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The Hit
You know what’s on the second you hear the horns, but Cheryl Lynn’s “Got to Be Real” coasts into nice bubbling funk bass, warm pulses of electric piano and a beat so simple that the most two-footed dancer couldn’t lose from there. The bass gets a top-end through the bridge/chorus. If you listen to the extended version (as opposed to the radio edit), you get a long swinging bop passage with a treble piano part and a rising horn progression dancing over it.
Recorded in 1978, it has to rank near the top of the most famous songs of the disco era. For all that, it didn’t show up in nearly as many movie soundtracks as you’d expect - 1990s Paris Is Burning is the only one mentioned in Wikipedia’s entry for it - though Mary J. Blige and Will Smith covered it for 2004’s Shark Tale.
Lynn co-wrote it with a guy named David Foster and the Marty and David Paich songwriting team - the latter went on to become the keyboardist for Toto - and it launched her career. The original recording featured at least one more name/reference I knew besides Paich - Ray Parker, Jr. played guitar on it (to finish the thought, David Shields played bass and James Gadson hit the skins) - and Lynn would work with famous names throughout her fairly robust career.
With the single to carry it, Lynn’s eponymous debut album hit one million copies sold in a blink and topped out at No. 5 on the Billboard album charts. The single only reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, but went all the way to No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B charts - another touchstone in her career. As noted in a glowing retrospective of her anthology on a site called The Second Disc, another single from her debut, “Star Love,” charted at No. 16 - a fact that, for me, rescues her from the (alleged) stain of being a one-hit wonder; count the R&B charts (and why wouldn’t you?), and she’s not even close.
Lynn’s smash has a hell of a legacy, as a guy named DJ Prince Language explains in his notes on Paris is Burning:
“The music that animates the movements of the dancers in the film, especially the lyrics, provides a subversive and sometimes even shady commentary on the politics and aesthetics of drag and ball culture. The use of Cheryl Lynn's 'Got To Be Real' is the ultimate example of this, brilliantly touching on drag's invocations of and insistence on 'realness,' and the film shows how balls and dancers ultimately question the very notion of what is 'real' in the context of identity, and how we each create and construct our own 'real' selves.”
Or, to borrow a tribute from The Second Disc:
“’Got To Be Real’ was more than a smash hit. It was a philosophical credo that guided Lynn through her entire, decades-long career.”
The Rest of the Story
Despite being born in a fame-factory like Los Angeles (in 1957), joining the cast of The Wiz and eventually landing the role of Evillene, Wicked Witch of the West for its six-month national tour, and appearing on The Gong Show, Lynda Cheryl Smith, aka, Cheryl Lynn, told Classicbands, in the shortest interview I’ve ever seen on that site, that she never planned on a career in music. Like a lot of black performers who went on to music careers, she sang in her church choir, but her mother stressed the importance of education and Lynn took her advice, majoring in speech pathology at USC until the siren song of the labels broke her…apparent resistance.
That Gong Show appearance came before her stint with The Wiz, but that singular moment, 1) almost certainly counts as her big break and 2) has some fun stories attached to it. For instance, an urban legend claims that she scored the only perfect 30 in Gong Show history with her rendition of Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful” - and Classicbands repeats it - but her Wikipedia page cites a “recently-posted clip on Youtube” that shows that the esteemed judges (Della Reese, Avery Schreiber and Jamie Farr) gave her a combined score of 21. That gave her the same score of an unnamed singing juggler, which set up a tie-breaker decided by the volume of audience applause. The singing juggler won that battle, but Lynn won the war. She perhaps received the greatest accolade of her career when Gong Show host Chuck Barris commented, “Of the 4,000 acts I’ve seen, she’s the all-time great.”
A bunch of labels courted her, but Columbia Records walked away with the prize. And, after the success of her debut, they had every reason to celebrate. When Lynn returned to the studio for her follow-up, 1979’s In Love, she reconnected with Judy Wieder and John Footman, the same songwriting team that delivered “Star Love.” That album didn’t do nearly as well, but, according to Wikipedia, “I’ve Got Just What You Need” became “a moderate hit on the R&B charts” while another single, “Keep It Hot” became “a club hit.” Her connection to the Paichs gave her the opportunity to sing backing vocals on the newly-formed Toto’s first album; with her in the studio, Toto scored their lone hit on the R&B charts with “Georgy Porgy.”
Ray Parker, Jr. produced her third album, In the Night (1981) - which featured the “major R&B single “Shake It Up Tonight” - then Luther Vandross produced her fourth, Instant Love (1982)…which didn’t appear to go anywhere important, but it did include a duet with Vandross, a cover of the Marvin Gaye and Tami Terrell song, “If This World Were Mine.” Lynn self-produced “most of” her fifth album, 1983’s Preppie - and she really struts her genre-busting flexibility on the title track - which featured another No. 1 on the R&B charts with “Encore” (great damn video, fwiw).
She recorded one more album with Columbia, 1985’s It’s Gonna Be Right, but I can’t stress the insanity of calling Cheryl Lynn a “one-hit wonder” enough when Instant Love reached No. 7 on the R&B charts and Preppie landed at No. 8. She had one hell of a career for someone who didn’t want to get into the business, and surely achieved her goal of being, as she told Classicbands, “a successful, independent woman” who “didn’t want to be dependent on [her] husband.” Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if the royalties on “Got to Be Real” alone don’t beat her never-named (and maybe non-existent) husband’s annual earnings.
Lynn continued working after the prime of her career, a lot of it session work (e.g., with Richard Marx in the 1990s), but she kept performing the odd major event (e.g., Sinbad’s Summer Soul Jam 4 in 1998). She fits the working musician/vocalist profile, basically, and by virtue of having the pipes/talent to pull it off; before gushing about everything else, The Second Disc praised her “impressive range that reached up from alto into the rare whistle range.” Even her 1995 album, Good Time featured a “nightclub favorite” with “Guarantee for My Heart.”
About the Sampler
I went with a 14-song sampler, mostly because I wanted to give people a fuller taste of what The Second Disc raved about. Even if they (or just the author of that post) likes what Cheryl Lynn did more than I ever will, they’re not at all wrong about her comfort singing just about anything. I already linked to a handful of the 14 above, so, to cover the rest:
Cheryl Lynn has her share of slow-jams (I just don’t like those as much), which I repped on the sampler with “Hurry Home” and “With Love on Our Side.” “I’ve Got Faith in You” brings back the funk, if with 80s production, a sound “Fix It” puts even further in the forefront. “Baby” dips back into funk (based on my limited listening, I’d call that her strongest funk number), while “All My Lovin’” has some solid funk riffs in the chorus. Finally, Lynn and/or Wieder/Footman opens “Don’t Let It Fade Away” with some lovely classical strings.
Genre-wise, Cheryl Lynn’s won’t be for everybody. But she unquestionably had talent, drive, smarts, and she found an audience again and again over the better half of a decade. So, yeah, one-hit wonder my ass.
You know what’s on the second you hear the horns, but Cheryl Lynn’s “Got to Be Real” coasts into nice bubbling funk bass, warm pulses of electric piano and a beat so simple that the most two-footed dancer couldn’t lose from there. The bass gets a top-end through the bridge/chorus. If you listen to the extended version (as opposed to the radio edit), you get a long swinging bop passage with a treble piano part and a rising horn progression dancing over it.
Recorded in 1978, it has to rank near the top of the most famous songs of the disco era. For all that, it didn’t show up in nearly as many movie soundtracks as you’d expect - 1990s Paris Is Burning is the only one mentioned in Wikipedia’s entry for it - though Mary J. Blige and Will Smith covered it for 2004’s Shark Tale.
Lynn co-wrote it with a guy named David Foster and the Marty and David Paich songwriting team - the latter went on to become the keyboardist for Toto - and it launched her career. The original recording featured at least one more name/reference I knew besides Paich - Ray Parker, Jr. played guitar on it (to finish the thought, David Shields played bass and James Gadson hit the skins) - and Lynn would work with famous names throughout her fairly robust career.
With the single to carry it, Lynn’s eponymous debut album hit one million copies sold in a blink and topped out at No. 5 on the Billboard album charts. The single only reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, but went all the way to No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B charts - another touchstone in her career. As noted in a glowing retrospective of her anthology on a site called The Second Disc, another single from her debut, “Star Love,” charted at No. 16 - a fact that, for me, rescues her from the (alleged) stain of being a one-hit wonder; count the R&B charts (and why wouldn’t you?), and she’s not even close.
Lynn’s smash has a hell of a legacy, as a guy named DJ Prince Language explains in his notes on Paris is Burning:
“The music that animates the movements of the dancers in the film, especially the lyrics, provides a subversive and sometimes even shady commentary on the politics and aesthetics of drag and ball culture. The use of Cheryl Lynn's 'Got To Be Real' is the ultimate example of this, brilliantly touching on drag's invocations of and insistence on 'realness,' and the film shows how balls and dancers ultimately question the very notion of what is 'real' in the context of identity, and how we each create and construct our own 'real' selves.”
Or, to borrow a tribute from The Second Disc:
“’Got To Be Real’ was more than a smash hit. It was a philosophical credo that guided Lynn through her entire, decades-long career.”
The Rest of the Story
Despite being born in a fame-factory like Los Angeles (in 1957), joining the cast of The Wiz and eventually landing the role of Evillene, Wicked Witch of the West for its six-month national tour, and appearing on The Gong Show, Lynda Cheryl Smith, aka, Cheryl Lynn, told Classicbands, in the shortest interview I’ve ever seen on that site, that she never planned on a career in music. Like a lot of black performers who went on to music careers, she sang in her church choir, but her mother stressed the importance of education and Lynn took her advice, majoring in speech pathology at USC until the siren song of the labels broke her…apparent resistance.
That Gong Show appearance came before her stint with The Wiz, but that singular moment, 1) almost certainly counts as her big break and 2) has some fun stories attached to it. For instance, an urban legend claims that she scored the only perfect 30 in Gong Show history with her rendition of Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful” - and Classicbands repeats it - but her Wikipedia page cites a “recently-posted clip on Youtube” that shows that the esteemed judges (Della Reese, Avery Schreiber and Jamie Farr) gave her a combined score of 21. That gave her the same score of an unnamed singing juggler, which set up a tie-breaker decided by the volume of audience applause. The singing juggler won that battle, but Lynn won the war. She perhaps received the greatest accolade of her career when Gong Show host Chuck Barris commented, “Of the 4,000 acts I’ve seen, she’s the all-time great.”
A bunch of labels courted her, but Columbia Records walked away with the prize. And, after the success of her debut, they had every reason to celebrate. When Lynn returned to the studio for her follow-up, 1979’s In Love, she reconnected with Judy Wieder and John Footman, the same songwriting team that delivered “Star Love.” That album didn’t do nearly as well, but, according to Wikipedia, “I’ve Got Just What You Need” became “a moderate hit on the R&B charts” while another single, “Keep It Hot” became “a club hit.” Her connection to the Paichs gave her the opportunity to sing backing vocals on the newly-formed Toto’s first album; with her in the studio, Toto scored their lone hit on the R&B charts with “Georgy Porgy.”
Ray Parker, Jr. produced her third album, In the Night (1981) - which featured the “major R&B single “Shake It Up Tonight” - then Luther Vandross produced her fourth, Instant Love (1982)…which didn’t appear to go anywhere important, but it did include a duet with Vandross, a cover of the Marvin Gaye and Tami Terrell song, “If This World Were Mine.” Lynn self-produced “most of” her fifth album, 1983’s Preppie - and she really struts her genre-busting flexibility on the title track - which featured another No. 1 on the R&B charts with “Encore” (great damn video, fwiw).
She recorded one more album with Columbia, 1985’s It’s Gonna Be Right, but I can’t stress the insanity of calling Cheryl Lynn a “one-hit wonder” enough when Instant Love reached No. 7 on the R&B charts and Preppie landed at No. 8. She had one hell of a career for someone who didn’t want to get into the business, and surely achieved her goal of being, as she told Classicbands, “a successful, independent woman” who “didn’t want to be dependent on [her] husband.” Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if the royalties on “Got to Be Real” alone don’t beat her never-named (and maybe non-existent) husband’s annual earnings.
Lynn continued working after the prime of her career, a lot of it session work (e.g., with Richard Marx in the 1990s), but she kept performing the odd major event (e.g., Sinbad’s Summer Soul Jam 4 in 1998). She fits the working musician/vocalist profile, basically, and by virtue of having the pipes/talent to pull it off; before gushing about everything else, The Second Disc praised her “impressive range that reached up from alto into the rare whistle range.” Even her 1995 album, Good Time featured a “nightclub favorite” with “Guarantee for My Heart.”
About the Sampler
I went with a 14-song sampler, mostly because I wanted to give people a fuller taste of what The Second Disc raved about. Even if they (or just the author of that post) likes what Cheryl Lynn did more than I ever will, they’re not at all wrong about her comfort singing just about anything. I already linked to a handful of the 14 above, so, to cover the rest:
Cheryl Lynn has her share of slow-jams (I just don’t like those as much), which I repped on the sampler with “Hurry Home” and “With Love on Our Side.” “I’ve Got Faith in You” brings back the funk, if with 80s production, a sound “Fix It” puts even further in the forefront. “Baby” dips back into funk (based on my limited listening, I’d call that her strongest funk number), while “All My Lovin’” has some solid funk riffs in the chorus. Finally, Lynn and/or Wieder/Footman opens “Don’t Let It Fade Away” with some lovely classical strings.
Genre-wise, Cheryl Lynn’s won’t be for everybody. But she unquestionably had talent, drive, smarts, and she found an audience again and again over the better half of a decade. So, yeah, one-hit wonder my ass.
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