Pearl Opens With Cry Baby and Closes With Get It While You Can — Both Written by the Same Man D

Pearl opens with Crybaby. Pearl closes with Get It While You Can. Both songs were written by the same man. Both were originally recorded by black soul singers that almost nobody remembers, and both are on the final album of Janis Joplin’s life, bookending it, the first track and the last track, the beginning and the end, the same songwriter’s fingerprints on the opening note and the closing one.

The man who wrote them is named Jerry Ragovoy. And this is the story of the song that closes Pearl, where it came from, who first recorded it, and what happened to that man in the decades that followed. Howard Tate was born in Elberton, Georgia, on August 13th, 1939. He moved to Philadelphia as a child. He sang in church. Gospel, the specific tradition that produces voices of a certain kind, voices that know how to hold an audience in a place between joy and grief simultaneously.

In his teens, he joined a gospel group that included Garnet Mimms. If that name sounds familiar, it should. Garnet Mimms was the original voice on Crybaby, the song that opens Pearl. He took it to number one on the R&B chart in 1963. Janis would make it her own 7 years later.

Garnet Mimms introduced Howard Tate to a producer named Jerry Ragovoy. And that introduction, that one connection, gospel singer to gospel singer, Philadelphia to Philadelphia, is the thread that runs under the entire architecture of Pearl. Jerry Ragovoy was one of the most gifted and under recognized songwriter producers of the soul era.

He wrote Piece of My Heart with Bert Berns, the song Erma Franklin recorded first, the song Janis transformed on Cheap Thrills. He wrote Crybaby with Bert Berns, the song Garnet Mimms recorded first, the song that opens Pearl, and he wrote Get It While You Can with Mort Shuman, the song Howard Tate recorded first, the song that closes Pearl.

Three of the most important songs on Pearl, one songwriter, three different original artists, none of them the name most people associate with the songs. Ragavoy kept giving Janis Joplin her greatest recordings without ever sitting down with her to write them. He wrote them for someone else years earlier, and she found them and made them hers.

Howard Tate recorded Get It While You Can in February 1967 for Verve Records. It was the title track of his debut album. The album had three R&B top 20 singles. Otis Redding heard it and called it the Bible of Soul. A young music journalist found a copy in a Woolworth’s cutout bin for 69 cents and became what he described as a charter member of the Howard Tate cult.

The album did not sell the way it deserved to. Howard Tate was a critical success and a commercial near miss. The music world was not ready or not paying attention or both. He kept recording, two more albums, more singles, more Ragavoy productions, and then in 1972, he simply stopped.

He disappeared from the music industry so completely that most of his fans eventually concluded he had died. He had not died. Something worse in some ways had happened. His daughter was killed in a house fire. He fell into addiction. He was homeless. The voice that Otis Redding had called part of the Bible of Soul was living on the streets of Philadelphia. He was gone.

In 1970, Janis Joplin chose Get It While You Can as the final track on Pearl. She did not choose it casually. You do not close your album with a the accidentally. The closing track is the last thing the listener hears. It is the final statement. It is what you leave them with.

She left them with “Grab it and hold it while you can. Don’t you let it slip away.” Let that land. The woman who had lived her entire public life on the principle of total expenditure, who gave everything every night, who held nothing back, who had no armor and no preservation, was closing her final album with a song that said, “Hold on to what you have. Don’t let it slip away.

” Whether she heard the irony, we don’t know. Whether the song was a warning to herself or a message to her audience or simply a great song that fit the moment, only she knew. But she chose it. She put it last. She made it the final word of Pearl. And 3 months after the album came out, posthumously in January 1971, the song that closes Pearl became one of the things she is remembered by.

Howard Tate, living somewhere on the streets of Philadelphia, did not know any of this. In early 2001, a disc jockey from Camden, New Jersey named Phil Kasden figured out where Howard Tate was. He found him. Howard Tate was 61 years old. He had been away from music for nearly 30 years. His voice was intact.

This is the specific miracle of the trained voice. It waits. It survives things that should destroy it. The three decades of absence, the addiction, the grief, the homelessness. When Howard Tate stepped back to a microphone in 2001, the voice was still there. He played his first date in many years in New Orleans that spring.

He began working with Jerry Ragovoy again, the producer and songwriter who had made the records that had made his name on a comeback album called Rediscovered, released in 2003. Among the tracks on Rediscovered, a new version of Get It While You Can, 36 years after the original. The first song on a comeback album named accurately Rediscovered, the original voice returning to the original song now also famous as the last track of Pearl.

Ragavoy and Tate back in a studio together recording the song that had closed one great singer’s final album while the original singer was still alive to hear it. Howard Tate died on December 2nd, 2011. He was 72 years old. He had his comeback. He made his final records. He played festivals and clubs.

He proved the voice had survived everything. He died knowing that his song, the one he had recorded for 69 cents at a Woolworth’s, had closed Pearl. That Otis Redding had called his album the Bible of Soul. That Jerry Ragavoy, his oldest collaborator, had brought him back. That the gospel training from Philadelphia had held.

The next time you play Pearl all the way through, listen to what closes it. Grab it. Hold it while you can. Don’t you let it slip away. The voice is Janis’s. The song is Howard Tate’s. The structure is Jerry Ragavoy’s. And the message, the message is for everyone who has ever held something good and felt it beginning to slip. She lived that song.

She closed her final album with it. She was gone 3 months before the album came out. She never let it go. It let go of her. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.