Garnet Mimms Recorded Cry Baby in 1963 and Took It to Number One D

Most people who know Cry Baby, know Janis Joplin’s version. The ragged blues rock voice, the full tilt boogie band, the specific pain of the Pearl recording. They know it from the radio, from the album, from the way it hits. What most people don’t know is that in 1963, 7 years before Janis recorded it, a gospel singer named Garnet Mimms took the same song to number one and almost no one remembers.

This is the story of Cry Baby, both versions, and the man who wrote it, who never heard either one of Janis Joplin’s greatest recordings because he was already gone. Garnet Mimms grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, the son of a preacher. He learned to sing in church. That is where the tradition came from, the specific gospel power, the call and response, the voice that carries the congregation somewhere it could not get to alone.

He sang in the church before he sang anywhere else. And when he moved to Philadelphia and started singing secular music, he brought the church with him. This is the specific thing about Garnet Mimms that matters for this story. His voice was a gospel voice applied to soul music.

The sacred and the secular sharing the same throat. The fire and brimstone ecstasies of the black sanctified church, as one music historian described it, coming through a song about heartbreak. In 1963, songwriter and producer Jerry Ragavoy brought Mimms into the studio with Bert Berns. Berns and Ragavoy were one of the most potent songwriting partnerships of the era.

Together they had a gift for the song that sits exactly at the intersection of gospel and blues and pop. The song that feels like church and heartbreak at the same time. Their instinct was for the specific emotional note that could carry a voice like Garnet Mimms’s to the furthest possible reach. They had written a song called Cry Baby.

They brought Mimms into the studio and put him in front of a microphone. Behind him, providing backing vocals, Houston and The Sweet Inspirations. Houston, who would later become known as Whitney Houston’s mother, was one of the great backing vocalists of the era. The Sweet Inspirations backed everyone who mattered, and here they were behind Garnet Mimms on a Tuesday in 1963 singing Cry Baby.

When the session was done, what they had was something that one music historian called the first shots in the soul music revolution. The song went to number one on the R&B chart. Number four on the Billboard pop chart. Garnet Mimms had his moment, and Janis Joplin, 20 years old in Port Arthur, Texas, heard it on the radio.

Now, I need to tell you about Bert Berns because he is the invisible thread running through two of Janis Joplin’s most important recordings. Bert Berns wrote Cry Baby with Jerry Ragovoy in 1963, the song Garnet Mimms took to number one. Bert Berns also wrote Piece of My Heart with Jerry Ragovoy in 1967, the song Irma Franklin recorded first before Janis transformed it on Cheap Thrills.

Two songs, the same songwriting team, both recorded first by black artists who never got the recognition they deserved. Both later transformed by Janis Joplin into something that the world came to think of as hers. Bert Berns died on December 35th, 1967. He was 38 years old. He did not live to hear Janis Joplin record Piece of My Heart.

He did not live to hear her record Cry Baby. The songwriter who gave her two of her greatest recordings never knew she was going to make them. He wrote the songs. She found them. He was gone before the finding happened. That is the specific cruelty of timing that this story keeps returning to. Janis had been performing Cry Baby in her live sets for years before she recorded it for Pearl.

The song had been in her repertoire since the late ’60s. One of the songs she came back to. One of the songs that fit the specific space in her voice where pain and power were the same thing. When she took it into Sunset Sound in 1970 for the Pearl sessions, she had been living with the song for years.

What she did to it was what she always did. She did not cover it. She claimed it. The Garnet Mimms original is a gospel production. The church underneath every note. Cissy Houston lifting the song toward something sacred. It is beautiful. It is specific. It belongs to the tradition that made it.

Janis’s version is blues rock. Rawer. More personal. The Full Tilt Boogie Band beneath her, Paul Rothchild producing, and her voice. The voice that had been built from Port Arthur to San Francisco to Monterey to here. Applying itself to the same structure and producing something completely different. Both versions are true. They just tell different truths.

Mimms’s version says, “Here is the shape of a wound presented with the beauty and the order of the church.” Joplin’s version says, “Here is the wound itself. Unbeautified. Unordered. Here.” Pearl was released in January 1971, 3 months after Janis Joplin’s death. Cry Baby was released as a single with Mercedes Benz as the B-side, and spent 6 weeks on the charts.

The song that Garnet Mimms had taken to number one in 1963 re-entered the cultural consciousness in a different form, under a different name. His gospel soul version and her blues rock version, the same architecture, entirely different rooms. And slowly, over the years and decades that followed, the association shifted.

When people heard Cry Baby, they heard her, not him. Garnet Mimms is still with us. He has given interviews over the years. He has been asked about Cry Baby. He has been gracious about it. The kind of grace that comes from someone who has been in the music long enough to understand that this is how it goes.

Songs travel. Voices carry them. The original is not always the one that lasts. He put Cry Baby to number one in 1963, backed by Houston and the Sweet Inspirations, in a production that one music historian said fired the first shots in the soul music revolution. That was real. That happened. That matters.

And Janis Joplin heard it on a Texas radio in 1963 and carried it inside her for 7 years until she stood in a Hollywood recording studio in 1970 and made it bleed in a different way. That was also real. That also happened. That also matters. The specific thing about Janis Joplin and the songs she covered is that she never diluted them.

She took the songs that came from the black gospel and soul tradition, the tradition she had been absorbing since Port Arthur, the music she had learned from records in her bedroom in bars and the radio coming through Texas windows, and she did not whitewash them. She did not sand the edges. She did not make them more comfortable for a white rock audience. She went deeper.

The specific rawness of her Cry Baby, the specific absence of the gospel order that makes Mimms’s version so controlled and so beautiful. It is not a failure to honor the tradition. It is a different answer to the same question. What does it sound like when the wound is completely unmanaged? When there is no church to hold it in shape? When it is just the pain directly? Garnet Mimms gave us one answer.

Janis Joplin gave us another. The song was big enough for both. Bert Berns wrote the structure. Garnet Mimms showed it was a hit. Cissy Houston lifted it toward the sacred and Janis Joplin took it somewhere else entirely. The man who wrote it never heard her. The man who first recorded it has watched his version fade from memory while hers remains.

And the woman who recorded the version that lasted died at 27, 3 months before the recording was released. All of them inside one song, Cry Baby. The Garnet Mimms original is worth your time. Put it on after you hear hers. Hear what he built. Hear what she did with it. Hear Bert Berns’ structure holding them both.

Two versions, one truth, all of it worth remembering. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.