Although primarily based in Chicago, Jerry Butler was signed by Mercury Records in 1967 and connected with the Philadelphia production team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. The result was Butler’s most successful album (and the first full-length album by Gamble and Huff), The Ice Man Cometh.
The Ice Man Cometh proved highly influential; John Bush noted in Allmusic that the album “marks an excellent collaboration, the first time R&B production techniques reached a level of maturity and elegance capable of fully complementing one of the smoothest vocalists in soul history”. In 1969, Elvis Presley recorded one of the hits from The Ice Man Cometh, “Only the Strong Survive”. The Ice Man Cometh, along with the follow-up album Ice on Ice were jointly reissued on a 2001 CD called The Philadelphia Sessions.
Mikki Farrow co-wrote one of the songs on The Ice Man Cometh, “(Strange) I Still Love You” with Jerry Butler and Norman Harris; she had previously participated in a songwriters’ workshop hosted by Jerry Butler in Chicago. According to the book A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul by John A. Jackson, the uncredited female vocals on the two Jerry Butler albums, The Ice Man Cometh and Ice on Ice were by Mikki Farrow, Jean Thomas and Tina Thomas. “(Strange) I Still Love You” was later included on Margie Joseph’s 1974 album, Sweet Surrender.
(July 2014)
