Gwen Guthrie earned her greatest recognition for topping the R&B charts with the self-written bouncer “Ain't Nothin' Goin' on But the Rent.” A gifted pianist and tireless composer, she also supplied Ben E. King with “Supernatural Thing” and wrote “This Time I'll Be Sweeter” for Martha Reeves, a song later taken up by Angela Bofill and Issac Hayes. Across her career she completed roughly fifty songs, and many observers believed she and frequent collaborator Patrick Grant possessed the chemistry to rival Ashford & Simpson.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1950, Guthrie first performed publicly in high school as a member of the female quartet the Ebonettes; fellow singer Brenda White King went on to enjoy steady session work in the same manner as Guthrie herself. In New York she fronted East Coast, a band assembled by Larry Blackmon before he formed Cameo, yet her decisive break arrived when she contributed background vocals to Aretha Franklin’s 1974 number-one R&B single “I'm in Love.” Half a year afterward she joined Bert de Coteaux Productions as a staff writer and, alongside Grant, delivered “Love Don't Go Through No Changes,” Sister Sledge’s debut hit, plus numerous additional titles; that partnership proved short-lived.
Guthrie soon teamed with other writers and continued furnishing backing vocals across countless sessions. Through late-1970s work with Peter Tosh she met reggae rhythm section Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, who summoned her to Nassau to lay down tracks for a project they were overseeing. Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, impressed by the distinctive timbre he heard in the studio, offered her a solo contract; the resulting Dunbar/Shakespeare album, shaped in part by Surface’s David Conley, appeared as her self-titled debut and yielded the dance-floor favorite “It Should Have Been You.” Her follow-up, Portrait, arrived in 1983 and adhered to a comparable approach. The 1986 set Good to Go Lover brought her second chart-topper, “Ain't Nothin' Goin' on but the Rent,” together with the impassioned ballad “You Touched My Life.” On 1988’s Lifeline she assumed greater responsibility for both writing and production. Her last album, Hot Times, reached stores in 1990; she composed nearly all of its material save a heartfelt reading of Stephanie Mills’ “Never Knew Love Like This Before.” Guthrie died of uterine cancer on February 3, 1999, in Orange, New Jersey.
