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| Which may or may not contain the bakery... |
The Hit
It’s a funky, strutting, table-turner of a number, “Mr. Big Stuff,” fun, satisfying and triumphant all at once. The backing vocals give it the feel of a pile-on, a dude living life at several pegs too high getting dragged back down to Earth by a woman who won't even start putting up with his shit - and in front of all her friends to boot. I like how the different sounds and instruments fit together in the song. The bass, the guitar, even the punchy horn parts, all pretty simple and short on their own, each of them almost the beginning of a thought, a bunch of “oh, this is just something I’m working on,” laced together in a fun little piece of pop. On the one hand, isn't that most of pop music? On the other, this one's basic in the best way.
Fun detail: “Mr. Big Stuff” started as a ballad…no, I can’t hear what that would have sounded like either. When the people who worked it up played her the demo, Jean Knight liked it but didn’t think it sounded quite right. In the words of the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame’s bio for Knight:
“She’d heard a tape of Mr. Big Stuff and she liked it, but it was a ballad and she wanted to liven it up. Joe Broussard, one of the co-writers of the song, told her to sing it the way she felt it. In the Malaco studios, she nailed the song on her second take.”
Knight had a smart ear, but a year would pass before the world learned about it. It wasn’t the first time she went back to her day job, nor would it be her last.
The Rest of the Story
New Orleans-born Jean Knight (born Jean Castile; she thought “Knight” would be easier to pronounce) rarely struggled to impress with her vocals. After hearing her sing at her cousin’s bar (“Laura’s Place”), several bands invited her to sing with them; people approached her about recording - and she did several times - but that’s where it ended more often than not.
In 1965, a producer named Huey Meaux trying to launch Barbara Lynn with “You’ll Lose a Good Thing,” either spotted or heard Knight. He picked her up and tried to shop a version of “Tain’t the Truth” (a cover of an Ernie K-Doe song), but couldn’t get the single to go anywhere outside the regional market. (She’d actually recorded at least once before, a demo/cover of Jackie Wilson’s “Stop Doggin’ Me Around,” which landed her a contract with the Jet Star/Tribe label…but, again, nothing she did broke out of the region.) With reality not lining up with her dreams, Knight hung up the microphone and picked up a job as a baker at Loyola University.
Another opportunity came her way in 1970, when a guy named Ralph Williams asked her to sing some songs he'd written. Williams connected her with a producer named Wardell Quezergue, who brought her in to record “Mr. Big Stuff,” and several other songs. Quezergue recorded an artist named King Floyd during the same sesson - the track was “Groove Me” - and he started pitching both songs to regional labels and outlets - including the legendary R&B/soul label, Stax Records. Failing to find any takers for either track, Quezergue set up a label of his own, Chimneyville Records, and decided to release King Floyd’s “Groove Me.” When that single became a regional hit, a staffer at Stax - Tim Whitsett, according to an AV Club article on Knight's lost career - remembered hearing “Mr. Big Stuff” in the same pitch and started pushing Stax to release it. No one else heard what Whitsett did (or Knight for that matter), but they made the decision to run it up the flagpole, figuring they could blame Whitsett if it flopped.
It did not flop. Released in 1971, it hit No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 2 on the pop chart and sold 3 million plus copies. Knight had engagements all over the country, up to and including singing “Mr. Big Stuff” on Soul Train’s 11th episode, and a Grammy nod that ended as runner-up to Aretha Franklin’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
The good times didn’t last nearly as long as they could have - and Quezergue played a role:
“Stax suggested some songs for her to record but Quezergue tossed them, insisting that she record songs his production company came up with. The dispute between Quezergue and Stax accelerated the end of her association with the record company by 1973, not that it mattered to her future finances. ‘Mr. Big Stuff is better to me now than thirty-one years ago,’ she said in a 2002 interview. ‘All I have to do is sit at home and wait for the mailman.’”
I decided to fast-forward to the happy ending, because Knight’s story continued in fits and starts for the remainder of her long, quieter career. After several years of working the “oldies circuit,” another producer, Isaac Bolden, called her in to sing “You Got the Papers, but I Got the Man” in 1981. She had another minor hit with a zydeco number called “My Toot Toot” in the mid-1980s (it cracked the Top 50 on the pop charts). She came back once more in the late 1990s with an album for some outfit called Ichiban called Shaki De Boo Tee. Whether work found Knight or vice versa, she continued to tour and perform all over the world, if mostly regionally. She never caught on the same way she did with “Mr. Big Stuff,” and there’s a bit of a punchline around that.
One reason the Stax people didn’t release it was because they heard it as a novelty song, i.e., a kitschy little fuck-around that didn’t fit with their usual material. In their write-up, the AV Club attached a lot more meaning to it. Observe:
“The song was only four years removed from Aretha Franklin’s groundbreaking version of “Respect” and released two months before the formation of the National Women’s Political Caucus, an organization founded by Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and a handful of other notable feminists focused on using political action for women’s rights. Only two years after its release, the Roe vs. Wade decision was passed. In its takedown of one man who treated women cruelly and callously, the song was also about the archetypal chauvinist, and to those supporting the Equal Rights Amendment, it must have felt like a rallying cry.”
I can’t call that true or false (c'mon, I was an infant), but I would argue that undersells the simpler explanation: “Mr. Big Stuff” is a smart, bopping little number and Knight fucking nailed the interpretation.
About the Sampler
Put it this way: I think Jean Knight deserved more career than she got. The mid-80s stuff falls painfully flat for me - represented on the sampler by “Lover Please,” “My Heart Is Willing (And My Body Is Too),” as well as the very late catalog, “Shaki De Boo Tee” - but the Stax era material (or what I take to be music from that era) has some songs that I liked enough to pull to the January 2021 playlist I’m in the process of wrapping up - e.g., “One-Way Ticket to Nowhere (It’s the End of the Line),” “Carry On,” “Tain’t the Truth” and, a song that I just learned snuck onto the Superbad soundtrack, “Do Me.” As proved by the rest of the sampler, those songs keep good company, including: “Please, Please,” “Take Him (You Can Have My Man),” “Your Six-Bit Change,” the sly kitsch of “I’m Evil Tonight,” and the torchy "Don't Break My Heart," and “A Tear,” a vulnerable counterpoint for “Mr. Big Stuff.”
Taken together, Jean Knight has a compilation’s worth of solid soul material at a minimum. Most of what Spotify serves falls into that category - which makes me think most of her best stuff came into the market as 45s - but it takes a little work to dodge the later (frankly over-produced) material. The fact they don’t organize it according to her discography makes it a little challenging to piece together what showed up on when, but I feel reasonably safe placing the stuff I like in the Stax era. Jean Knight did some strong work…
It’s a funky, strutting, table-turner of a number, “Mr. Big Stuff,” fun, satisfying and triumphant all at once. The backing vocals give it the feel of a pile-on, a dude living life at several pegs too high getting dragged back down to Earth by a woman who won't even start putting up with his shit - and in front of all her friends to boot. I like how the different sounds and instruments fit together in the song. The bass, the guitar, even the punchy horn parts, all pretty simple and short on their own, each of them almost the beginning of a thought, a bunch of “oh, this is just something I’m working on,” laced together in a fun little piece of pop. On the one hand, isn't that most of pop music? On the other, this one's basic in the best way.
Fun detail: “Mr. Big Stuff” started as a ballad…no, I can’t hear what that would have sounded like either. When the people who worked it up played her the demo, Jean Knight liked it but didn’t think it sounded quite right. In the words of the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame’s bio for Knight:
“She’d heard a tape of Mr. Big Stuff and she liked it, but it was a ballad and she wanted to liven it up. Joe Broussard, one of the co-writers of the song, told her to sing it the way she felt it. In the Malaco studios, she nailed the song on her second take.”
Knight had a smart ear, but a year would pass before the world learned about it. It wasn’t the first time she went back to her day job, nor would it be her last.
The Rest of the Story
New Orleans-born Jean Knight (born Jean Castile; she thought “Knight” would be easier to pronounce) rarely struggled to impress with her vocals. After hearing her sing at her cousin’s bar (“Laura’s Place”), several bands invited her to sing with them; people approached her about recording - and she did several times - but that’s where it ended more often than not.
In 1965, a producer named Huey Meaux trying to launch Barbara Lynn with “You’ll Lose a Good Thing,” either spotted or heard Knight. He picked her up and tried to shop a version of “Tain’t the Truth” (a cover of an Ernie K-Doe song), but couldn’t get the single to go anywhere outside the regional market. (She’d actually recorded at least once before, a demo/cover of Jackie Wilson’s “Stop Doggin’ Me Around,” which landed her a contract with the Jet Star/Tribe label…but, again, nothing she did broke out of the region.) With reality not lining up with her dreams, Knight hung up the microphone and picked up a job as a baker at Loyola University.
Another opportunity came her way in 1970, when a guy named Ralph Williams asked her to sing some songs he'd written. Williams connected her with a producer named Wardell Quezergue, who brought her in to record “Mr. Big Stuff,” and several other songs. Quezergue recorded an artist named King Floyd during the same sesson - the track was “Groove Me” - and he started pitching both songs to regional labels and outlets - including the legendary R&B/soul label, Stax Records. Failing to find any takers for either track, Quezergue set up a label of his own, Chimneyville Records, and decided to release King Floyd’s “Groove Me.” When that single became a regional hit, a staffer at Stax - Tim Whitsett, according to an AV Club article on Knight's lost career - remembered hearing “Mr. Big Stuff” in the same pitch and started pushing Stax to release it. No one else heard what Whitsett did (or Knight for that matter), but they made the decision to run it up the flagpole, figuring they could blame Whitsett if it flopped.
It did not flop. Released in 1971, it hit No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 2 on the pop chart and sold 3 million plus copies. Knight had engagements all over the country, up to and including singing “Mr. Big Stuff” on Soul Train’s 11th episode, and a Grammy nod that ended as runner-up to Aretha Franklin’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
The good times didn’t last nearly as long as they could have - and Quezergue played a role:
“Stax suggested some songs for her to record but Quezergue tossed them, insisting that she record songs his production company came up with. The dispute between Quezergue and Stax accelerated the end of her association with the record company by 1973, not that it mattered to her future finances. ‘Mr. Big Stuff is better to me now than thirty-one years ago,’ she said in a 2002 interview. ‘All I have to do is sit at home and wait for the mailman.’”
I decided to fast-forward to the happy ending, because Knight’s story continued in fits and starts for the remainder of her long, quieter career. After several years of working the “oldies circuit,” another producer, Isaac Bolden, called her in to sing “You Got the Papers, but I Got the Man” in 1981. She had another minor hit with a zydeco number called “My Toot Toot” in the mid-1980s (it cracked the Top 50 on the pop charts). She came back once more in the late 1990s with an album for some outfit called Ichiban called Shaki De Boo Tee. Whether work found Knight or vice versa, she continued to tour and perform all over the world, if mostly regionally. She never caught on the same way she did with “Mr. Big Stuff,” and there’s a bit of a punchline around that.
One reason the Stax people didn’t release it was because they heard it as a novelty song, i.e., a kitschy little fuck-around that didn’t fit with their usual material. In their write-up, the AV Club attached a lot more meaning to it. Observe:
“The song was only four years removed from Aretha Franklin’s groundbreaking version of “Respect” and released two months before the formation of the National Women’s Political Caucus, an organization founded by Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and a handful of other notable feminists focused on using political action for women’s rights. Only two years after its release, the Roe vs. Wade decision was passed. In its takedown of one man who treated women cruelly and callously, the song was also about the archetypal chauvinist, and to those supporting the Equal Rights Amendment, it must have felt like a rallying cry.”
I can’t call that true or false (c'mon, I was an infant), but I would argue that undersells the simpler explanation: “Mr. Big Stuff” is a smart, bopping little number and Knight fucking nailed the interpretation.
About the Sampler
Put it this way: I think Jean Knight deserved more career than she got. The mid-80s stuff falls painfully flat for me - represented on the sampler by “Lover Please,” “My Heart Is Willing (And My Body Is Too),” as well as the very late catalog, “Shaki De Boo Tee” - but the Stax era material (or what I take to be music from that era) has some songs that I liked enough to pull to the January 2021 playlist I’m in the process of wrapping up - e.g., “One-Way Ticket to Nowhere (It’s the End of the Line),” “Carry On,” “Tain’t the Truth” and, a song that I just learned snuck onto the Superbad soundtrack, “Do Me.” As proved by the rest of the sampler, those songs keep good company, including: “Please, Please,” “Take Him (You Can Have My Man),” “Your Six-Bit Change,” the sly kitsch of “I’m Evil Tonight,” and the torchy "Don't Break My Heart," and “A Tear,” a vulnerable counterpoint for “Mr. Big Stuff.”
Taken together, Jean Knight has a compilation’s worth of solid soul material at a minimum. Most of what Spotify serves falls into that category - which makes me think most of her best stuff came into the market as 45s - but it takes a little work to dodge the later (frankly over-produced) material. The fact they don’t organize it according to her discography makes it a little challenging to piece together what showed up on when, but I feel reasonably safe placing the stuff I like in the Stax era. Jean Knight did some strong work…
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