Optimism Amid the Skyscrapers

THE LIFE OF A SONG, NEVER ENVISIONED

“Whatever survives through changing tastes and is adaptable to any variation in performance is truly the work of creative genius.”

“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” is the most-played Motown track on Spotify, the world’s largest streaming service. It’s been recorded by scores of singers since Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell’s first hit version, more than 50 years ago. One of those many performers liked it so much that he recorded it with three different vocal partners. The song’s writers even made a version themselves for commercial release, admittedly on an album which never came out.

Now, in the age of coronavirus, it’s been used to lift the spirits of patients and staff at a New York area hospital, while also going viral in a video of an amateur performance endorsed by actress/singer Kristen Bell. “It has a life now that Nick Ashford and I never, ever envisioned,” songwriter Valerie Simpson said last autumn, “but it’s still inspiring people.”

***Marvin & Tammi, united forever in song***

The idea for the upbeat lyric came to her late husband one day while he was walking down Central Park West, amid Manhattan’s mountainous, intimidating skyscrapers. “When we got together,” Ashford later explained, “the process to write the song wasn’t that long.” Then, it almost went into the possession of Dusty Springfield, until Motown’s initial interest in Ashford and Simpson’s work led them to hold it back for use at Hitsville.

But first, before further reprising the history of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” there’s that uplifting tale from the New York Presbyterian Queens Hospital. Two of the staff there, Kym Villamer and Dawn Jones, have been singing it to patients and their carers during the coronavirus crisis. This idea was born when a cafeteria space in the hospital had to be converted into space for patients. Evidently known for their singing skills, Villamer and Jones were asked to bless the repurposed area with a song.

The moment turned into a continuing effort to boost morale in the hospital, with Villamer and Jones vocalising wherever and whenever it seemed appropriate, including during staff breaks. “A few people looked tired and we just started singing and they all stopped in the stairwell,” said Villamer on television’s Good Morning America last month. “It’s definitely spontaneous, dropping by, asking the staff to come to the nurse’s station and join us for a song,” added Jones. “That’s what’s been happening.”

Similarly, people have been uplifted by a karaoke performance of “Ain’t No Mountain High” by Virginian vocal coach Joseph Clarke and his niece, Bri’Anna Harper. After a video of this was posted on Instagram, it spun around the world, fuelled by the approval of Kristen Bell, perhaps best-known as the voice of a character in Disney’s animated movie behemoth, Frozen. She told her 14 million Insta followers: “I’d like this CD immediately and thank u!!!”

Speaking of compact discs, that’s the format for another offering of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”: namely, the Diana Ross chart-topper from 1970, remixed for 2020 by celebrated house music DJ Eric Kupper. It’s one of nine tracks on a Ross remix album entitled Supertonic, just issued digitally and due in physical form soon on CD and so-called “crystal-clear” vinyl.

Still one more interpretation of Ashford & Simpson’s song has become available in recent weeks, by Roberta Flack. This is a demo which the singer cut in New York in November 1968, while assembling material with producer Joel Dorn for her Atlantic Records debut album, First Take. It’s one of the previously-unissued tracks in a forthcoming 50th anniversary, deluxe edition. That will be on sale on CD and vinyl on July 24, but the “Mountain” track has been pre-released on digital streaming services.

PLANNING ROBERTA’S ‘FIRST TAKE’

In its limited-edition anniversary package, First Take includes liner notes by soul music writer/historian David Nathan, who explained to me that in 1968, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” was part of Flack’s live repertoire, and so was natural to consider when she and Dorn were planning First Take. Among other demos from those studio sessions: “Frankie And Johnny,” “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out” and “To Sir With Love.”

These were recorded with Bernard Sweetney on drums and Marshall Hawkins on bass. On “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Sweetney employs the same snare-drum-rim clicks which were so memorably part of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s 1967 hit version, as played by Motown musician Uriel Jones. (It was Ashford who credited Jones with that contribution, although Universal Music’s Harry Weinger advises that Johnny Bristol claimed those rim shots.)

David Nathan also noted that another version of “Mountain” by Flack was once made available on Newport In New York ’72, a six-LP set of recordings from that year’s jazz festival in and around Gotham. Playing behind her at Yankee Stadium on July 8 were the likes of Grady Tate, Ralph MacDonald, Richard Tee and Eric Gale, stellar musicians of the era. Flack later became close friends with Ashford and Simpson, when they lived near each other on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She also duetted with Simpson on “Turn Around The Square,” a track on the latter’s most recent album, Dinosaurs Are Coming Back Again. That same set from 2012 included a compelling instrumental treatment of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” featuring Simpson on piano.

“Valerie got excited when I shared on Facebook the news of the release of Roberta’s demo of ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,’ ” said Nathan, who spoke to Flack for the liner notes of the First Take reissue. He also worked with Rhino Records to track down the demos she recorded in November ’68. The deluxe album is being marketed as a direct-to-consumer release, with Nathan’s own soulmusic.com website taking pre-orders.

The very first take of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” was cut by Tammi Terrell at Motown, just a couple of weeks after producers Harvey Fuqua and Johnny Bristol supervised the track’s recording in December 1966. (Ashford and Simpson had signed to Jobete Music earlier that year.) When the record company decided to pair Terrell with Marvin Gaye as a new duet partner, his vocals were wrapped around hers to magical effect. The single’s subsequent Top 20 success set in motion the singers’ electrifying union, with more hits like “Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing” and “You’re All I Need To Get By,” which helped to elevate Nick and Val to the top rank of Hitsville’s writing/producing teams.

Their status was blue-chipped still further when Berry Gordy selected the pair to work on Diana Ross’ first solo recordings, including her monumental take on “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Nick Ashford clearly remembered the moment when Ross questioned the choice of a song which had already been a hit. “She just kind of raised her eyebrows,” he told me for The Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits, “and said, ‘Marvin and Tammi already did that.’ We said, ‘This [version] is especially for you.’ She said, ‘OK,’ and just gave it all she had.”

‘MOUNTAIN’ CLIMBING, OVER AND OVER

Since then, as noted above, scores of singers of every stripe have chosen to record “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” whether in the manner of Marvin & Tammi’s exuberant template or Diana’s high-drama, almost-cinematic adventure. Among the more, uh, unusual remakes are these:

The New Christy Minstrels’ faux-cowboy performance in their execrable On Tour Through Motortown LP from 1968.
Claudine Longet in French, in We’ve Only Just Begun, her 1968 album for husband Andy Williams’ Barnaby Records. It’s even breathier than Diana’s.
Vikki Carr’s xerox of the Ross rendering, complete with spoken-word passage, in her 1971 long-player, Love Story.
Hugo Montenegro’s instrumental excursion, included in 1975’s Others By Brothers (an interesting title), an extension of his ARP-fuelled album of Stevie Wonder covers, one year earlier.
The London Symphony Orchestra’s full-scale, concert-hall treatment, with the help of the Royal Choral Society, part of 1979’s Rhapsody In Black.
The Temptations’ surprisingly-anonymous version, despite lead vocal chores shared between G.C. Cameron and Ron Tyson, on their 2006 Reflections set.
A quasi hip-hop exercise by a capella group Naturally 7, entitled “What I’m Lookin’ 4” from the group’s 2006 album, Ready II Fly.

There is, of course, an intense, live rendering by Ashford & Simpson themselves, blended into a medley with “You’re All I Need To Get By” and “Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing” in their 1981 album, Performance. Not to mention the third Motown recording of the song, on 1968’s Diana Ross & the Supremes Join the Temptations. Also, there’s the triple treatment by big-voiced balladeer Michael Bolton, a self-confessed fan of the Motown sound. That admiration was obvious from his 2012 album, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough: A Tribute To Hitsville U.S.A., opening with the title track as a duet with Kelly Rowland, formerly of Destiny’s Child. Two years later, Bolton saw fit to revisit the song not once, but twice, and both times on record with winners of the U.K. edition of television’s The X Factor, Sam Bailey and Leona Lewis.

This is obviously not a complete “Mountain” chronology. Consider other versions by Hugh Masekela, Ferrante & Teicher, Al Green, Boys Town Gang, Michael McDonald, Van McCoy & the Soul City Symphony, Inner Life, Eddie Money, Jimmy Barnes, Chimène Badi & Billy Paul, Jimmy Somerville, Howard Hewett & Stacy Lattisaw, and Scherrie Payne. Many more have performed the song in concert and on TV talent shows, and like so many Jobete copyrights, it’s also been drafted for movie soundtracks and in advertising. Then there’s Amy Winehouse, whose producer Salaam Remi thought of using it as a foundation stone for “Tears Dry On Their Own” within her multi-platinum 2006 album, Back To Black. And her godchild, Dionne Bromfield, recorded “Mountain” for her debut album, released through Winehouse’s Lioness Records.

The words which opened this West Grand Blog are those of a showbiz star from another age, Gene Kelly, paying tribute (in the liner notes of a Supremes album, no less) to the work of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Kelly might have added that the most enduring qualities in song are melancholy and optimism. “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” exemplifies the latter in melody and lyric. Whatever the challenges of a particular time – a global pandemic, say, or worldwide protests against racial injustice – people will always want to believe in a better future.

Music notes: this week’s West Grand Blog playlist contains a cross-section of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” interpretations, beginning with Tammi Terrell’s original and also including Amy Winehouse’s variation. Valerie Simpson’s instrumental version on Dinosaurs Are Coming Back Again is not, alas, available on Spotify, but it can be accessed elsewhere, such as Amazon Music. Then there’s the matter of Ashford & Simpson’s “lost” album for Motown, through which their 1972 studio recording of “Mountain” flowed as an interlude on the first side, unifying and separating three other numbers. “It was a non-stop album,” Simpson explained 20 years on. “We thought we were being very clever – so clever that they didn’t release it.” Entitled Nick & Val, this remains in the Motown vault, unattainable. Some heights still can’t be scaled, it seems.