Jody Watley

Jody Watley (1959- ) is an American R & B singer, best known for the songs “Looking for a New Love” (1986) and, when she was with Shalamar, “The Second Time Around” (1980). She won the Grammy for Best New Artist in 1987.

Here are her songs that made it to the top ten on the American R & B chart (note that she was with Shalamar from 1977 to 1984):

• 1977: Uptown Festival (Part 1) (#10)
• 1980: The Second Time Around (#1)
• 1981: Make That Move (#6)
• 1982: A Night to Remember (#8 )
• 1983: Dead Giveaway (#10)
• 1986: Looking for a New Love (#1)
• 1987: Still a Thrill (#3)
• 1987: Don’t You Want Me (#3)
• 1988: Some Kind of Lover (#3)
• 1989: Real Love (#1)
• 1989: Friends (#3)
• 1989: Everything (#3)
• 1991: I Want You (#5)
• 1996: This is for the Lover in You (#2)

She was also in “Do They Know It’s Christmas” (1984). She hates her hair in that video but is proud she helped to feed children in Africa.

She has been in the music business since 1977. Thirty years and 20 million discs later she can still hit the top of the dance charts: in 2007 her remake of the Chic song “I Want Your Love” became a number one dance song.

She was never as big as Madonna or Janet Jackson, but neither did she present herself as a loose woman like they did. Through it all she has remained true to herself, putting out what she considers to be good music rather than the terrible stuff the record companies wanted her to make.

She has her own music company, Avitone. Through it she has been searching for a new business model, one to take the place of selling music on discs, which is dying out.

Her music has changed little over the years. In 2007 it was not all that different from the dance music of the late 1970s that she started out in.

While she was one of the first R & B singers to have a rap in her song (“Friends”), she never took part in the marriage of R & B and hip hop the way that Mary J Blige and others later did.

For some reason I thought she was an army brat. In fact her father was a Pentecostal minister. Her mother sang and played the piano in church. They moved all over the country: Chicago (where she was born and won Best Smile in Miss Black Teen Aged Illinois), Washington, DC, Kansas City, Texas, Indiana and Los Angeles. She saw the violence that broke out in Washington after Martin Luther King was killed.

In the early 1970s she became a dancer on “Soul Train” and even taught Aretha Franklin some moves!

Her godfather was the great Jackie Wilson.

She was the first black woman ever to appear on the cover of a Japanese fashion magazine.

She was once married to Andre Cymone.

Her heroes: Grace Jones, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Chic and the Carpenters.

See also:

• Jody Watley’s MySpace page – excellent. She wrote it herself for her fans. It is not just a few lifeless paragraphs written by some marketer. You can hear her latest music and find out where she is on the road singing. (She was in Java when I wrote this.)
• Jody Watley: Some Kind of Lover
• Jody Watley: Everything
• Shalamar: Second Time Around
• hip hop