Darlene Love on Resilience, Faith, and Recognition

The Voice Behind ‘Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)’ on Resilience, Faith, and Finally Getting the Recognition She Deserves

Darlene Love began singing background as a teenager. This in and of itself may not seem like a big deal until you realize who she sang background for: Sam Cooke, Elvis Presley, and a whole lot more. She also began a promising career as a lead singer, culminating with the holiday classic, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” Her career hit a snag when Phil Spector refused to let her out of a contract. She almost gave up singing altogether, but she had an epiphany that led her back to the mic, and eventually into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In this interview, she talks about all of the facets of her career, including her turn in the film, 20 Feet from Stardom. Watch the trailer below!

Read the entire transcript, starting with Darlene talking about recognizing her calling.

Darlene Love:

Early days of my church, probably between ages of 10 and 15. But even at that time, I didn’t really think that I had this great voice because when you grow up in church, people have the habit of saying, “Don’t get yourself too puffed up. You just got to be singing for the glory of God. Let Him lead you.”

That was their favorite word, “Let Him lead you.” So I just kind of like, oh, well maybe I am as good as people say I am. First of all, my father was placed in San Antonio, Texas for five years and then we returned back to California and he didn’t have a church. So a lot of my friends were going to one of the biggest Baptist churches in Los Angeles, and my father let us go over there because they had a great choir.

Now, that’s when I really thought I could sing because I was with these voices. They’re like 75 voices in this choir, and I was one of the youngest members in the choir. The director of the choir told me I had a great voice and that I should come, and try to start singing solos with the choir, and I worked with her for a couple of weeks. Then before you know it, the next week on a Sunday morning, I was singing solo. I think that was when I realized I really do have a gift, and I need to use it, and not just in church. God meant for me to use it everywhere.

He’s lightened my light to shine all over the place, and the only way I can do that is go out into the world, and let my light so shine, and I have enjoyed it. I think that’s why I really do it because I believe that my voice is a gift from God, and that I am supposed to use it, and that’s what I’ve been doing.

Now, during this time before you were taken aside by the choir director, were you listening to music and feeling moved by it there or was it just something that was just part of your daily diet?

Well, mostly because at home, rock and roll, rhythm and blues at the time was not allowed to be played in our house, only gospel music. The only way I got to hear other kinds of music was to go to my girlfriend’s house, and that’s where we heard a lot of secular music. But my leading was actually to gospel music because I heard it over the years. I wanted to sing like Marian Anderson, the great singer. That’s who I wanted to sing like. Then I figured out that that road to where Mahalia Jackson was a hard road. So I have to try to figure out another way of implementing what I was doing. So I went to rock and roll and that’s when I really started singing because my singing was more background singing than anything, and I just loved the background. Matter of fact, the group I was with, the Blossoms, we sang to everybody. It didn’t matter who it was just so we were singing.

It wasn’t really until Phil Spector came along that I really started singing solo because most of the people that I was working for were stars. They didn’t want to hear my lead voice because they wanted to hear my background voice, which they really did love. A lot of the people that I worked with never treated me like a background singer. They always treated me as one of their peers. They were really happy and lucky to be having me singing on their records so that was a great feeling.

Well, take me to, I guess, from singing in church, solo, to singing with the Blossoms, and putting that all together.

Well, it came from the singing at the Baptist church I was singing at with the choir. They heard me sing a solo at church, and they asked me if I would like to be in their group because they were looking for another singer, and they thought that I would probably fit in, well, of course I had to ask my mother and father if I could sing in a rock and roll group.

It wasn’t very hard. They said, “Well, okay. We want to know where she’s going and what she’s going to be doing, and we’d like to know you all as parents. We’d like to talk to them and just see what kind of girls they were,” that he was going to allow me to go and sing with them. So he did, my mother and father got to know their parents and we were all really good friends by then. So I was able to go out and sing with the Blossoms. I had to call when we went out to sing, I had to call when we got where we were going, and I had to call where we were on our way back home. They’re really strict about that, and the Blossoms wanted me so they made sure I called my parents when we got where we were going, and when we were on our way home. Then of course, jobs just got bigger and bigger and bigger and we would do solo projects, but they wouldn’t pan out that well. We still ended up just doing background work for everybody.

So when your father and mother let you go, were you surprised that there is no objection to the style of music you’re going to be singing?

They didn’t have the objection. It was amazing that the church people were the ones that had their objections, the members of the church. My father said, “Well, if her mother and I feel that she can do it, there is nothing wrong with it. It’s all R&B, music is music. She’s not strip dancing or singing on a flagpole, or any of that thing. It’s singing and enjoying it.”

So if somebody had something to say about it, it would be them not the people in the church. Which was wonderful because at first we didn’t think they were going to agree to it, but they did. I think they never said this, but I think they knew that I had a gift, and that one way or another I was going to use it. I think they figured they should just be in the middle of this to help me and lead me. You know what I’m saying? Because I was only like 15 years old. I really didn’t really start being able to do it full time until I graduated from high school.

Did you think to yourself, “Oh, man. All this time I could’ve been listening to rhythm and blues and rock and roll in the house?”

No, I never even thought about it because I knew back in those days, back in the ‘40s and the ‘50s, parents were more strict over their children, and we obeyed what they said to do. Because we know hellfire was going to be coming down if we didn’t.

So you know what? I really didn’t miss it. What I did here, well, for my girlfriend’s house we enjoyed that, and I just enjoyed when I couldn’t sing it. I didn’t sing it, but once I was able to sing it I didn’t think I had missed anything. I think I just enjoyed it, enjoyed the time, and as I got older and left home, got married, I was really out on my own. I think the protection of my parents helped me a lot to see the woes and mistakes and everything entertainers can make. I think that helped me a lot, so I didn’t have any trouble. I love rock and roll, I love rhythm and blues, but I still, my first choice today is gospel music.

What was your first gig with the Blossoms that made you realize that this was something really serious?

Our first recording session with James Dean.

The James Dean? He sang?

Yes. He sang. Not James Dean, the actor. Jimmy Dean.

Oh, okay. Like “Big Bad John”?

Yes. That James Dean. That was our first gig and we were so nervous because we had never sang before and the guy that was leading us, he was actually our coach, a vocal coach. He was also an arranger so he was the one that got us the job, to sing with him. We were nervous, he was nervous. It was his first session and ours.

After we got maybe an hour into the session, the fear left and plus those were during the days where the band, the singers, the background singers, and the lead singers did everything at one time.

It wasn’t put the music on and then put the voices on, no. Everything was done at the same time. Finally, we made less mistakes when we did it that way. Today, it takes you months to do one song. So, back in those days we would do a three to four-hour session and they would get what they needed in those three or four hours that we weren’t doing background.

Wow. What was that song with Jimmy Dean?

Oh mercy—I almost just said it. I can’t think of the name of it.

Okay. So it wasn’t “Big Bad John” itself.

No. It was his first song which was, gosh, I’ll think of it before we get off the phone. If not, I will call you back and tell you what it is.

So you’re singing background and singing with the Blossoms. What song did you sing on with Sam Cooke and when in the timeline was that?

You know what? That was one of my second sessions after school. We met Sam Cooke, they had a building here in New York called the Brill Building where all writers and singers wrote all the time. They had a rhythm and blues place like that in Hollywood where we would all go to and write, and Sam Cooke’s manager was a friend of our manager. He told him, “Well, we are looking at some girls to sing with Sam.” Of course we were hysterical ‘cause we were in love with Sam Cooke. The first session we did with Sam was “Everybody Likes to Cha Cha Cha.”

Oh wow, that’s awesome.

Then we did Chain Gang. Nobody knows there’s women on it. But our voices are on that record is what we called—we sweetened a lot of records. When they say sweeten in other words, put a little more onto it than was already on there. So those are the two records we did with Sam.

What was this Brill Building, west called? I had never heard of that.

Oh, it didn’t have a name. I was just using that as an example. I do remember it was on Ivar in Hollywood Boulevard because we used to go there almost every day to rehearse. It was rhythm and blues, it wasn’t rock and roll, it wasn’t like the writers that were writing at the Brill Building. This was the Black part of the rhythm and blues that were there. The Platters rehearsed there, we met all types of people when we were there rehearsing. We would just stand outside the little cubbyholes and listen to what they were doing. That’s how we actually ended up getting started singing background.

Wow.

Our manager at the time was an arranger called Eddie Bill. He was a big arranger back in those days. He just brought us along with him as the singers on the session, and it actually turned out to be a great deal.

Would you strike up friendships with the other artists and did you strike up a friendship with Sam at all?

We did. We got to be very friendly with him because we were all in the same game and Sam was one of the first Black people to do Shindig, the television show I was doing back in 1964-’65. So, when I say we got to know him, we didn’t hang out, we didn’t go to parties together, nothing like that. But when we were in the recording studio, we were friends. We’d sit around, we’d go to lunch together, those kinds of things.

I remember when we spoke last and we talked about Phil Spector, you definitely weren’t shocked with what he ended up doing later, but I just wonder with Sam’s character, it seems like that would have been more shocking.

Well, Sam loved women, all kinds. We used to tell Sam, and this is very funny because we told him one time, “Man you better stop fooling around with all these crazy women. One of these days you’re going to lose your life.” This was not a prophecy but it’s really amazing what actually happened to him, how he actually ended up dying.

Phil, my prophesy on Phil was because of the way he acted with guns. He always had guns in the studio, and he was always putting them in his pocket and taking them out and flipping them around and all those things. I was the only one that would leave the session because I would say “Listen, if he is going to shoot somebody, it ain’t going to be me.” Guns don’t shoot, people shoot.

I just think it was stupid and dangerous to be in a recording studio. We had like 15-20 musicians in the studio while he was doing this. If the gun dropped and went off, guess what?

So if he had a gun, I would make him take it out of the car, take it out of the studio. Remove the gun or I’m going to remove myself. That was the only way I would record with him, and finally he just stopped bringing it into our sessions. I don’t know what he did with other people. I’ve heard, but I wasn’t going to be shot because somebody was being stupid.

Right. So let’s talk about when you started working with him. So you’d been doing the Blossoms for a number of years and then how did he come to learn of you?

He had a partner Lester Sill who was living in Los Angeles at the time. We did a lot of sessions with him. He was a record producer too, but none of his records were as famous as the one he did with Phil Spector. We forget the ones that weren’t hits and I’m sure they do too. Which were a lot of those. As a matter of fact it was a lot more failures than hits.

But that didn’t stop him from trying, and Phil was rushing to get to New York to record “He’s a Rebel.” I tell the people it was a very simple story. I know people have tried to make it bigger, more gigantic than it really was. The Crystals were 13 and 14 years of age, and their parents wouldn’t allow them to come to Los Angeles.

So the Blossoms were there and Lester introduced us to Phil and said, “Well, I think Darlene can do it.” I said, “Sure, I can do it, but you’ve got to pay me.” That’s how I got involved with him. A lot of good things came our way because we were great session singers. That’s how we met Phil because we had been doing background for four or five years before I met Phil. So we were really ingrained into it by then. We knew the pitfalls and everything else. So him coming along, wasn’t a shock of like, “Okay, so you’re Phil Spector. What do you want us to do?”

When did you become not jaded, but when did you become not afraid of these bigger personalities?

Who?

You. You worked with Elvis and the Beach Boys.

Yeah but you know what, I wasn’t afraid anymore. By then, we had worked with Lou Adler who had the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas so we’re used to being around all these people. There were times being around Elvis was like “Wow, look we’re working for Elvis Presley.”

That kind of thing which started in the early days soon left us