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The Skip Scarborough Songbook

Thirteen songs by one writer. If you know soul music at all, you know at least eight of them — and you probably have never said his name aloud.

One of the finest R&B songwriters who will always be remembered through his timeless hits.

Skip Scarborough (1944–2003)

Clarence "Skip" Scarborough wrote or co-wrote a startling number of the ballads that define seventies and eighties soul, and he did it as a working songwriter rather than a star. He died in 2003, and his name still means almost nothing to general listeners while the songs remain in constant rotation.

What is most striking about his catalogue is its consistency of temperature. Scarborough wrote warm songs — not sentimental, not showy, but generous. The melodies sit comfortably in the middle of a singer's range, the chord movements are richer than they first appear, and there is almost always a turn in the bridge that lifts the whole thing.

What to listen for

Bill Withers' "Lovely Day" is the one everyone knows, and the co-write with Withers produced that extraordinary sustained note at the end — a piece of singing so famous that people forget somebody had to write the song underneath it.

L.T.D.'s "Love Ballad" is arguably his finest, and it comes twice in the culture: once with Jeffrey Osborne's original lead, and again when George Benson took it back into the charts.

"You Can't Hide Love", here as Earth, Wind & Fire's version, was first cut by Creative Source; EW&F made it permanent.

The Emotions' "Don't Ask My Neighbors" is the connoisseur's pick — a lyric about keeping a private grief private, set to one of the prettiest melodies of the decade.

Anita Baker's "Giving You the Best That I Got" is the late peak, and it won its Grammys for good reason.

Earth, Wind & Fire's "Love's Holiday", Phyllis Hyman's "The Answer Is You" and Patti LaBelle's "Come What May" fill out the picture, and Donald Byrd's "Places And Spaces" is the instrumental left turn.

Go deeper

Play "Love Ballad" and "Giving You the Best That I Got" back to back — eleven years apart, and unmistakably the same writer's hand.

For the songwriter's-catalogue approach generally, the same exercise works beautifully with Linda Creed, Thom Bell, Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson and Leon Ware. Following a writer rather than a performer rearranges how the whole era sounds.

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