‘He should have been a superstar’: Freddie Hughes, Oakland soul singer, dies at 79

Singer Freddie Hughes, right, often performed with Chris Burns, left, at the Royal Cuckoo in San Francisco’s Mission District. Hughes passed away Tuesday, Jan. 18, in Oakland at age 79.


                                 



                                  


By ANDREW GILBERT 

While Freddie Hughes’s recording career peaked commercially with the 1968 hit “Send My Baby Back,” the Oakland singer’s impact on East Bay soul and the Bay Area music scene in general went much deeper than that.

Hughes, 79, died Tuesday at Kaiser Oakland from leukemia and COVID-19 complications, according his son Derick Hughes, a former Tower of Power vocalist who’s toured for years with Roberta Flack.

Held in the highest esteem by his peers during the six decades he was a pillar of the Bay Area music scene, Hughes played a central role in shaping the sound of East Bay soul during a pervasively influential era defined by church-reared Black vocalists bringing the fervent cadences of gospel music to secular settings.

An ostentatiously gifted singer as a child, Hughes was at Castlemont High School in Oakland when he started working professionally in various Oakland vocal groups in the mid-1950s. If talent alone led to success in the music business he would have become a household name, said Oakland blues and R&B great Johnny Talbot, a close childhood friend who often collaborated with Hughes.

“I worked with Lou Rawls, Aretha, and Marvin Gaye, and Freddie was equal to any of those singers,” Talbot said. “He had a voice that was unique and influential. When you mention singers from this area, Freddie has to be at the top. He had such a gift.”

During his long career, Hughes held his own working with stars such as Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Etta James, and Ike and Tina Turner. As a recording artist under his own name, however, one stumbling block he faced was the parallel career of Southern California R&B vocalist Fred Hughes, with whom he was often confused (YouTube credits often conflate the two artists).

The fact that he recorded so infrequently didn’t help either, though each appearance was galvanizing, like his searing version of Paul Tillman Smith’s “Sharing” on Vitamin E’s 1977 Buddah Records single.

“Johnny Mathis and Freddie had the two most incredible voices out of the Bay Area,” said drummer, songwriter and producer Tillman Smith, who featured Hughes on three standout tracks on “The Sounds of Oakland,” a new album celebrating the legacy of East Bay soul and R&B.

“He should have been a superstar. But we didn’t have the songwriters or production infrastructure here. We didn’t have Philadelphia International Records here.”

Born Aug. 20, 1943, in Berkeley and raised in Oakland’s segregated Harbor Homes housing project, Hughes had four siblings. Like many African Americans drawn to the region by plentiful war industry jobs, his parents came to the East Bay from the Dallas/Fort Worth area. His father, Fred W. Hughes, was a longshoreman and pastor who helped found Oakland’s Good Samaritan Church of God in Christ, and his mother Lola Mae Anderson was a singer and missionary.

Oakland brimmed with young talent in the 1950s. As a youth Hughes sang in a choir that included Betty Watson and Edwin Hawkins, who went on to co-direct the Edwin Hawkins Singers (the group that recorded the 1969 international gospel hit “Oh Happy Day” at Berkeley’s Ephesian Church of God in Christ).

“Freddie was singing lead with the grown-up choir every Sunday at 12 years old,” recalled Johnny Talbot, who also sang in the Good Samaritan children’s choir with Hughes. “The way he could sing later was the way he could sing at 12.”

Hughes made some of his first recordings for Compton-based Melotone Records in the late 1950s with a vocal quartet called the Markeets. He went on to sing in a variety of vocal groups and by 1961 had taken up with The Four Rivers, a combo that caught the attention of Capitol Records in Los Angeles. But legal threats from the group’s erstwhile manager, who wanted to maintain control of the band’s recordings, put the kibosh on any potential record deal.

Back in the East Bay, The Four Rivers become a house combo for Ray Dobard’s Berkeley-based Music City label, singing backup for acts such as Richard Berry, James Brown, and Big Mama Thornton. Looking to make their own way, Hughes and fellow Four Rivers vocalist Ken Pleasants started performing as a duo known as The Music City Soul Brothers, recording several singles, like 1965’s “Let Our Love Go On.”

“Together we developed a style reminiscent of Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions,” Pleasants told British music journalist Opal Louis Nations. “We sang double falsettos on the melody and harmonized on the bridges and at the breaks.”

Hughes scored his big national hit with 1968’s imploring “Send My Baby Back,” breaking into R&B’s Top 20. The success of the single, released nationally by San Francisco’s Wee Records and internationally by Scepter-Wand Records, quickly led to an album of the same name. The 2010 reissue by Ace Records, a U.K. label focused on hard-to-find soul music, includes 14 bonus tracks covering much of his 1960s output.

While international soul aficionados were paying hundreds of dollars for his vintage 45s, Hughes cut a modest figure on the Bay Area scene. In recent decades he held down regular gigs at no-cover venues like Berkeley’s Cheese Board, where he often performed with Oakland blues band Kickin’ the Mule, and at the Mission District bar the Royal Cuckoo, where he performed with keyboardist Chris Burns.

Chris Siebert, the Red Hot Skillet Lickers pianist and husband of the band’s vocalist Lavay Smith, books the Royal Cuckoo (which is owned by Smith’s brother). Burns was holding forth on the Hammond B-3 organ installed behind the bar shortly after the Cuckoo opened in 2011 when Hughes, unbilled and unannounced, started singing without a mic and hushed the room.

Siebert quickly figured out who possessed those glorious pipes, and Hughes and Burns became fixtures in the Cuckoo rotation. “We fell in love with his singing,” Siebert said. “His version of ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ was as powerful as Sam Cooke’s. He was a beautiful guy, and his delivery reflected the culture he came from in the Church of God In Christ. His voice brought tears to our eyes often.”

Hughes is survived by his brother, Wayne Hughes of Oakland; five children, Sonia Hughes Farmah of Hanford, Derick Hughes of Oakland, Derene Hughes Jones of Alameda, Lena Hughes, and Jelani Hughes; 23 grandchildren, and many great-grandchildren.

Plans are underway for a jam session and memorial concert in Hughes’ honor. Details will be announced soon.

            



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