Chuck Jackson was a matinee idol among his generation of soul singers in the early 1960s, displaying the looks and the bearing to match the elegance of his singing. He shared with such contemporaries as Ben E King, Jerry Butler and Lou Johnson an understated masculinity that would be lost in the subsequent decade, with the arrival of grunting sex machines and smooth “love men”.
Jackson, who has died aged 85, infused the songs he recorded with deep emotions made all the more powerful by the restraint of his delivery. Among his hits were Any Day Now, composed by Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard, and I Keep Forgettin’, by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (both 1962), as well as Chris Kenner’s Something You Got (1965), which he recorded as a duet with Maxine Brown.
Born Charles Jackson in Winston Salem, North Carolina, he never knew his father, and he was brought up by his grandmother in Latta, South Carolina, after his mother, Lucille, moved to Pittsburgh for work. Steeped in gospel music from an early age, he made his first radio broadcast at six years old and was a choir leader by the age of 11. Segregation led him to drop out of a scholarship to South Carolina State College and to move north to Cleveland, where he joined the Raspberry Gospel Singers.
Leaving the group after a year, he served in the US Navy before moving in 1957 to Pittsburgh, where he sang The Lord’s Prayer to Joe Aberbach, a local music promoter. Aberbach had little use for gospel music, but secured Jackson a place in the Del-Vikings, a mixed-race vocal group whose national hits included Come Go With Me (1957) and whose baritone singer was leaving.
While on tour with the group a few months later, Jackson met the singer Jackie Wilson, already an established star, who encouraged him to follow his own example and strike out as a solo artist. Jackson toured as Wilson’s support act, performing for the first time at the Apollo theatre in Harlem, and made his first recordings for small labels such as Clock and Beltone before being signed in 1961 by the producer and songwriter Luther Dixon to Florence Greenberg’s Scepter/Wand company, alongside the Shirelles, Dixon’s female proteges.
Behind the jaunty rhythm and rapturous strings of I Don’t Want to Cry (1961), Jackson’s first release on the Wand label, a kind of dignified melancholy was already evident. He and Dixon had written the song together, its lyric based on the singer’s memories of an unfaithful girlfriend. It reached No 5 on Billboard’s R&B chart, followed later in the year by the more explicitly doleful I Wake Up Crying, written by Bacharach and Hal David, which made No 13 on the same chart.
A few months later Bacharach teamed with Hilliard, his other regular collaborator at the time, to write Any Day Now, in which a piping organ introduced Jackson’s sombre reading of a lyric containing strikingly poetic images: “Any day now, when your restless eyes meet someone new / Oh, to my sad surprise / Then the blue shadows will fall all over town / Any day now, love will let me down.” In the background of Bacharach’s dramatic arrangement, built on an ominous rhythm tapped out on a broken ashtray and a muffled tom-tom, could be heard the voices of the sisters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick and their aunt, Cissy Houston.
It gave Jackson his biggest hit, nibbling the edges of the pop Top 20 while making No 2 on the R&B chart, and attracted many cover versions. Bacharach always included the song in his own concerts, but it never sounded as good as in its original incarnation, when Jackson evoked those blue shadows falling all over town.
His next single, I Keep Forgettin’, was almost as big a success. Teacho Wiltshire’s arrangement made strikingly prominent use of percussion, a selection of boobams, tom-toms and a glockenspiel creating staccato rhythms held together by the singer’s powerful urgency.
A succession of uptown soul ballads, including Getting Ready for the Heartbreak, Tell Him I’m Not Home and I Need You, pleased his admirers, as did his duets with Brown, but made less impression on the charts. In 1968 he signed with Motown through his friendship with Smokey Robinson, but three albums and a series of singles made little impact. He went on to record for Dakar, ABC, Channel and EMI America, and made an album of duets with Houston in 1992 for the Shanachie label. In 1997 he released a Grammy-nominated duet, If I Let Myself Go, with Dionne Warwick, to whom he remained close.
Compilations of rare, overlooked and unreleased recordings from his early years found a loyal audience of hardcore soul fans, particularly in the UK.
Chuck was married twice, and had two children. He met his second wife, Helen Cash, in 1959; they were married 20 years later. An arts organiser on the staff of the New York State Council on the Arts, she died in 2013.
• Chuck (Charles) Jackson, singer, born 22 July 1937; died 16 February 2023
