Hello, Clifton, and ‘Goodbye’

A MELODY REWRITE, A SONG FOR THE AGES

Next February, he will star in what’s thought to be American TV’s first black daytime soap opera in more than three decades, Beyond the Gates. In the 1980s, he was prominently featured in one of the all-time most successful black television sitcoms, Amen.

This son of a Baptist minister also performed on Broadway with the likes of Pearl Bailey (in Hello, Dolly!) and Dustin Hoffman. He has been nominated for Tony and Grammy awards, and was cast in Motown Productions’ first venture into dramatic television, Scott Joplin.

Oh, and he wrote one of Motown’s most-covered songs of the past 50 years.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Clifton Davis, the author of “Never Can Say Goodbye.” The Jackson 5 recording was a multi-format jewel in 1971, while Gloria Gaynor’s 1974 remake was a dance-floor dominator. A 1987 version by the Communards made a trip to the Top 5 of the British charts. And among the scores of others who have cut the song over the years are Johnny Mathis, Sheena Easton, Andy Williams, Herbie Mann, Donnie Elbert, Ray Conniff, Will Downing, the New Birth – and Isaac Hayes.

“Isaac was playing Carnegie Hall,” remembered Hal Davis, who produced the Jackson 5’s original. “He called me, and said ‘I just heard a tune that I gotta do.’ ” It was “Never Can Say Goodbye,” and he did. The result: a major R&B hit single and inclusion on Hayes’ Top 10 crossover album, Black Moses.

Clifton Davis (no relation to Hal) penned his first song in high school, but it wasn’t until after he began acting on Broadway, in his twenties, that he took up the craft seriously. “I started writing and I was looking for placement with a publisher,” he recalled in Legacy, Fred Bronson’s 2017 book with the Jacksons. Singer Tony Orlando initially helped Davis get his songs published, then his acquaintance with Gloria (“Heartbeat”) Jones connected him to Motown. “I got hold of the road manager of the Supremes, and through him, I met the Supremes.”

During a 1970 trip to Las Vegas, where the trio was performing, the songwriter played them a new piece of work, “Here Comes The Sunrise.” He explained, “They said, ‘If you can stick around until tomorrow, our producer will be coming to town, and you can play it for him.’ So I stayed, and Frank Wilson came to town the next day. I played it for him and he loved it.”

‘WHEN YOU GONNA CUT IT?’

Encouraged to take a meeting with Jobete Music, Davis was in the firm’s Los Angeles office, auditioning some of his songs, including “Never Can Say Goodbye,” when he encountered Hal Davis for the first time. “It’s an amazing thing about that particular tune,” Hal told me for The Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits, “because Clifton – who I ended up being very good friends with – was playing that when we were at 6464 Sunset. The office walls were very thin, and I was in a meeting [next door] with Jerry Marcellino.

“We could hear the keyboards, and Clifton was playing ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ for the guy [George Gordy] who was running Jobete at the time. I heard the melody, and it kept interrupting my ear, because the melody was a hit.” The producer walked into the adjacent office and spoke to the songwriter. “I said, ‘That’s a hit, can I cut it?’ He said, ‘Yeah, who’ve you got?’ And I said, ‘I’ll cut it on the Jackson 5 right away.’ He said, ‘When you gonna cut it?’ I said, ‘Tonight.’ ”

The song was a ballad when Hal Davis first heard it. “Yes,” he said, “I just put a little beat behind it because of Michael and the way he dances. I wanted to keep that little hip-hop thing he had going – they call it hip-hop now. I put in a little class with strings. Out of all the producers there, Berry said I was the only one who was able to take funk and put class with it with the strings, and keep that pulse. Which is why it went pop and R&B.”

*With Jonelle Allen in* The Two Gentlemen of Verona

It’s not clear whether the track and/or vocals were cut at Motown’s California studio or the facility which Hal Davis often favoured, the Sound Factory. “And then,” according to Clifton, “Berry [Gordy] asked me to do a melody rewrite on a little portion of it. So I rewrote the melody with Michael there, so he could learn the new part. They went back into the studio right away. Michael was young, but he was professional. His ear and pitch were amazing. He could take things and make them his own.”

Shortly before Motown released “Never Can Say Goodbye” as the Jackson 5’s sixth single in March 1971, Jobete Music announced Clifton as one of its new songwriter signings (others included Patti Dahlstrom and Severin Browne). The following year, he penned another substantial hit for the Jacksons, “Lookin’ Through The Windows,” as well as one more tune they cut, “Uppermost,” and “We Feel The Same” with the Miracles. The copyright which had connected Davis to Jobete in the first place, “Here Comes The Sunrise,” was recorded by the Supremes on their 1971 album, Touch.

Still, Davis had a competing career as an actor, and before the end of ’71, he was co-starring in a Broadway hit, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which netted him a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Musical. In the summer of 1972, he co-hosted a musical comedy series on CBS-TV with Melba Moore, and two years later, he starred in That’s My Mama, a sitcom set in a middle-class black neighbourhood in Washington, D.C.. Following that, Davis spent five years co-starring in NBC-TV’s Amen. More recently, he was in the political drama, Madam Secretary, from 2015-19, as well as episodes of high-finance drama, Billions.

During the 1974-75 run of That’s My Mama, this most versatile music maker started playing in nightclubs, including New York’s Reno Sweeney. “The main fault with Davis’ show,” grumbled Billboard in its June ’75 review, “was that much of it seemed forced as if he were an actor playing a nightclub singer.” But when performing “Never Can Say Goodbye” and “Lookin’ Through The Windows,” admitted the trade paper’s reviewer, he shone, “as he seemed relaxed doing his own material.”

And so to the full circle of Clifton Davis’ remarkable career, as he prepares for a return to a TV series about the life of a black family. When it comes to the world of acting, it appears that he never can say goodbye.

Music notes: for just a brief selection of “Never Can Say Goodbye” (and other) recordings, here’s the latest West Grand Blog playlist. Among the more obscure is a Motown-released instrumental by the Impact of Brass, which came out on Rare Earth shortly after the Jackson 5 original. Clifton Davis’ own version comes from his 2020 album of the same name. The song was Grammy-nominated in 1971, but lost out to Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine.”