Paulette McWilliams. Credit: Steve Krakow for Chicago Reader
Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
Soul singer Paulette McWilliams has reached amazing heights, performing with a long list of greats. You’ve almost certainly heard her voice on someone else’s huge radio hit. But do you recognize her name? Maybe you know her as a footnote in the biography of Chaka Khan, the soon-to-be-famous friend she recruited to replace her in the band Ask Rufus. But McWilliams deserves to have her own story told, so the Secret History of Chicago Music is taking a swing at summing up her star-studded career—which is still unfolding today.
McWilliams was born Paulette Johnson on the south side of Chicago on December 10, 1948. She grew up around 60th and Peoria, absorbing jazz, R&B, and gospel from hearing her mother singing along to the radio. The young McWilliams would often get a bit of spending money from her uncles by performing at holiday gatherings.
In the 60s, McWilliams gravitated toward the sounds of Motown and the British Invasion, and she formed Paulette & the Cupids with friends at Loretto Academy in Woodlawn, inspired by the likes of the Marvelettes and the Shirelles. The group worked with manager Don Talty, whose clients also included guitarist Phil Upchurch—and Upchurch’s friendship with McWilliams would later prove critical to her career.
In 1965, the Cupids released their only 45, “Teenage Dropout” b/w “He’ll Wait on Me,” on the Prism label from Dayton, Ohio. Both sides feature impeccable harmonies and McWilliams’s honey-sweet lead vocal, but “Teenage Dropout” stands out. The tune got local airplay (DJ Herb Kent spun it on WVON), and in 2018 the Numero Group included it on the compilation Basement Beehive: The Girl Group Underground.
The most popular song by Paulette McWilliams’s teenage group, Paulette & the Cupids
For her senior year, McWilliams switched to Harlan High School in Roseland. After graduation she got a job with a phone company, and at 19 she married (the source of the McWilliams name). The couple split within a year, while she was pregnant with her only child, so she moved in with her mother. By then McWilliams had a better-paying position at the post office, but her income wasn’t enough to afford her much independence. She hoped she could do better by making music.
Upchurch put her in touch with the American Breed, who were looking for a singer. The famed bubblegum-garage band had scored hits with “Step Out of Your Mind” (in 1967) and “Bend Me, Shape Me” (in 1968), but pop culture changed fast back then too—in 1969, they decided to take a new, more soulful direction.
“I think they wanted two black girls,” McWilliams told PopMatters in a 2014 interview. “There were about 100-something of us all down in Chuck Colbert’s basement! Chuck was one of the founding members of the American Breed. Light-skinned black guy with a handlebar mustache. I sang ‘Fascinating Rhythm,’ which I heard Morgana King sing, and won that audition!”
The band adopted a dance-friendly sound, hoping to compete with another famous integrated group, Sly & the Family Stone. They gigged all over the eastern half of the country, and while McWilliams was on the road, her parents were happy to watch her baby daughter. “They saw the kind of money I was making,” she said. “In one weekend I’d make $500 or $600. They thought, there’s no job that’s going to pay her like this. The post office didn’t pay like this!”
For about three weeks, they called themselves Smoke, until they discovered another band with that name. At that point, their lineup consisted of McWilliams, keyboardist Kevin Murphy, two members of the American Breed (bassist Colbert and drummer Lee Graziano), and two members of the band Circus (vocalist Jim Stella and guitarist Vern Pilder).
In 1970, the band took the name Ask Rufus, borrowing it from an advice column in Mechanix Illustrated magazine. American Breed guitarist Al Ciner replaced Pilder, and bassist Willie Weeks came aboard. “We did some of the songs that they had been doing as the American Breed, but we tried to hip them up a little bit,” McWilliams told PopMatters. “Charles Colbert, myself, and Jimmy Stella were the three front-people. We were doing stuff like ‘We Can Work It Out’ but funkier.”
Ask Rufus recorded this newly remastered version of “Read All About It” for their never-released Epic album.
The band packed Chicago clubs, drawing crowds that included luminaries such as Odetta, Baby Huey & the Babysitters, and the 5th Dimension. With this lineup, Ask Rufus released just one single, the gospel-flavored “Brand New Day” (written by Al Kooper) backed with the soulfully psychedelic “Read All About It,” which came out on Epic in 1971. An album allegedly rejected by the label at around the same time now lives on YouTube (among other places), and it’s a solid mix of groovy sitar pop, smoky funk rock, and soulful hymns (including a blowout version of “I Wanna Testify” by pre-Funkadelic band the Parliaments).
By 1972, Ask Rufus had become a dramatically different band: Weeks was replaced by Dennis Belfield, Graziano by Andre Fischer, and Stella by keyboardist-vocalist Ron Stockert. Colbert was also gone. McWilliams wanted to spend more time with her daughter, and she decided to leave as well. In the process, she kick-started the mainstream career of her friend Chaka Khan.
McWilliams had remarried when her daughter was three, and she and Khan met through their husbands. McWilliams suggested that Khan take her spot in Ask Rufus, and even though Khan had already replaced Baby Huey in the Babysitters after he died in 1970, her bandmates resisted at first. McWilliams stayed aboard to manage the transition, though, teaching Khan the songs and performing onstage with her. The band changed their name to Rufus, and the rest is history—they had their first smash hit with “Tell Me Something Good,” written by Stevie Wonder, which appeared on their 1974 sophomore album, Rags to Rufus.
For a while McWilliams mostly did advertising jingle work, which let her make good money without taking her on the road and away from her daughter. Within a couple years, though, Upchurch once again hooked her up. He and McWilliams recorded a song by her friends Donny Hathaway and Tennyson Stephens (an enigmatic pianist I’d love to learn more about), and Upchurch sent it to the late, great Quincy Jones in Los Angeles.
Jones invited McWilliams to sing lead on the tour supporting his 1974 LP Body Heat. For his ’75 platter, Mellow Madness, she cowrote the title track and recorded vocals alongside the likes of Minnie Riperton and Leon Ware. At a concert in Tokyo, Jones surprised her with the chance to sing a duet with her idol Sarah Vaughan.
Paulette McWilliams’s first solo album, released in 1977, was also her only solo album till 2007.
In 1977, the same year she relocated to Los Angeles, McWilliams put out her first solo album, Never Been Here Before. The glossy, expressive LP includes tunes written by Ciner and his former American Breed bandmate Gary Loizzo, and it balances the delicate title track against the thumpin’ disco of “Chump Change.” Sadly, it didn’t sell well, and it’d be her last record under her own name for 30 years. “I had people that believed in me,” McWilliams said, “but unfortunately I didn’t have the people that had the money.”
Paulette McWilliams is one of the backing vocalists on Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.”
In the meantime, McWilliams did a lot of amazing work under other people’s names. She sang with Bette Midler, Johnny Mathis, Aretha Franklin, Luther Vandross (from 1982 till the early 2000s), Marvin Gaye (on his final tour in 1983), and many others. You can hear her on radio fare as diverse as Billy Idol’s “Mony Mony” and David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire).” Perhaps most famously, Quincy Jones invited her to work with Michael Jackson—her voice is one of several on the hit “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” from his 1979 album Off the Wall (where she appears on several tracks, credited or otherwise).
Paulette McWilliams and Ivan Hampden wrote and produced everything on her latest album.
McWilliams moved to New York in 1986, then returned to California 20 years later. In the aughts, she sang live or in the studio with the likes of Mary J. Blige, Celine Dion, and Steely Dan. She released a Japanese-distributed album called Flow in 2007, followed in 2012 by Telling Stories, where she covers “Ode to Billie Joe” and duets with Bobby Caldwell. If anything, she’s picking up the pace of her solo output—A Woman’s Story came out in 2020, and last year she released These Are the Sweet Things.
McWilliams has been making music professionally for six decades. “I never knew anything else. It was my only focus all my life,” she said. “I really do feel my soul lifted every time I sing.” And she can lift your soul too. “When you make people feel something, I don’t care what genre you’re singing, then you’ve done something.”
