Jocelyn Brown

Jocelyn Brown's unmistakable vocal presence has echoed across dance floors ever since the closing years of the 1970s. Her commanding, emotionally charged delivery anchored several landmark disco anthems while also supporting countless other productions from the background. Short-lived ensembles such as Inner Life and Musique scaled the upper reaches of the club charts largely because of her contributions, and she later enjoyed a measure of solo recognition. Producer Patrick Adams, who collaborated with her during those formative projects, once described her as one of the finest singers he had ever encountered. Anyone who surveys the breadth of her recorded output quickly arrives at the same conclusion.

Her roots in gospel explain the intensity listeners hear today. Born in 1950 in Kingston, South Carolina, she was raised in a household steeped in both music and faith. Numerous relatives sang in church choirs or performed as minstrel singers, yet it was her aunt, Barbara Roy (also known as Barbara Gaskin), a member of Ecstasy, Passion & Pain, who encouraged her to explore secular material. Although Brown had already logged studio time by the age of fourteen, she began recording at a rapid pace in the second half of the 1970s and set aside earlier plans to enter teaching. Session dates with American acts including Machine, Kleeer, and Disco Tex & the Sex-O-Lettes proved as regular as work with overseas artists such as Italy's Cerrone and Change. Throughout that era she frequently appeared on releases under the married name Jocelyn Shaw.

A particularly fruitful stretch occurred when she joined Patrick Adams' group Musique, which scored consecutive club smashes in 1978 with "Keep on Jumpin'" and "In the Bush," the latter sometimes listed as "Push, Push, in the Bush." A combined twelve-inch issued by Prelude climbed to the top of Billboard's disco chart. The next year Adams and Greg Carmichael formed Inner Life, placing Brown at the forefront. Their debut single, "I'm Caught Up (In a One Night Love Affair)," reached number seven on the club tally and later entered the Top 25 of the R&B chart. Subsequent releases, a Larry Levan remix of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" in 1981 and "Moment of My Life" in 1982, each became enduring dance classics despite more modest chart peaks; both tracks benefited from Brown's regular appearances at the Paradise Garage.

She achieved her first major solo breakthrough in 1984 with the number-two R&B hit "Somebody Else's Guy," co-written with her sister Annette Brown. That same year Vinyl Dreams assembled an album pairing earlier Inner Life recordings with her new solo material. A Warner Bros. project titled One from the Heart failed to find an audience, resulting in her departure from the label. Additional solo singles charted in 1986 and 1987 but fell short of her earlier commercial heights. During the same prolific decade she remained in constant demand as a backing vocalist for artists ranging from Bette Midler, Manu Dibango, Chic, Candido, Steve Winwood, and Lou Reed to Culture Club, Mick Jagger, and Diana Ross.

Work continued without interruption through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, while her recorded voice appeared on numerous samples. Snap's inescapable 1990 dance-pop single "The Power" drew directly from her earlier track "Love's Gonna Get You," the same recording that Bizarre Inc. repurposed for "I'm Gonna Get You" in 1992. Throughout the remainder of the decade she collaborated frequently with Todd Terry, Incognito, and Masters at Work, and she began supplying vocals for advertising jingles. Several compilations, among them Deep Beats and Moment of My Life, appeared during those years. Further dance-oriented projects occupied her in the 2000s and 2010s, culminating in the contemporary gospel album True Praise, issued in 2010.