For more than 60 years, Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers has made his living singing blue-eyed soul. But now, at 84, he feels the best way to express himself is by going hardcore country.
On his first new album in nearly 20 years, Straight from the Heart, Medley devoted every track to melancholy ballads made famous by country stars such as Kris Kristofferson, Hank Williams and George Jones. “I feel I can sing these songs, because I’ve lived these songs,” Medley said. “When you get older, you’ve seen a lot of ups and downs. And I’ve had some real downs.”
In fact, more than many people have. In the early 70s, Medley was told he would never sing again due to the strain he put on his voice. Several years later, his ex-wife, the mother of his first child, was raped and murdered in a case that went unsolved for decades. Then, in 2003, he discovered the body of his beloved partner in the Righteous Brothers, Bobby Hatfield, who had died in his sleep at 63 from a heart attack. Four years ago, it was his turn to suffer a medical crisis. He was diagnosed with throat cancer, a disease that, once again, threatened to silence one of music’s most distinct voices. “That was an incredibly scary thing to go through,” Medley said of the disease. “If I lost my voice, I would be devastated.”
Instead, a round of surgery caught the cancer and left his vocal cords unscathed. On the new album, Medley sounds physically robust and emotionally present. Though inevitable traces of wear and tear show in any voice at 84, they work in his favor, offering hard evidence of everything he has lived through. To flesh out the well-known songs he covered on the album, such as Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down and I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, some pieces were arranged as duets, letting Medley mix it up with guest singers such as Michael McDonald, Vince Gill and Keb’ Mo’. For Medley, the duet dynamic is mother’s milk, having built his reputation on the interplay between his resounding baritone and Hatfield’s high-wire tenor in the Righteous Brothers. “You can’t play catch with yourself,” Medley said of the interplay. “As a singer, it’s a lot more fun when you throw a line out to someone and then they throw it back.”
At the same time, the Righteous Brothers’ unique rapport resulted in something much more meaningful and far-reaching than record sales, including ones as monumental as their 1964 breakthrough song, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, which held the record as the most played song on US radio and TV for more than two decades. Beyond their cultural ubiquity, the Brothers helped change the relationship between music and race by featuring white singers who “sounded Black” at a time when Jim Crow laws still segregated many Americans. In the same year the US passed the Civil Rights Act, Medley and Hatfield performed a parallel act of integration with their music. “That was all brand new back then,” Medley said.
Though by that time mainstream music had embraced white artists such as Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis integrating authentic black styles into their sound, much pop music in the early 60s still favored the milky sound of artists such as Frankie Avalon and Pat Boone. The Righteous Brothers recorded perhaps the first major hit to feature white singers channeling the full gospel fervor of soul music, in the process midwifing the genre of blue-eyed soul. At the time, Medley said they had no clue that would be such a winning formula. “For two white singers to sound Black was really going against the grain,” he said. “It was the most uncommercial thing you could do at the time.”
The early songs the duo recorded were for a small label, and just one of them, Little Latin Lupe Lu, made any chart impression at all. Written by Medley and sung with gusto by the duo, the song barely broke the top 50 in 1962. They first recorded it under the name the Paramours, but because, in concert, African American listeners had been yelling out things like, “That was righteous, brothers,” they adopted the new name. The fresh term for their sound has been credited to a Black Philadelphia DJ named Georgie Woods. “It was a way to hip his audience to the fact that we were white,” Medley said. “He would say, ‘Here are my blue-eyed soul brothers.’”
The sound caught the ear of Phil Spector, who made them the first white act signed to his Philles Records label, which otherwise favored artists such as the Ronettes and the Crystals. In 1964, he hired songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil to pen You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, which soared to No 1 and endured as a beacon for all soul singers to come. “We were really blessed that Black audiences took us in, because we knew there were two Black singers on every corner who could do what we were doing,” he said. “But once we did break through, there were hundreds of white artists right behind us.”
One draw for the Brothers was the clever way they highlighted the contrasts in their voices. To break up their extended harmony parts, they featured sections that isolated each singer before building to a pitched call and response between the two. The way Medley navigated his low parts really stood out to Michael McDonald, who, on the new album, performs with him on the Buck Owens song Crying Time. “Most baritone singers are confined to a pretty narrow range,” McDonald said. “They don’t move around that much. But Bill is able to improvise a melody in a way that allows him to hint at a higher range. And when he goes for those notes that are less comfortable for him the strain brings a great soulfulness and angst.”
Remarkably, Medley said he wasn’t born with his deep instrument. “The truth is, when I was 15, I was a first tenor,” he said. “That’s why I have such a sense of what Bobby was doing with his voice. But when I turned 16, I grew seven inches in one year and went from a first tenor to a baritone.”
With a laugh, Medley credited the thick texture of his voice to “really bad sinuses”.
Spector’s epic production made the most of the pair’s vocal drama. “Everybody wants to hear a horror story about Phil,” Medley said, “but when we recorded with him, he was fairly sane. I think he was more interested in having people think he was nuts and then, later, he talked himself into it.”
Given Spector’s reputation for being a control freak, it’s notable that the Brothers had a lot of say in certain recordings. “We were street kids, so Phil knew he couldn’t do a lot of his usual pushing around,” he said.
Medley got to write or co-write many songs and was even allowed to produce some, including their classic Unchained Melody, an extreme rarity for an artist at the time. But due to a legal tussle between Spector and the duo’s former label, the relationship with the producer only lasted a year and a half. “I didn’t want to leave Phil,” Medley said.
Fortunately, by that time he had absorbed enough knowledge from Spector to imitate his Wall of Sound style when he produced the duo’s next single, Soul and Inspiration, a top five smash in 1966. Just two years later, the hits dried up and the duo split. Medley proceeded to make records on his own, though most performed tepidly. By 1974, he was mainly playing Vegas lounges, which is where he blew out his voice. “I had laryngitis but was still doing three shows a night,” he said. “That’s like running on a sprained ankle. It’s just gonna get worse.”
Upon examining him, LA’s top throat doctor told him: “Your vocal cords are hamburger meat.” A chance encounter with his high-school choir teacher turned things around. He told him he could bring back his voice with a rigorous series of exercises. Medley described the protocol as “very painful. I’m surprised I stuck it out,” he said. “But thank God I did because my voice came back.”
In that same time frame, he reunited with Hatfield and the two enjoyed a comeback hit with Rock and Roll Heaven, a treacly ballad whose lyrics imagined the ultimate jam in the afterlife between famous dead musicians such as Otis Redding, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. The joy of that comeback was cruelly countered a few years later by the murder of his ex-wife. Medley, who says the two remained close despite the divorce, was so crushed by her violent death he quit the music industry for a few years to spend the time raising the couple’s son. (Years later, DNA evidence proved that a drifter had committed the murder in a random act of violence.) “You can take the 70’s as far as I’m concerned,” Medley said. “It was a very tough 10 years for me.”
Remarkably, he rebounded resoundingly in the 80s with another No 1 smash, I’ve Had the Time of My Life, a duet with Jennifer Warnes that was prominently featured in the wildly successful film Dirty Dancing. At first, Medley turned down the invitation to take part in the movie because “the title sounded like a bad porno”. His desire to sing with Warnes won him over in the end. Another movie connection gave the Righteous Brothers one more comeback. In 1990, the blockbuster movie Ghost featured a pivotal scene based around Unchained Melody, generating even greater sales for the song than it had enjoyed the first time around.
After the death of Hatfield in 2003, Medley didn’t revive the Righteous Brothers name for another 13 years, at which point he hired Bucky Heard to handle the tenor parts. The pair continued to tour successfully under the old brand but, as a solo star, Medley couldn’t secure a new record contract for decades due to trends that disfavored his vintage style, as well as the realities of an industry that’s long been reluctant to back artists of age. He credits his latest resurrection to Mike Curb, who signed him to his Nashville-based Curb label for the new project. His role model for its sound was his idol Ray Charles, who made history by mixing country and soul in 1962.
Before Curb came to his aid, Medley was so convinced his career had waned, he announced his retirement just over a year ago. Now, he has new energy and hope. He plans to keep performing with Heard in Vegas as the Righteous Brothers and, should the new album connect, he’d love to make more. “Hell, there are so many great country songs, I could do 50 more albums like this,” Medley said. “As long as there’s a need for my music, I’ll keep making it.”
Straight From the Heart is out on 21 February
