The First Lady of Black country is from Houston, but her name isn’t Beyoncé. It’s Esther Phillips.
By Michael Hall
The Quonset Hut studio, on Nashville’s Music Row, didn’t get many singers like Esther Phillips in 1962. Phillips was Black, for one thing. She had come all the way from Houston, led by a man desperate to succeed in the music business who saw her as his best shot. At just 26 years old, Phillips was already a has-been. Almost half her lifetime ago she had been a wildly popular singer, one of the first modern teen idols. She had three number one rhythm and blues singles and toured the country, her name in lights. But then the hits stopped. By her late teens, she was addicted to heroin, often nodding her way through gigs. Eventually, she went into rehab.
Now, wearing a floral-print blouse and gray flannel slacks, surrounded by two dozen singers and musicians—all of them white—she stepped up to the microphone and began to sing. She casually stretched the first syllable over the beat—“Toooo-day I passed you on the street”—before sliding into the song’s familiar melody and words. “And my heart fell at your feet.” She came in low on the chorus: “Oh, I can’t help it,” she sang, sounding stunned, shaken up, “if I’m still in love with you.” The angelic voices of the Anita Kerr Singers answered her, as did a vibrato guitar and a piano playing a bluesy riff. In the second verse she sounded even more wounded, pausing before the words as if it hurt too much to go on, then pushing the melody—confidently—like a jazz singer. She knew this tune, Hank Williams’s “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You),” like she knew her own heart, and by the third chorus she couldn’t hold back her anguish anymore. “I just can’t—I just can’t help it if I’m still in love with you!”