Edwin Starr

Stentorian soul singer best known for his controversial hit 'War'

Charles Edwin Hatcher (Edwin Starr), singer: born Nashville, Tennessee 21 January 1942; married (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved); died Bramcote, Nottinghamshire 2 April 2003

Edwinn Starr's extraordinary outburst at the start of his 1970 hit record "War" – "War, uh, yeah, what is good for? Absolutely nothing" – touched a generation. The powerful record did not specifically refer to Vietnam, and it has been used for comment on conflicts ever since.

Surprisingly for a soul singer, he was born in the heart of country music, Nashville, as Charles Edwin Hatcher in 1942. His father, a serviceman, was constantly on the move, but the family settled in Cleveland, Ohio. Hatcher sang with a teenage doo-wop group, the Futuretones, from 1955 to 1960, and they won an orthopaedic mattress on a television talent show. "Luckily, one of the guys' father had a bad back," Starr told me:

So he bought it off us and we split the money. The real prize was an appearance at a night-club. Billie Holiday was starring and I was completely in awe of her because I knew I was meeting the greatest singer ever.

Hatcher soon found that he was blessed with a stentorian voice, rather like his hero Jackie Wilson:

He was The Voice to me. Things like "Night" are right on the edge of opera and he was playing Vegas long before other black acts.

After army service in Germany from 1960 to 1962, Hatcher joined Bill Doggett's road show:

If you'd done something wrong, Bill would play a little riff on his organ, which meant you would be fined five dollars. One night he introduced me as Edwin Starr and played a riff, so I knew my new name would cost me five dollars.

In 1965 Starr told Doggett that he wanted to record his own song "Agent Double-O Soul", but Doggett felt that he was not ready for a solo career:

I knew I was, so I quit. I was introduced to Ed Wingate who owned Ric-Tic Records in Detroit and within a month I had a hit record.

A young George Clinton notwithstanding, Starr was Ric-Tic's main asset. He sang lead on the Holidays' "I'll Love You Forever" and wrote US hits by the Shades of Blue, ("Oh How Happy") and Darrell Banks ("Baby What'Cha Got for Me"). When he was watching the television show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, he became intrigued by the distress signal in Morse code. He worked it into a song, which was originally called "Sending Out Soul". "I changed it into a love song by calling it 'Stop Her on Sight'," said Starr. "I know that should have been 'S.H.O.S', but the record company said no one would notice."

Ed Wingate used the Motown session musicians, the Funk Brothers, on Starr's recordings. Berry Gordy, the owner of Tamla- Motown, recognised their work and fined them for moonlighting. However, he appreciated what Wingate was doing and, in 1966, he bought his label and his studio, which became Motown Studio B. At the time, Starr was making live appearances in the UK and, when he returned to New York for a concert at the Apollo Theatre, the Temptations welcomed him to Motown. Starr was horrified that the artists had been sold like cattle and, what's more, that he would receive none of the purchase money. He refused to record for two years, although his work for Ric-Tic was reissued by Motown on the album Soul Master (1968).

In 1968 a Motown executive heard Starr performing one of his own songs, "25 Miles", on television and persuaded him to record it. "I didn't understand their politics," said Starr:

They wouldn't let me produce it and said I would have to work with Harvey Fuqua and Johnny Bristol. They thought the song needed a better intro and I said, "OK", but they were then on the song as writers. End of story, what could I do?

"25 Miles" made the US Top Ten in 1969, but a soul ballad about ghetto life, ironically called "I'm a Strugglin' Man", failed to consolidate the success.

The Motown writer and producer Norman Whitfield had recorded "War" as an album track for the Temptations, but it was not released as a single. "The song was controversial," said Starr,

and Motown did not want a smear campaign against one of their top groups. I didn't have much of a career for them to be concerned about. If the record went down, I would have been dead as an artist, but it became one of the biggest records they ever put out.

Starr transformed "War", deservedly winning a Grammy for his performance, but the song was not as controversial as he maintained as there was already considerable opposition to the war. When I spoke to Starr in 1990, he had acquired a different take on the song:

The song was not about the Vietnam War. It was about any kind of war. It can be the war you have in your neighbourhood trying to survive. It can be about the war you have in your job or the problems you have because of your colour.

"War", with its combination of soul music and psychedelic fuzz guitars, topped the US charts and reached No 3 in the UK, but the follow-up, "Stop the War Now", was simply more of the same and in Starr's words, "totally redundant".

Starr made two fine albums, War and Peace (1970) and Involved (1971), but, besides social protests, he sang "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" and "Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On". One of his best performances was an insidious rendering of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord". Starr criticised Wilson Pickett, whom he felt had stolen his arrangement of "Hey Jude" for a hit single.

Motown could have done more with Starr, but he was a difficult artist and they did have another stentorian vocalist with Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops. His best work with Motown included some duets with Blinky ("Oh How Happy", "Ooo Baby Baby") and the soundtrack for the blaxploitation film Hell up in Harlem (1973). "Take Me Clear from Here" (1972) "Love (The Lonely People's Prayer)" (1973) were excellent tracks and potential hit singles if Motown had got behind them. "I never received my royalties from Motown," he claimed, "and that is why my live performances had to be so powerful as that is all I had to rely on for a living."

Edwin Starr enjoyed working in the UK and found a large following on the Northern soul circuit. He settled in the Midlands and, when his Motown contract expired in 1975, he began recording in Britain, scoring Top Ten hits with the disco songs "Contact" and "H.A.P.P.Y. Radio", both in 1979. In 1987 he anticipated further success by recording with the production team of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, but, he concluded,

They were never serious about what they were doing with me. They wanted to guide me through the vocals, so they were treating me like a novice.

Starr recut "War" in a rap version for Peter Stringfellow's Hippodrome label in 1993, and the song is now a standard with cover versions from Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Weller and, in 2002, Joan Osborne. Starr often toured the UK in Motown revival packages, most recently in Dancing in the Streets with Martha Reeves and Mary Wilson in 2000.

In 2003 he toured with Geno Washington and I was very impressed by his performance at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool. He had a well-rehearsed 12-piece band and he did some energetic versions of Motown classics such as "Reach Out, I'll Be There" and "Get Ready". My last impression is of him encouraging the whole audience to shout out, "War, what is it good for?", to which he added the uh and yeah and good god y'all.

Spencer Leigh