’s version is an up-tempo arrangement with some swing. It is punctuated by some powerful horns and solidly underpinned by a funky bass line. A great start to her career at Chess!

The follow-up single, released in 1967, was “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”, which took Shaw into the charts. The song reached number fifty-eight on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart and number thirty-three on the Billboard R&B Singles Chart, with a clever arrangement by Charles Stepney and Billy Davis in charge of production. Shaw’s vocal is more laid-back compared with the style of the debut single, slowly building to a crescendo, with some Jazz inflections. Subsequent singles showed similar trends, culminating in the 1969 release of “Woman of the Ghetto”, a song co-written by Shaw with Richard Evans and Bobby Miller, who arranged and produced the single. It is Shaw’s best Chess offering, with a powerful vocal performance set against a solid, funky, driving beat.

The Jazz influence identified on several of the single releases for Cadet is also in evidence on the two albums that Chess put out in 1968 and 1969. The first, “Out of Different Bags”, contains several of the early singles and some show songs. Everything is well-done, smooth and funky, but there is a lack of drama and passion. The second album, “The Spice Of Life”, is better, opening with “Woman Of The Ghetto” and featuring much stronger songs, including a good Bluesy version of “Stormy Monday” and an up-tempo cover of Billy Taylor’s 1963 song “I Wish I Knew (How It Would Feel To Be Free)”. Hidden amongst the ballads towards the end of the album is Shaw’s best-known song, “California Soul”.

The song was written by Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, who had joined Motown in 1966. The original version was recorded by The Messengers and put out by Motown as the B-side of “Window Shopping” in 1967. Ashford then decided to record the song himself in 1968, just before the Fifth Dimension put out their version later that year. The Fifth Dimension single went to number twenty-five on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart and may well have inspired the song’s inclusion on Marlena Shaw’s second album. One more version appeared in early 1970, sung by the Motown duo Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, providing the B-side to the “Onion Song”. It was released just after Terrell’s untimely death.
Shaw’s cover version was also released as a B-side, in 1969, backing “Looking Thru The Eyes Of Love”, which had been released the previous year with a different B-side. “California Soul” became popular on the Northern Soul circuit in the UK, bringing Shaw the award of silver disc accreditation from the BPI. The song was later sampled by a series of hip-hop artists, culminating in a 2008 remix produced by the LA DJ Diplo, which breathed new life into the sales. The song has also been used in several advertising campaigns.
The idea of including the song on “The Spice Of Life” album came from producer Richard Evans, and the arrangements for the song were the work of Charles Stepney once again. Much of the preliminary discussion took place between Shaw and the two key collaborators by telephone, as Shaw was spending most of her time in New York with her children. The result was an excellent dance track, with a strong back beat, punctuated with soaring backing vocals. There is a sense of excitement and fun. Shaw has described it nicely: “It’s like when it’s late summer and you’re taking a walk, and you’re hot, but you can feel that little cool thing happening in the air.” (Quoted in Craig Seymour’s article October 8th 2020 at www.udiscovermusic.com).

It was a fitting way to end Shaw’s three years at Chess.