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Look, I wasn’t there (or even alive), but I heard about the performance. Who am I kidding — we all heard about the performance. The news traveled the back channels of Black America like wildfire, igniting curiosity and excitement and turning a group of boys from Harlem into legends, seemingly overnight. When we finally saw it, I think we all agreed that The Five Heartbeats were (and still are) one of the greatest singing groups of all time whose only real competition were The Jackson 5 and The Temptations. The lineup of Donald “Duck” Matthews, J.T. Matthews, Anthony “Choirboy/Rock” Stone, Terrence “Dresser” Williams and Eddie King, Jr. rival any lineup of any group ever and they proved it, one night in New York City.
Any singing group worth their salt can sing a cappella. That’s what it’s all about really, the voices. But being able to sing and being able to control a room with your voice and then turning misfortune into gold is a whole different talent, but that’s exactly what happened. In one night, The Five Heartbeats almost lost it all because of haters but, in the end, gained the world.
So, boom. The Five Heartbeats were doing a showcase in New York City. It was one of those talent showcases in the early 1960s where record label heads and people looking to break the next big group were in the building. I don’t know if Berry Gordy was there, but I don’t know for certain that he wasn’t there. Rumor has it that he wanted to sign The Five Heartbeats to Motown, but Smokey wasn’t feeling the competition with Duck as a songwriter and told Berry that the group was going to hang at a different restaurant after the showcase. Berry (allegedly) went to the wrong place and ended up in New Jersey, and The Five Heartbeats ended up on a rival label, Big Red Records, owned by Big Red Davis. But, it’s all just rumor, nobody has been able to verify this story and Berry has never spoken publicly about it, so let’s just move on.
Bird and The Midnight Falcons went first, and they tore the house down in their white outfits with their song, “Baby Stop Running Around.” Bird, a rising star in the soul music game, put on a show that night. He would eventually run afoul of Big Red Davis, who hung him out of a window. The story about Big Red’s office hours made it into court documents during the murder trial of The Five Heartbeats’ manager, Jimmy Potter, and in a bit of oddball historical chicanery, would set the actual parameters for standard working hours— 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Dolly Parton would later (allegedly) say in an interview that her famous song “9 to 5” was an ode to Jimmy Potter and Bird, though there’s no video proof from this interview.
Bird and The Midnight Falcons killed their set, and the crowd was loving it. Somehow, as the story goes, behind, The Five Heartbeats were told that Duck, the songwriter, piano man and musical director, couldn’t play the piano — the house piano player, whom they’d never met, would play off of sheet music. AND THEN, the MC for the evening went up on stage and told the crowd that The Five Heartbeats think they’re better than Bird and The Midnight Falcons AND The Temptations. The crowd wasn’t feeling that … at all.
As you can imagine, The Five Heartbeats’ set started out horrible. The piano player was jacking up their music, and the crowd was booing from jump. They even threw things on stage. But then something happened. Duck, frustrated and annoyed by the pacing and the outright mangling of his music, went and pushed the piano player off the keys and dove into gospel mode. Eddie King Jr. understood the assignment, grabbed the microphone and let that crowd know who he was with a long, guttural “oooooooooooooooooooooooh” that changed the direction of Black music history. When Eddie and Duck got to work, the fellas knew what time it was. They jumped off the stage and hit an a cappella version of “A Heart is a House For Love ” that still, to this day, is untouchable.
Every time I watch the video of this amazing showcase performance, I cry. When Eddie sings “Is there a heart in the house tonight, STAND UP … LET ME KNOW THAT YOU UNDERSTAND,” the ancestors all smiled down upon us all. Women passed out in the stands. Other singers couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The only performances that even came close to rivaling the magnificence of that night in New York City were Randy Watson and Sexual Chocolate’s performance of “The Greatest Love of All” in 1987, Michael Jackson’s moonwalk at the “Motown 25 Celebration” in 1984 and Whitney Houston’s Super Bowl performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
After that performance, The Five Heartbeats followed along in their trajectory as one of the greatest groups of all time. They changed the course of Black music, sound and the ’60s and ’70s. The ripples of their magic exist today, and it all stems from one of the greatest performances of all time. The Five Heartbeats changed my life that night, and I am better for it.
They showed me and you, your mama and your cousin, too, that a heart is, indeed, a house for love.
Panama Jackson is a columnist at theGrio. He writes very Black things, drinks very brown liquors, and is pretty fly for a light guy. His biggest accomplishment to date coincides with his Blackest accomplishment to date in that he received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey after she read one of his pieces (biggest), but he didn’t answer the phone because the caller ID said: “Unknown” (Blackest).
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