THE REEMERGENCE OF WILLIAM BELL

A familiar hook plays over the opening seconds of Ludracris’ “Growing Pains.” It’s a seven-note guitar riff, repeated twice and capped by a lush minor-key resolution, sounding sultry, sad and funky all at once. On the surface, it might seem out of place leading off a track from a hard-edged hip-hop album produced in the second year of the new millennium. But somehow, it never sounds anything less than timeless and fresh. The sampled track is a 1968 soul record called “To Be a Lover.” The recording artist is William Bell. And Ludacris is far from alone.

Three years after it reached the Billboard Top 10 as a slow, pleading piece of Southern soul, “Lover” found itself reinvented as a chunky reggae rhythm in the studio of Lee “Scratch” Perry and Shenley Duffus. In 1977, Perry did it again, this time speeding up Bell’s song and turning it into something bordering on a party track.

Meanwhile, Bell’s music was moving into genres where you would never have anticipated it. Billy Idol transformed it into a synth-drenched rockabilly-pop song, as The Mad Lads shrieked the words with righteous intensity. Bruce Springsteen numbered it among his soul covers when he recorded Only the Strong Survive two years back. And then there are the hip-hop and R&B stars: Ludacris, Snoop Dogg, Savages and Jaheim—the list goes on, and it might not even be slowing down.

What it is about William Bell that makes his music so peculiarly timeless? Music critic Dave Marsh crystalized the paradox in his book The Heart of Rock and Soul in 1989, dismissing Bell as a “journeyman” artist in one paragraph, yet in another saying about “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” Bell’s signature song: “It amazed me that he’d written it. Its cadences suggested something much older—and something much more [country & Western] too.” Marsh had hit on a bigger truth than he knew: The particular genius of Bell lies in the mutability and adaptability of his songwriting. And maybe that’s why, half a century after the peak years of the Stax Records scene from which he emerged, Bell has become a staple presence for a new generation of soulful singers and songwriters.

William Bell was born William Yarbrough in Memphis in 1939. He came by music early, in the gospel of his church choir and in records by The Soul Stirrers and Sam Cooke. He chose Bell as his stage name after his grandmother but also for the clear, chiming tone of his voice. “On Memphis radio station WDIA, we heard all types of music, including gospel, blues, jazz, country, R&B and our generation’s soul music,” Bell wistfully recalls today. “In 1955 I decided to make my life as a singer to escape the impoverished conditions in the Black community.”

By age 10, he had written his first song, “Alone on a Rainy Night.” A decade later, he would put it on record with a vocal R&B group called The Del Rios. Bell’s songs in those early years are bluesy and arranged in the slow, thumping, piano-heavy style of 1950s rhythm & blues, Southern Black music for Southern Black record-buyers. But it was precisely that sense of unapologetic passion and bluesy intensity that put him on the radar of Stax Records as the 1960s dawned.

Stax in 1962 was young, but it was hungry. Founded five years earlier as a house primarily devoted to country and pop records, the company had only assumed a new identity as a label devoted primarily to soul two years before Bell’s arrival. Early recordings by Rufus and Carla Thomas were modest successes, mostly confined to the South—good enough for a fledgling regional label, but the kind of popular breakout that Motown was already achieving, and which the big fish in the pond, Atlantic Records, had turned into a fine art. It was all just a little too gritty, a little too rough, a little too culturally confined within its milieu of origin. Stax needed an artist capable of retaining the bluesy spirit of the Memphis soul sound while finding a way to reach audiences—largely Northern, largely white—who might not otherwise have found it. What they needed was a William Bell.

“I was brought to the attention of Stax by Chip Moman to sing backup on Carla Thomas’s ‘Gee Whiz’ with my vocal group, The Del Rios,” Bell recalls. “The music produced at Stax was exciting and different from anything being played on the radio, a gospel and blues combination.”

In 1962 Bell laid down the recordings for what would become the first of the singles with which he’d be identified. On its surface, “You Don’t Miss Your Water” had the typical makings of deep-country soul ballad. The opening chords, carried over the brass thrum of a horn section and the loping waltz of a piano, are pure gospel—the kind of tune that emerged from the church pews of Bell’s youth since time immemorial. Where it stood apart was not just the earnest sincerity of Bell’s own vocal but also the pleading sincerity of his lyrics about a man whose two-timing ways drove away the woman that he realized, too late, was his only source of solace. Bell leans into his words like he was born to them, unapologetically inhabiting a musical character overcome by sorrow he can only express through song.

That honesty leads into the song’s eternally memorable melodic swerve: As Bell hits the line telling of his lover’s abandonment—“But when you left me, oh how I cried!”—the song’s melody suddenly veers off into a minor key, as if the emotion of the moment has overwhelmed even musical logic. It’s passionate, it’s memorable and it makes the song stand out in a crowded field. No surprise that it managed to crack the Top 100 on the Pop charts—peaking at 95, to be sure, but a rare mainstream success for a fledgling record label. Bell possessed the voice Stax had been searching for.

In a 2019 interview Bell reflected on the lyrical aspects that made his work stand out. “I’m a person that usually writes about my personal experiences or from observation,” he said. “So even if it’s hypothetical, I write truthfully, because I think that’s how people can relate to a song—through the lyrics. So I just write from past experience. Say, for instance, ‘Poison in the Well.’ Sometimes you get into a bad relationship and you fall in love. You know it’s bad for you, but you somehow can’t just leave it right away. You know the water’s no good, but you keep coming back for it.”

Bell’s rise would be temporarily waylaid by a stint in the armed forces, but when he returned in 1967, it was as a force to be reckoned with. It was a fortuitous time to make a return to the Stax studios. In 1962, the R&B charts were still dominated by the Northern-oriented, pop-infused songs of the early soul era: Sam Cooke, Little Eva and the like. By the second half of the ’60s, those tastes were changing, and the Top 100 reflected it. Soul was getting deeper; sounds were getting more Southern. Bell’s reappearance was both an influence on the shift and a lucky beneficiary of it.

Soul of a Bell, released that year, is a 35-minute fusion of soul and country, an album thoroughly rooted in its Memphis locale but drawing with effortless power from both Black and white musical traditions. And Bell’s approach increasingly became the approach of Stax as a label, as Bell became one of the label’s premiere songwriters alongside house bandleader Booker T. Jones (of Booker T. & the MG’s fame).

“Because he could write, William became a henchman at the label, one of the hubs in the wheel—a go-to guy,” Jones recalled to The New York Times years later. “He was an innovator as a singer. He set the standard for Percy Sledge and all the people who sang with heart and soul and feeling.” Bell, too, would later look back fondly on the freewheeling atmosphere of the Stax studio, when artists could (and did) absorb musical influence from one another without even noticing: “It really was like an extended family,” Bell recalls. “Long before integration, we got behind those walls at Stax, and the only thing that mattered was what you brought to the table in terms of talent and creativity. We didn’t care about race, gender, whatever.”

Part of what made Bell’s music—and by extension, the music of the whole Stax crew—distinctive was not just its fusion of white and Black traditions but its intermixing of pop and melancholy, a tone of bittersweet longing and regret that runs through even the catchiest of his numbers. Take his obligatory holiday record, “Everyday Will Be Like a Holiday,” as a case in point. It’s the kind of novelty record that soul singers of the era were obliged to put out, and it certainly worked on those terms. But more importantly, it’s a quiet prayer sung by a man dreaming of the day when a tearful reunion will mean he’s lonely no more, heady stuff for a Christmas-themed single. But Bell stuck the landing; not for nothing has it been called the greatest Christmas soul song of all time.

“It’s a purely natural occurrence,” Bell says of that signature mingling of moods in his work. “I tend to write about life experiences truthfully and think that people from all walks of life can identify with that.” The emotions followed naturally as the music flowed.

But for all this, by the time the ’60s came to a close, the Stax magic was seemingly starting to wane. The label’s biggest star, Otis Redding, had tragically died in a plane crash (Bell wrote a memorable eulogy in song for him as “A Tribute to a King”), and in the world at large, musical tastes were getting grittier and more rootsy than even the Memphis label had anticipated. So in 1969, Bell went South to strike out on his own. The label was to be called Peachtree, and its home base would be Atlanta, with its balmy weather and sultry sounds.

“After Stax began to decline, I wanted to make a new start with a new outlook,” Bell reflects on that turning point in his career. “My manager and I decided to create a new record label with the same values as Stax and its artists.”

He specialized in a form of soul music that walked the blurry line between gospel, R&B and country & Western, a stripped-down sound and a nimble, limber lineup of studio musicians. For Bell, Atlanta was like Memphis writ large. “I was already doing concerts in Atlanta and found the city to be much like Memphis, except more cosmopolitan,” he recalls. “And the people in Atlanta loved the same type of music.”

The artists of Peachtree were a sonically down-home crew whose records, by and large, have stripped-down arrangements and clear, naturally reverberating vocals that stand out above the notes of the jangling guitars and low-end bass rhythms: James Fountain, whose “Seven Day Lover” feels like one insistent dance break that you never want to end; Jimmy Church, with the balladic plea “Shadow of Another Man’s Love”; The 4 Dynamics, whose “Things That a Lady Ain’t Supposed to Do” is a tongue-and-cheek call-and-response number with a proto-disco beat that sounds almost a decade ahead of its time. Bell was finding artists who drew from the South’s musical past but pointed toward the R&B chart’s future. Only trouble was, it didn’t last.

For all its artistic potential and Bell’s undeniable skill in finding a lineup of turn-of-the-decade singers and songwriters, Peachtree was too small to make it in the cutthroat market of the ’70s. By 1972 the label was defunct, and Bell was back on his own. Hits still followed—one of them, 1977’s “Trying to Love Two,” reached the top of the R&B chart and peaked at #10 pop—but a listener could be forgiven for thinking that his heyday was behind him. Bell would gradually fade from the musical consciousness, like so many soul singers before and after. Or so it seemed.

But in 1994, something surprising happened. Anthony Forté, a West Coast rapper who performed under the name Rappin’ 4-Tay, sampled Bell and Judy Clay’s “Private Number” for his song “Playaz Club” on 4-Tay’s debut album. Bell’s single was released in the same year that 4-Tay was born, and on the surface, his soulful murmur is a world away from 4-Tay’s early-’90s gangsta production. And yet: listen to “Playaz Club,” even three decades later, and it’s self-evident that Forté has landed on something ingenious. The repetition of Bell’s hook—that low-key, mildly funky guitar riff—drives forward the rhythm of the rap that follows and sets the mood and tone of 4-Tay’s insouciant lyrics. Listeners agreed: Rappin’ 4-Tay’s single hit #36 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was a sign of things to come.

By the early 2000s, nearly 200 hip-hop artists had adopted Bell’s songs or productions to repurpose their own music. In 2001 Ludacris took the same Bell single as Rappin’ 4-Tay and this time deconstructed it into its elementary particles for his single, “Growing Pains.” The effect is distinctly modern compared to 4-Tay’s vintage production, but the results are equally distinctive—and equally identifiable as the fruits of Bell’s work. Snoop Dogg used it again in 2014, though less distinctively or memorably.

The members of the Wu-Tang Clan also fell under Bell’s sway: Ghostface Killah launched his 2006 song “Big Girl” with a sampled kickoff by way of Bell and Mavis Staples’ “Strung Out” from 1969, while RZA went as far as creating a straight-up remix of “Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday” for the Repo Men soundtrack in 2010.

And then there was Kanye West. Mentioning West at this late date is a fraught matter, his work too wound up in questions of politics and personality to approach on a purely musical level. But there was a moment in hip-hop history when a sampling from West amounted to a stamp of approval in the production world. So it was a big deal when West deployed Bell’s hook from “Strung Out” on his 2004 collab with Cam’ron and Syleena Johnson, “Down and Out.” In a sense it was like a bolt of electricity connecting a circuit from the music of Atlanta’s past to the music of its present.

What was going on here? Bell’s reemergence as both a source of influence for contemporary artists and a pop-chart presence in the 21st century bears examination. But maybe it isn’t as mysterious as all that. Take the explanation of 9th Wonder, who utilized Bell’s music for his song, “Yesterday and Today,” recorded with former Living Legends MC Murs in 2006.

“‘Yesterday and Today’ is a sample by William Bell,” 9th Wonder noted in 2010. “He’s an old Stax musician that did the song ‘I Forgot to Be Your Lover,’ which was remade by Jaheim… That soul from the ’60s and ’70s gets people through. That’s why I sample the works that I sample, because it has that feeling in it, man—it’s life music. I made the beat and let Murs hear it, and he knew exactly what to write about. If you ever listen to Murs and 9th Wonder, you know that we make music that drives people’s emotions. We deal with real-life situations, not your average, ‘We’re over here partying’ music.”

And there it is again: that same quality of true-to-life observation that Bell had singled out as the thing that makes his music unique. That same quality, it seems, makes it functionally immortal on a commercial and artistic level. You can repurpose it, remix it and chop it into component pieces. But truth, at the end of the day, is truth.

And Bell, for his part, says that he’s been taking it in stride. “I’ve been quite fortunate that a new generation can listen to and find a common denominator in my creations,” he says. “I absolutely love it when they can. Every generation has its problems and deals with them accordingly, but the human feelings are the same: love, wishes, frustrations and desires.”

Of course, that this common denominator has resulted in a fortuitous commercial revival for Bell himself isn’t exactly incidental to his reaction. After all, Bell’s reemergence in other people’s music has prompted a reemergence of his own. In 2016 he came full circle, bringing back the Stax branding to release his first album of new music in a decade, This Is Where I Live. It went further than he might have anticipated, winning a Grammy for Best Americana Album, which resulted in a flood of renewed media attention for Bell and his music. He released 2023’s One Day Closer to Home on his own label, Wilbe Records, but the sound remained the same. Or almost the same, in any case: The vocals were a little more wizened but just as crisp, the hooks bluesier and heavier but just as driven and effective. And that truth-telling—the gift for incisive lyricism—is still there, Bell’s words audible above the stripped-down drums and strings.

So it isn’t hard to imagine that we’ll be having this same conversation yet again two decades down the road, a new set of musicians and producers rediscovering a long-lost gem of soul music that was never all that lost to begin with. Bell doesn’t seem like he’d be all that surprised. “Music is our common denominator,” he reflects philosophically on the unusual path his career has traveled. “We are all in this together.”