In the 1970s, KC & the Sunshine Band and George McCrae recorded in Miami, but the bustling hit factory that launched them produced more than disco stars—it also gave the world Latimore, the sensuous soul-blues singer who broke out with a swinging cover of the blues classic “Stormy Monday” and followed it with a sultry, slow-simmering ballad of his own, the 1974 R&B chart topper “Let’s Straighten It Out.”
Latimore Sat 6/8, 5:15 PM, Jay Pritzker Pavilion
That was in Charleston, Tennessee, where a young Benny Latimore sang in his church choir. He later dropped out of college after he snagged a gig singing with Louis Brooks’s R&B combo in Nashville. On that job he began doubling on piano. “I never had the training, but I played by ear,” Latimore says. “We always had a piano at our house, and I fooled around with it.” That put him in excellent position to join the band of deep-voiced Nashville R&B crooner Joe Henderson, who’d just scored a hit in 1962 with “Snap Your Fingers.”
- “Discoed to Death”
After that, hits came in abundance for Latimore for the rest of the 70s, notably “Keep the Home Fire Burnin’” in 1975 and “Somethin’ ‘Bout ‘Cha” the following year. He even dared to poke a little wry fun at Stone’s principal stock-in-trade with his ’79 hit “Discoed to Death.” “In clubs where we used to gig every night, you had a guy in there playing records every night,” he remembers. “They were playing disco, disco, disco, disco.”
