Jimmy Scott Escapes The Shelf

Jimmy Scott’s Falling in Love is Wonderful is perhaps the most riveting of these tales in the vocal jazz genre. A rare vocal talent — a genetic condition meant his voice never fully matured, rendering him a natural contralto, a vocal register that used to inspire people to mutilation to achieve — Scott was the first artist signed to Ray Charles’ own label, Tangerine Records, at a time when Ray was cashing in on the goodwill he’d accrued from dominating popular music. Ray played on Scott’s first and only album for Tangerine, producing it himself, while letting Scott pick all of his own songs, a rarity in those days for artists not on Ray’s own level. The result was Falling in Love is Wonderful, an album whose title speaks for itself, a song cycle devoted to love and all its feelings, failings, and foibles. It seemed as though Scott were poised for greatness; a Ray Charles cosign in those days was like being blessed by the almighty, and lush orchestral arrangements like those found on the record were still en vogue, not yet replaced by the Motown machine of soul music. However, it was not to be.

The album was released in 1963, but pulled shortly thereafter. The disappearing act was prompted by the litigious founder of Savoy Records, Herman Lubinsky, who had signed a younger, more vulnerable Scott to an ironclad record contract that meant he was more or less owned by Savoy in perpetuity. Despite Scott’s signature on the contract, his Savoy recordings largely went under-promoted or unreleased, as the label struggled to turn him into the male Billie Holiday they’d hoped for. Savoy’s seeming disinterest gave Scott the impression that he was in the clear to jump to Charles’ ship. Lubinsky disagreed, and Falling in Love is Wonderful was pulled from shelves, where it remained unissued for more than 40 years, its existence a rumor, its appearance in record stores an apparition. Its myth grew, and, until a CD reissue in the early ’00s, so did its reputation. Scott’s music career more or less ended after the album was pulled (the singer tried again to make a record for Atlantic in the late ’60s, and that, too, was effectively buried under litigation from Lubinsky), and he instead found work as a hospital orderly to make ends meet. It was a crime that Scott never got the chance to seize on his major debut then, and its egregiousness was only made more apparent when the album was finally made widely available.

Jimmy Scott’s musical career started in earnest more than 15 years before Falling in Love is Wonderful, when he was discovered by Lionel Hampton, who had drafted Scott to be part of his big band. In 1950, when “Little” Jimmy Scott was 25 (at the time, he was only 4’11” thanks to Kallmann syndrome, which gave him his high voice) he sang lead vocals on “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” a massive hit for Hampton on which Scott had no credits at all; he was simply listed as “And vocalists.” Throughout the 1950s, Scott bounced around bands and performances before signing with Savoy. None of his singles had the kind of power that “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” did, and Savoy didn’t seem to know what to do with him: His high, soaring register wasn’t ready-made for upbeat songs, and emotional, heart-on-sleeve jazz wasn’t exactly selling millions. Savoy rented him out to King Records, and Scott made his living by touring and singing with groups that would have him.

At some point, Ray Charles heard Scott and quickly considered him his favorite singer. It isn’t hard to understand what Ray appreciated about Scott: He saw a fellow iconoclast with a unique take on Black music, doing his own thing. Ray’s approach to letting Scott record Falling in Love is Wonderful was laid-back and hands-off: He let Scott pick every song, and it’s Scott, functionally the album’s uncredited producer and A&R man, who made the song cycle work. Charles lent twinkling keys to the proceedings, providing subtle, unobtrusive accompaniment to Scott, though the overall instrumentation leans heavily on big band orchestral arrangements provided by ringers Gerald Wilson and Marty Paich. Scott knew what he wanted to do from the moment he hit the studio.

“My concept was romance. Make a romantic record you could listen to late at night with your lady,” Scott told writer David Ritz in the early ’00s. “I wanted the kind of record you could play over and over again, where you wouldn’t be bored and the mood stayed steady.”

If nothing else, he accomplished that; on Falling in Love is Wonderful, Scott plumbs the Irving Berlin and Gershwin songbooks to deliver an album you could just as well cry or copulate to. It’s a showcase for Scott’s high range — like watching a tightrope walker cross back and forth between two towers, a show that can’t help being marveled at by passersby. Hear him whisper before flowering out into that upper register on “How Deep is the Ocean”; gawk at the tender “There is No Greater Love”; ooh at the raw “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So”; and clap at the climactic “Sunday, Monday or Always.” This is elite fireplace music, an album meant to be played above an animal skin rug in an Eartha Kitt movie. It is, without a doubt, Scott’s crowning achievement, the album only he could make.

The album lasted very briefly on shelves before the aforementioned lawsuit meant it was closed up, under lock and key, in Charles’ vaults. These days, if you can even find one, an original copy might set you back by three figures; reissues of various degrees of legality and quality some amount under that. All the while, the album remains elusive on streaming services.

The conventional story — that Falling in Love is Wonderful would have made Jimmy Scott a household name, if only it had not been recalled — calcified in the early ’90s, when the singer enjoyed a reemergence thanks to a spellbinding performance in the final episode of the original run of Twin Peaks. But even with the benefit of hindsight, the album’s mythic status tends to crowd out its real substance: It’s difficult to imagine the album ever shooting Scott to the level of popularity that Ray Charles enjoyed. Falling in Love is Wonderful was too tender for the world, too soft for the mainstream, too well-considered for the pop charts. A unique, distinct talent, with a voice like a bird, singing the tenderest of love songs over swelling orchestral backing was never going to crack the Top 10 in 1963. But in 2024, it can stand rightly as the crowning achievement of a forgotten singer, 60 years too late.