Donny Hathaway

Donny Edward Pitts was born on the first of October 1945 at Chicago, Illinois, the only child of Drusella Huntley — a teenage mother who would across his life remain estranged — and a father whose name does not appear in the surviving record. He was raised from infancy by his maternal grandmother Martha Crumwell Pitts — a celebrated gospel singer in the St. Louis Baptist tradition — at her home in the Carr Square neighbourhood of St. Louis. He took her surname Hathaway from her second marriage. He sang at three at the local Baptist congregation under the name Donny Pitts the Nation's Youngest Gospel Singer.

He completed the Vashon High School in St. Louis in 1963 and entered Howard University on a fine-arts scholarship the same fall to study classical piano under the Howard piano faculty. He met at Howard the singer Roberta Flack — the friend and future duet partner who would across the remainder of his life be his principal musical and emotional intimate. He met also at Howard the producer Curtis Mayfield (placed in this archive) — visiting the campus to recruit talent for his new Curtom label — and signed with Curtom in 1968.

He recorded across the years 1969 to 1971 a sequence of session and arrangement engagements at the Curtom studios in Chicago that established his arrangement style and his unusual command of orchestral production techniques. He signed with Atlantic Records in 1969 and released his debut solo album Everything Is Everything in October 1970. The album yielded the single "The Ghetto" — a six-and-a-half-minute extended-form social-conscience suite that became one of the principal recordings of the early-1970s soul tradition.

He produced across the following eight years the body of work — Donny Hathaway (1971), the Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway duet album of 1972 with "Where Is the Love" and "The Closer I Get to You," Extension of a Man (1973), and the 1972 Live album recorded at the Bitter End and the Troubadour — that placed him at the centre of the early 1970s soul-music canon. The 1973 single "Someday We'll All Be Free" is widely identified as the most consequential of his solo compositions.

He suffered across his late twenties from severe paranoid schizophrenia that progressed across the years 1973 to 1979 to the point of his hospitalisation in several New York-area institutions. He withdrew from public performance from 1973 to 1977 and recorded across that period only intermittently.

He died on the thirteenth of January 1979 from a fall from his fifteenth-floor room at the Essex House on Central Park South. He was thirty-three.

He is honored here as the architect of the early-1970s soul ballad.