Go Deep In Your Soul: Loleatta Holloway's Gospel Source

An overview of the career of this former member of Albertina Walker's Caravans who went on to become the most-sampled voice in dance music.

I’ve spent much of the past two weeks working on the New York Community Choir book, specifically the chapter about their ‘disco’ years which began in 1977—an incredibly important year for a handful of artists from the gospel world who found a home in disco.

One gospel-honed artist who found great success that year was Chicago’s Loleatta Holloway. Her first album for Philadelphia’s Gold Mind Records, the simply-titled Loleatta, hit record stores in late 1976, as did its first single, “Worn Out Broken Heart.” The ballad fared well, finding its way into the top 30 of Billboard’s R&B chart at the beginning of the new year, but it was “Hit and Run,” the second single which also happened to be a disco tune, that really caught fire, rising to #3 on the Disco Action chart.

Loleatta’s success had been hard-won. By 1977, she’d been recording for a decade. She joined gospel queen Albertina Walker’s Caravans in the aftermath of Shirley Caesar’s 1966 departure from the group. Caesar was followed by the group’s regulars Josephine Howard and Delores Washington, leaving Walker without a group. Holloway’s first recording with The Caravans captures the group in transition, with former group members James Cleveland and Dorothy Norwood filling in the gaps with Holloway and Walker on pieces of the underrated Help Is On The Way. Walker added Gwenn Morgan and former Davis Sister Julia Mae Price-Williams to the group and began the group’s last chapter as an active touring and recording unit.

They recorded a whopping eight albums between 1967 and 1972, scoring hits like “Carry Me Home” and “Jesus Will Fix It” in 1968, but by the end, the hits were harder to come by, despite having quality records. During Holloway’s tenure the group opened for Aretha Franklin and Redd Foxx in Las Vegas and began to record more polished tunes like the Donny Hathaway-produced “Mama Said Thank You” and message tunes like 1972’s “Freedom” and “Put a Little Love In Your Heart.” "

During one of the Caravans off-periods in 1971, she met songwriter/producer/arranger Floyd Smith who wanted to record her. She told Paolo Hewitt at New Musical Express, “When I met him, he asked me if I would record and I said no, I only sang gospel. I was upset with one of the leaders in my group and so I told him if he could record me before the week was out then I would do it. He later told me that he sold pop bottles and hustled all kinds of money before the week was out and that’s how I started.”

They cut “Rainbow ‘71,” a Curtis Mayfield composition that had been a hit for Gene Chandler in 1962 and 1965. When “Rainbow ‘71” became a regional hit, she and Smith put together a band and took an extended club engagement in Chicago, officially beginning her career as an entertainer. She added ‘actress’ to her resume when she joined the touring cast of Micki Grant’s stage play, Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, after auditioning with Aretha Franklin’s “Spirit In The Dark.”

“When I sang 'Spirit In The Dark,’ I really put my whole heart and soul in to the number. The producer and auditioners all stood up and applauded,” she recalled to the Chicago Defender. She toured with the production for nearly two years, maintaining a rigorous schedule—not unlike the one she’d kept with The Caravans. “It almost killed me,” she told Joe Blake with the Philadelphia Daily News. “We would work seven days straight, and then have four days off. It was just too much. I really missed my family, and I only managed to be home three days out of the month.” By this time, she’d married Floyd Smith and was now a mother. Her commitment to her craft was bona fide. When she landed in the hospital in 1974, she got her doctor’s permission to perform for a benefit concert she’d committed to. She told Jet, “I committed myself and I just couldn’t disappoint those kids.”

1975’s Cry To Me, a heart-on-her-sleeve collection of songs about love, romance and heartache on Atlanta’s Aware Records, scored her a Top 10 R&B single. GQ raved, “If Atlanta, in the guise of the Hotlanta Sound, becomes to the seventies what Detroit was to the sixties, then Loleatta Holloway stands a good chance of being its Diana Ross/Gladys Knight/Martha Reeves.” The album’s success led to a new deal with Norman Harris’ Gold Mind, which resulted in four incredibly successful albums that made Loleatta a central voice in disco’s nightlife.

The disco tunes on 1977’s Loleatta are dynamic, high voltage performances with rigorous vocals and outrageous monologues (“I don’t want nothing that LOOKS at you!”) mixed by the brilliant Walter Gibbons that dancers fell in love with. Mind you, she had not yet performed in a disco. It was after the album’s release that she made her first disco appearance at Nicky Siano’s Gallery. In a talk at Red Bull Academy, Siano recalled the occasion:

“Loleatta…she’s up on the stage, and I haven’t announced her yet, but she’s up on the stage and “Love in C Minor” by Cerrone was playing. She’s going [mimes her singing with mic off] So I turn up the mic and she’s scatting to “Love in C Minor”: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” The place fucking – it was, like, 1,300 people there—erupted! I played that tape for two years until someone stole it. I’ll never forget that night. She was supposed to do two songs, she did five.”

Dance music historian Tim Lawrence quotes Holloway as telling him in 1997, “I was really surprised that the gay crowd was so into me. I didn’t have to build them up. They were already there.” But Holloway’s heart was in the ballads. “I love ballads, even though in the disco times they would call me a disco singer because most of the songs that they put out were fast ones,” she’d say in 1989.

“But I’m really a ballad singer. I see these singers like Stephanie Mills and Whitney Houston singing these ballads and I know that’s really me, but I got caught up in something else. If they were to get a hold of my old albums and sit down and play them, just play the ballads, they’d know the real Loleatta.”¹

Between 1977 and 1979, she’d score nine disco hits from her own albums and recordings as a featured vocalist that only increased in intensity as time went on. Her second Gold Mind album, Queen of the Night, produced “I May Not Be There When You Want Me (But I’m Right On Time)” which re-purposed the gospel cliché for her own uses with its rollicking track, scorching vocal and an even more dramatic monologue.²

The album would also earn a Grammy nomination in the Contemporary Gospel Soul Album category for her reading of the pop hit “You Light Up My Life.” In a daring move, she performed at Billboard’s Disco Forum, opting to not sing her hits—which Billboard wrote was “a feat not too many artists are capable of.” She chose, instead, to perform Queen of the Night’s ballads, “Only You” with Bunny Sigler and “You Light Up My Life,” winning the audience’s undeniable approval.³ To her, the ballads spoke to real life. She told David Nathan, the British Ambassador of Soul:

"Whenever I would play the clubs, they'd say 'no ballads,' but whenever I would include a slow tune, the audiences would go off. I played a lot of gay clubs and I felt that sometimes people might need to hear the message. Of course, when I'd do those ballads, the club owners would say, 'Well, Loleatta, you know your show!' because it always worked."⁴

Her last full-length album, 1980’s Love Sensation, brought Holloway her first #1 single on Billboard’s dance chart with the album’s title track, written and produced by Dan Hartman. She & Hartman had collaborated on the title track for his Relight My Fire the year before, bringing Hartman a #1 dance hit. He’d approached her about collaborating after catching her live show and wanted her to record “Fire” with him instead of Bette Midler or Patti LaBelle, whom he’d initially intended to pitch the song. With “Love Sensation,” Hartman returned Loleatta to her hard-singing days in The Caravans. She relived the session in an interview for DJhistory.com. “I sang that song 30 times! At the end where I hold that note I was so hoarse I didn’t know what to do.” Eating Vicks and drinking coffee, she did take after take over the course of two days to deliver the “hard and deep” vocal performance that Hartman had envisioned. “I was cursing,” she remembered.

“Love Sensation” became her most enduring hit, resurfacing in the early era of sampling with countless usages, perhaps most famously in Black Box’s “Ride on Time” and Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibration.” But the usages did not feel like homage to Holloway, who was not benefitting from the appropriation of her voice, fighting every step of the way for even a credit on the albums utilizing her talent. “It really messed me up for a little while mentally,” she said. “I went over to Europe and found that there were all of these people who knew my music but didn’t know who I was. I mean, for a moment there, Black Box was telling people it wasn’t me singing.”⁵

She resurged in the midst of the sampling debacle with the appropriately titled “Strong Enough,” a single she co-wrote, with remixes by Larry Levan and Francois Kevorkian. Upon its release, she said,

“The new record has a real message to it. I think its especially important for people with AIDS because it’s all about keeping your head up. Although AIDS affects everybody, it’s the gay audience that has kept me going through all these years, just like they have with Patti LaBelle, and I’m not ashamed to say it. If it weren’t for them, I would have quit and got disgusted a long time ago. I couldn’t want a better audience: they’ve been loyal and stuck with me.”⁶

Before her death in 2011, her 1977 tune “Dreamin’” would hit #1 on the dance chart by way of a remix and her voice would be become, what is said to be, the most sampled voice in dance music. In one of her last performances at Newark, New Jersey’s Lincoln Park Music Festival, she sang live along with the pre-recorded version of“Love Sensation,” a song she famously and obstinately lip-synched in club performances, as if to say, at sixty-three, she still was the voice.⁷ Six months before her death, she stood at the funeral of her early mentor, Albertina Walker (to whom she’d dedicated Love Sensation) reunited publicly with surviving members of The Caravans for the first and last time.

She’d carried the gospel force with her to the end. Critics labelled her albums “unbalanced,” as they also did The Two Tons/The Weather Girls (Martha Wash & Izora Armstead) and Cissy Houston, a common criticism leveled at artists who fused their gospel soul with a spectrum of sounds, artists who refused to be shoved into a box. Much like Wash & Armstead or Houston, Holloway saw no incongruence in recording the experimental house track “Crash Goes Love” and making her lush, orchestral cover of Rufus & Chaka Khan’s “Sweet Thing” the b-side. Loleatta relished in the ability to do this and that, because she knew the sound delivered from her singular soul could. “Gospel is like soul,” she once remarked. “It’s really deep and you mostly sing about the way you feel. You go deep into your soul and bring it out.”⁸

1. Hewitt, Paolo, “Loleatta Holloway: It’s My Record and I’ll Cry If I Want To,” New Musical Express, Oct. 21, 1989.

2. It’s vital to note that if Loleatta were a recording artist in 2023, her monologues would have earned her credit as a co-writer. In the seventies, this was not common practice, therefore her spoken contributions to songs like “We’re Getting Stronger,” “Dreamin’,” “I May Not Be There When You Want Me” were considered to be ad-libs and not a part of the song’s structure, thus excluding her from shares as a writer and, subsequently, royalties when her spoken contributions were sampled.

3. Moore, Marie, “Bevy of Awards Given at Disco Convention,” New York Amsterdam News, July 1, 1978, pg. D9.

4. Nathan, David, “No More Free Samples,” Blues & Soul, June 30, 1992.

5. ibid.

6. ibid.

7. Owen, Frank, “Divas Do Battle,” Newsday, April 14, 1992, pg. 53. Holloway lip-synched “Love Sensation” at the Apollo Theater at the Battle of the Divas concert in 1992. Her performance was deemed “the low point of the evening” by critic Frank Owen in Newsday. “Watching Holloway pantomime to her own record Saturday night…came off as a showbiz travesty. ‘No more lip-synching’ shouted one disgusted audience member.”

8. Hewitt, Paolo, “Loleatta Holloway: It’s My Record and I’ll Cry If I Want To,” New Musical Express, Oct. 21, 1989.