“Be Ever Wonderful” is the final track on Side 2 of Earth, Wind & Fire’s album All ‘N All (1977). It begins with a complicated flourish of horns and percussion, the kind of bebop-redolent challenge for which Maurice White had a weakness (check out the opening moments of the hit single “Getaway” (1976), or the Eddie Harris cover “Spasmodic Movements” on the album Open Our Eyes (1974) for other examples).
“Be Ever Wonderful” then proceeds to a slow-dance paced verse sung by White: Be ever wonderful — stay as you are. As we’ve seen in the last few weeks, elliptical, puzzling or even kind of weak EWF lyrics — Time is right for you tonight, find your place among the broad day light — can be lent a powerful poetic gravity when combined with the musical performance. In any case, White returns repeatedly to the stay as you are message.
So far, this is a record is a rewarding listen, though we haven’t gotten to the sonic magic, the musical dharma, yet. Let us dwell for a moment on the love-song message of “Be Ever Wonderful”. We know by know that Maurice White had an explicitly spiritual “Concept” in mind when he formed Earth, Wind & Fire, a concept that can be read as (though not exclusively as) a linked set of Buddhist teachings. But most listeners in 1977 were poised to hear a love song when they put this on the turntable, and more specifically, a heterosexual love song from a man to a woman. And White’s slightly ambiguous lyric can indeed be hear that way. As you live today, what I wanna say, is be ever wonderful in your own sweet way. Of course, like “Shining Star”, this sentiment could transcend the boy-girl love-song frame to communicate a spiritual message in the Master’s Voice to all humankind.
Earth, Wind & Fire explicitly considered the boundary between boy-girl love songs and universal-love songs on more than one occasion. On their self-titled début album (to which we seem often to return, as though it was a sort of blueprint for White’s Concept as a whole), the song “Love is Life” seems more consciously to jump back and forth between the two frames. You brought me love, the chorus says, which sounds like boy-girl; and love is life, which makes the jump to universal. This leads the narrator to consider other forms of love:
Did you ever watch a mother
And how tender she treats a child?
And the birds in the treetops
How they protect their young from the wild?
These reflections call to mind the words of the Mettā Sutta, a discourse by the Buddha on the topic of loving-kindness (mettā):
Even as a mother at the risk of her life
Watches over and protects her only child,
So with a boundless mind should one cherish all living things.
Suffusing love over the entire world,
Above, below, and all around, without limit,
So let one cultivate an infinite good will toward the whole world.
“Be Ever Wonderful”, meanwhile, is cued to evoke boy-girl love because at least some listeners might have known a minor 1963 hit single by Ted Taylor also called “Be Ever Wonderful”. Indeed, Taylor’s song starts the same way as Earth, Wind & Fire’s: be ever wonderful — stay as you are. Whether Earth, Wind & Fire are quoting Taylor deliberately, unconsciously, or entirely coincidentally, I cannot say. Taylor remains squarely in boy-girl love territory:
Be ever wonderful
Stay sweet and true
And be ever loving me
As I love you
Taylor was an Oklahoma-born soul singer who had a small number of minor hit records — “Stay Away from My Baby”, “Something Strange is Going on in My House” — that feature his dramatic Jackie Wilson-style vocal over a very bluesy musical backing. Taylor continued to record and release records through the 1970s. On a 1978 album called Keeping My Head Above Water, he returned to “Be Ever Wonderful”, this time appending a spoken word introduction linking the two recorded versions separated by fifteen years:
Darling, I told you many times
And I am telling you once again
Just to remind you, sweetheart
That my love for you has never changed
Ah girl, you've been my inspiration
You been my dream come true
Once again, I wanna dedicate this song to you
This sweet, nostalgia-tinged re-recording, ever-so-slightly weighted down by the weariness of a hard-working musician recalling his long-ago biggest-ever hit, provided the backdrop to another record suffused with memory and irony.
Rapper Kendrick Lamar’s album DAMN. (2017) ends with “DUCKWORTH.”, a nonfiction account of long-ago encounters between Kendrick’s father — who worked the drive-through window of a fried-chicken restaurant — and Kendrick’s record label owner, “Top Dawg” — who as a young man ran with a gang and had shot up the chicken restaurant at some point. His father would always give Top Dawg extra portions when he drove through at the restaurant. One day Top Dawg and his crew shot up the restaurant again but were careful to spare Kendrick’s dad. All of this happened years ago; the drama in the song stems from the rapper’s realization that absent his father’s acts of generosity, Kendrick would not be the Pulitzer-Prize-winning hip hop artist he is today.
That one decision changed both of they lives, one curse at a time
Reverse the manifest and good karma, and I'll tell you why
You take two strangers and put 'em in random predicaments
Give 'em a soul, so they can make their own choices and live with it
Twenty years later, them same strangers, you make 'em meet again
Inside recording studios where they reapin' their benefits
Then you start remindin' them about that chicken incident
Whoever thought the greatest rapper would be from coincidence?
Because if Anthony killed Ducky, Top Dawg could be servin' life
While I grew up without a father and die in a gunfight
Here’s the relationship to this week’s musical storyline: the sweet spoken-word introduction to Ted Taylor’s 1978 re-recording of “Be Ever Wonderful” is sampled at the opening of “DUCKWORTH.” Many hip hop samples function as the musical latticework of the production — like, say, to choose one of a million examples, Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up” undergirds Kanye West’s “Touch the Sky”. But “Be Ever Wonderful”, in keeping with the cinematic character of Lamar’s whole DAMN. album, functions more as background music in a movie scene — it almost sounds to me like Top Dawg has his radio tuned to a station playing “Be Ever Wonderful” just as he pulls into the Kentucky Fried Chicken drive-through where Kendrick’s dad will slip him some free food. It situates the scene at a place and time, the way music does in so many Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese films. And this choice of sample is Ted Taylor looking back just as Kendrick is looking back, each to definitive moments in their history, whether their personal history or their family history.
All of this weight, all of these echoes — of “Love is Life”; the Mettā Sutta teaching of loving-kindness; Ted Taylor in 1978, not quite washed up, reaching back to 1963 and forward to Kendrick’s “DUCKWORTH.” in 2017; Kendrick’s father and Top Dawg — are present in Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Be Ever Wonderful”. These connections, so distinctive and critical a feature of the Seventies Soul Dharma, lend meaning and beauty to the record.
But what lends transcendence to the record, in my view, is a gorgeous circular musical motif, which arises first at the 2:15 mark, and reappears later, with joyous repetition at 3:30, until the fade. The Philip Bailey-led vocal chorus sings wordlessly behind White’s oblique lyric — don’t let the world change your mind, change your mind — surrounded by lush orchestration and bright horns. The whole seems to be a spiral circling toward heaven, transmitting the dharma, keeping our heads to the sky.
Thanks for connecting all of these dots.