Little Jimmy Scott: “Someone to Watch Over Me”
by Peter Guralnick
The first time I saw Little Jimmy Scott was at a memorial for Big Joe Turner that Doc Pomus had organized in December 1985. I had been hearing about Jimmy from Doc for years – “the best ballad singer I ever heard,” Doc wrote. “He sang behind the beat further than anyone else ever could and every time I thought he was too far back he returned somehow with impeccable meter. He had a sob in his voice that always had me close to tears.” They were tight in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, Doc said, hung out, did gigs together. Not only that, Doc was going with Jimmy’s cousin Aida, who “loved me fiercely and poetically, [but] I was cool with my feelings. That was the style in those days.”
But for all of Doc’s paeans to his singing I never got to see Jimmy in person, and Doc didn’t either, because in the aftermath of a career that never brought much in the way of material rewards, Jimmy had returned to his hometown of Cleveland, where he worked as an elevator operator at the Sheraton downtown, and despite all his efforts Doc was unable to re-establish contact.
Jimmy returned to the New York area in 1985, and Doc reconnected with him in Newark just before the Big Joe Turner Memorial, where he was a late addition to the bill. It was, as Doc might have said, kind of a crazy night, with all kinds of big names filling the club and emotions running wild. Without the benefit of rehearsal, Jimmy’s performance was a little ragged, lacking the kind of broken-hearted, slow-drag assurance that you hear on his classic records, from the earliest sides to the wonderful 1963 album produced by Ray Charles for his own label, Tangerine, that went unreleased for forty years because of a “lifetime” contract with Savoy. It was thrilling to see him, though, thrilling to hear him, and it seemed like things were finally bound to start happening.
They didn’t, though, despite all of the efforts of Doc and other friends of long standing like Joel Dorn. In September 1987 Doc wrote an impassioned plea to the music industry. He ran down a list of all the singers Jimmy had influenced, including Frankie Valli, Nancy Wilson and Stevie Wonder, and all the music moguls he had tried to contact on Jimmy’s behalf. “What’s everyone waiting for?” Doc’s words practically screamed. “He’s sixty-two years old, he’ll die, and there’ll be a hot funeral. Everybody will show up in hip mourning clothes and talk about how great he was….I’m getting good and pissed at the affluent members of the music community who sit around and pontificate and let those kind of tragedies happen again and again….Let’s do something now.”
But it wasn’t until he sang at Doc’s funeral three-and-a half years later, as Joe McEwen writes in his accompanying tribute, that Jimmy finally got his break. Joe and Bill Bentley had been advocating for him for years, but it was only after his performance at the funeral that he was offered a recording contract and finally became known to the world at large. And the song that he sang, George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” like Mac Rebennack’s equally heartbreaking, just as unashamedly sentimental tribute to his friend, “My Buddy,” spoke volumes about the spirit not just of the man but of the music.
One final note, just to give an idea of the celebratory nature of the occasion: Doc, the music, the moment, got a standing ovation as the casket was rolled up the aisle.