Now in his late 70s, the heavily tattooed Dave Ritz grew up in a non-observant Jewish household, has had a passion for the music of Black artists all his life, and felt Jesus tugging on his sleeve for nearly six decades.
During his career, Ritz has been nominated six times for a Grammy, although he is not a musician. His Grammy win is for album notes he wrote for “Aretha Franklin: Queen of Soul.” A writer, his primary work has not been making music but helping musicians craft their autobiographies.
A white man with a stutter, he has a talent for capturing the voice and feeling of others, helping them sound like themselves on paper. He has been the ghostwriter for dozens of autobiographies, including those of Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, Janet Jackson and Chicago bluesman Buddy Guy.
In 2019 he wrote his own story, a memoir that chronicles his long conversion to Christianity. “The God Groove: A Blues Journey to Faith” documents his struggles with substance abuse and sexual addiction and the persistent but often confusing pull of faith. He writes briefly, but movingly, of his often-distant and enigmatic mother finding peace with God on her deathbed, and of the uncomprehending but ultimately supportive responses of his Marxist father and Jewish wife and daughters when, at the age of 60, he decided to be baptized.
He also writes about the faith of some of the musicians he’s known. Many had difficult lives, complicated by their immersion in the entertainment industry, which is often rampant with ambition, substance abuse and promiscuity. They may not all be examples of saintliness, but they are often insightful and convincing in their sincerity.
“I’m schizophrenic to the bone,” the renowned singer Etta James said when she worked with him, “so if I bark at your questions or tell you to get lost, don’t pay me no mind. I’ll be different tomorrow.”
“Etta was a mess,” Ritz writes, but he remembers with admiration her asking him to pray with her, and he remembers the words she addressed to heaven: “You give love because that’s all you can do. You forgive my misbehavin’ cause you can’t do nothing but forgive. Don’t understand why you’re that way, but I’m glad you are. …”
Marvin Gaye quotes Scripture. Smokey Robinson reassures Ritz that great doubt can lead to great faith.
Before B.B. King was a guitarist who influenced a generation of rock musicians, he was a sharecropper. Traveling through the South with him, Ritz recalls King reflecting on the racism of the sharecropping system but also on the spirituality he found in farm work. “A new crop was like new life,” King said. “I could see God’s hand in the creation of the natural world. That made me want to sing about him. Thank him for my life. Thank him for the rain that brought out the blossoms.”
King goes on to connect God to the music he plays, the blues. So does Percy Mayfield, who wrote the songs “Hit the Road, Jack” and “Danger Zone,” both made famous by Ray Charles, and “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” a tune that has been covered by more than a dozen artists.
“Yes, sir, God’s weeping,” Mayfield said, speaking of the world’s troubles.
“He wants us to make sense of nonsense,” Mayfield continued. “Nailing Jesus to the tree was nonsense. What did he do to deserve torture?
“Brother didn’t do nothing. But deep down, Jesus knew what God knew. The nonsense made sense ‘cause it showed us what love’s all about. Sacrifice your child? I’d call that mighty love.”
The most poignant scenario Ritz recalls concerns Billie Holiday, the incomparable singer whose life story — invariably described by writers as “tragic” — includes a deprived childhood, racial conflicts, drug and alcohol problems and abusive men. Ritz never interviewed her, but he records what her friend, jazz singer Carmen McCrae, told him:
“She’d ask me over to her place on the West Side [of New York], where she spent a lot of time singing the blues about the men who did her wrong,” McCrae said. “Then she’d take me to a little Catholic church down the street that was empty except for a couple of old ladies. We’d sit in the back pew, and Billie would get on her knees and cry. I mean, really cry. Tears flowing for five, 10 minutes.
“When she got up to leave,” McCrae remembered, “all she said was, ‘He heard me. I know he heard me.’”
Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.