Viola Wills

Before achieving widespread fame, Barry White employed vocalist Viola Wills for session work on productions he helmed at Bob Keane’s Bronco and Mustang imprints. During the mid-1960s, Keane—who had already scored successes with Ritchie Valens, the Bobby Fuller Four, and Johnny Crawford of ABC-TV’s The Rifleman—sought to enter the soul market. In 1965 White, then serving as A&R director, placed Wills under contract with Bronco as a featured performer. Several sides she cut for the company never reached the charts. A lone 1969 release on the A Bem Soul label likewise made no commercial impact. Four years later she stepped in for Claudia Linnear during Joe Cocker’s European tour; while overseas she also taped material for Goodear. In 1977 she moved to Arista Records.

Under the Ariola/Hansa banner in 1979, Wills attained her greatest success via a disco reinterpretation of Patience and Prudence’s 1957 single “Gonna Get Along Without You.” Working in a brisk Hi-NRG dance framework, she next registered club favorites with “If You Could Read My Mind” and “Up on the Roof.” On the Wide Angle imprint she earned a U.K. Top 40 entry with the paired tracks “Both Sides Now” and “Dare to Dream.”

A Bronco-era recording later supplied the foundation for a chart-topping R&B hit. While preparing the next Love Unlimited project in the mid-1970s, member Glodean James proposed that producer Barry White lift the piano motif from Wills’s “Lost Without the Love of My Guy.” Initially reluctant to recycle an earlier idea, White eventually agreed and adapted the same chord sequence for “I Belong to You.” The sweeping ballad reached number one on the R&B list in late 1974 and later appeared on both In Heat and Best of Love Unlimited.

Although Wills has yet to register a major pop single in the United States, her tracks remain staples in dance clubs; among those still circulating are “No News Is News,” “House Is Not a Home,” “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Let’s Love Now,” “Take One Step Forward” (with Noel McCalla), and “Always Something There to Remind Me.”