Born in Harlem, New York, in 1947 (with some sources listing 1949 instead), Chris Bartley spent his early years in close proximity to the Apollo Theater, where he absorbed the music that filled both his immediate surroundings and the airwaves. During his teenage years his primary influence came from Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, a neighborhood act that had enjoyed major success in the mid-to-late 1950s. Three years after those hits, Bartley assembled his first ensemble, the Soulful Inspirations, alongside William Graham, Henry Powell, Sam Nesbitt, and Ronald Marshall. Over the following six years the five-member group experienced repeated lineup changes and adopted several new names before settling on the Mindbenders, a unit unrelated to the British band of the same name.
Eventually Bartley and Marshall continued as a duo. Their decisive opportunity arrived when the pair auditioned for Van McCoy, who chose to sign Bartley as a solo artist to his recently launched Vandor Records rather than taking on the duo. The McCoy-penned “The Sweetest Thing This Side of Heaven,” a deeply affecting soul ballad, immediately yielded a Top 40 pop and Top Ten R&B hit for both singer and label. The single brought Bartley nationwide attention along with concert dates in England and remains one of the most fondly recalled one-off soul successes of the era. Despite further attempts, among them the strong Motown-styled “Baby It’s Wonderful,” he never repeated that commercial breakthrough. He remained with Vandor long enough to release a full album surveying McCoy compositions that dated back to the close of the 1950s.
After McCoy closed Vandor in 1968, Bartley moved to Buddah Records and recorded a version of the McCoy song “Baby I’m Yours,” yet it likewise failed to reach the charts. He is said to have withdrawn from the music industry in the mid-1970s when his mother became gravely ill. Although he has rarely appeared in public since, “The Sweetest Thing This Side of Heaven” continues to surface on 1960s soul compilations and oldies radio programming, while his Vandor recordings have been collected on a well-regarded Collectables compact disc.
