Walter Jackson

During the 1960s Walter Jackson embodied Chicago soul at its most melodic and, on occasion, broadly accessible. A string of sturdy R&B singles arrived in the middle of the decade—“Suddenly I'm All Alone,” “It's an Uphill Climb (To the Bottom),” “Speak Her Name,” “Welcome Home,” “A Corner in the Sun”—yet none climbed beyond the lower tiers of the pop Top 100. Signed to the OKeh roster, the premier Chicago soul imprint of the era, he enjoyed production from Carl Davis and Curtis Mayfield, the same team guiding the Impressions, Major Lance, and Gene Chandler. The arrangements retained the label’s trademark brass-and-string punch, though rendered in a smoother, more cosmopolitan manner; Jackson also moved easily into unadulterated supper-club pop devoid of any R&B inflection.

Before arriving at OKeh he had already cut sides for Columbia and had auditioned unsuccessfully for Motown. In 1962, while performing at a Detroit piano bar, he came to the attention of OKeh’s A&R chief Carl Davis. Having contracted polio in childhood, Jackson never allowed the resulting disability to impede his career and continued to appear on stage with crutches. Struck by the authority of his voice, Davis envisioned him as a Nat King Cole-styled vocalist and secured songs for him from Curtis Mayfield, Van McCoy, Chip Taylor, and other leading writers.

Despite clear potential for pop crossover, Jackson never registered with white audiences. Later in his OKeh tenure he was shifted from Davis’s production unit to Ted Cooper; a handful of additional hits followed, but momentum faded after the close of the decade. He continued recording for scattered labels until his death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1983.