Although the name may not instantly ring a bell, you've heard the voice for sure. And there are plenty of places where Jeanie Tracy's soulful sounds can be heard. During the late seventies Jeanie, together with the Two Tons O' Fun, backed the late, great Sylvester and since then, she's become one of the most sought-after session singers in the business. Aretha Franklin and Patti Labelle has proclaimed her "one of the Top Ten voices in the world" and if you ask Chaka Khan, she probably agrees.. Aretha, Chaka, Peabo Bryson, Jeffrey Osborne, Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand, Sheena Easton, Tevin Campbell, Diana Ross, Curtis Mayfield, just to name a few, they've all benefited from her big voice. And yes, it was none other than Jeanie Tracy you heard wailing behind Whitney Houston on "I'm Every Woman". It's time to bring Jeanie out of the background, into the foreground. After more than twenty years in the industry, she sure had some stories to tell!

Born in Houston, Texas, but raised in Fresno, California, Jeanie Tracy's singing career, like so many other grand R&B vocalists, began from an early age in the church choir. Her passion -and obvious talent- for music led her to study opera and classical music in high-school, where she also took piano lessons and sang in the school choir. All of which helps to explain her incredible range and versatility. "I had a wonderful piano teacher who I call every now and then to see how she's getting on, you know?" the warm, funny and talkative songstress told me over the phone from her home in Oakland, California. "I haven't heard from my choir teacher in high-school for a long time, though. I really love her. You've heard of the Whispers? She was their teacher too. There are a lot of singers that came from her, that she taught. The school was multi-cultural, with a good mixture of people. And she was white. She taught us Negro Spirituals, metricals, Pop... in fact, she was the one that took me aside and told me that I had a wonderful future. I liked a lot of Pop stuff, a lot of everything back then, but she told me in particular that I should listen to Johnny Mathis, who had really great diction. I met him on a plane a couple of years ago, and I was so exited. I told him 'I listened to you' and 'I'm a huge fan of yours' and that I had learned diction from him. He was quite pleased and it gave me a buzz, because you know, some artists are friendly and some aren't and I found out that this artist I adored, was really nice as a person too."

It was while raising money for charity (by playing keyboards with a DJ who played drums for more than sixty-hours straight!) that Jeanie, reluctantly, landed her first professional job.
"That was really funny. It was probably when I was in college and two years into college" Jeanie recalled. "I was doing a drum-a-thon. This guy saw me playing keyboards and singing along at some outdoor festival and he came up to me and said 'You sound wonderful' and asked me if I wanted to join his band. I explained to him that I didn't know the first thing about being in a band, but he got my number anyway and about a week later, his guitar player got sick. He came by my house, without calling, and begged: 'I really need you'. I knew that the guys in his band were much older than I and they played jazz and blues, that kinda thing, so I told him 'I don't know how to play that music', Jeanie said in a pretended desperate and squeaky voice, before letting out one of her infectious laughs. "He said 'that's OK, all I need for you to do is just play what you know to play and we'll follow you'. So I did. I played everything I knew and it actually turned out fabulous. The band was on a 2-week notice to leave, but the club-owner told the guy 'if you keep her, I'll extend your contract'. We were there for, like, two years after that. I left first, because wanted to go on the road and do other things."

Although Jeanie is best known for her work as a session and back-up singer, she has recorded in her own right, her very first single being "My Man Is Gone", followed by "Making New Friends" on the small, independent Brown Door label. After moving from Fresno to San Francisco, around 1970, Jeanie took up acting and starred in Oscar Brown Jr.'s musical "Slave Driver". "Oscar Brown is very famous in the theater world. 'Slave Driver' wasn't the first play I was in, but it was the first thing I was cast for. I felt really honored, because he was like the ultimate in theater, I mean, it was just like singing with Quincy Jones, or something.. I remember Oscar telling me 'you have a wonderful voice, but you're not singing with enough confidence. You need to take this back home and study it again'. The next play I did was probably 'Sing Mahalia Sing' , that was my first big piece and that was right behind Jennifer Holliday. After Jennifer left, I kinda walked in her shoes (laughs). The next play was 'Right Mind'. That was really an undertaking because that was my first, really big thing. It had some of the people that were in 'The Wiz'. All the big shows out there, all the New York people... And there I was, this little California-girl, going out, you know, in the midst of all these divas... But it was pretty cool, because they knew who I was. Sometimes theater people can snob you, because they think 'OK, she's a singer, but can she act?'. They have that kinda attitude, you know? It was quickly resolved, though, once I got in and they saw that I had done a little bit of stage stuff! (laughs). Oh, I almost forgot, I did 'Street Dreams' too, that was another New York production."

Sometime in the mid-seventies, Jeanie met veteran singer/songwriter/producer and industry giant Harvey Fuqua. Fuqua co-owned the Milk & Honey labels (distributed by Fantasy Records) and Jeanie began writing and producing for Fuqua's gospel-group, Voices of Harmony. (Jeanie is unsure of whether or not the Voices Of Harmony's album ever was released, if anyone reading this has information in this matter, please contact this scribe).

In 1979 Jeanie sang on the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola's movie "Apocalypse Now" and soon thereafter, Harvey Fuqua persuaded her to audition for a certain Sylvester James, who Fuqua had begun producing two years earlier. Sylvester's "Over and Over", "Dance, Disco Heat" and "You Make Me Feel Mighty Real" had earned him the "Disco-King" title and he attracted a huge following. Impressed by what he heard, Sylvester hired Jeanie to sing both on recordings and live gigs, together with his regular back-up vocalists: Martha Wash and Izora Armstead, also known as the aptly titled duo Two Tons O' Fun, (later re-named the Weather Girls). Out of this audition came some of the best dance-music ever produced on this planet, plus a strong friendship, which lasted to Sylvester's untimely death in 1988.
"I was his biggest fan and I loved him. He was not only my boss but he was my friend and I took care of him from the first day that he got ill, to the last day of his life" Jeanie said with much emotion in her voice. "He was delightful, even though he was sick, living with AIDS. He was still funny, still a character and everything. It was great fun being with the girls: Martha (Wash) and Izora (Armstead) and Sylvester. I wouldn't sing on the road with anyone else now anyway, but I just don't really know... if I was gonna do it again, sing with someone back-up, who it would be with, because I don't know anyone that could be that much fun. Sylvester was the pest! We shopped, he loved to shop! We'd dish, he loved to dish the dirt, you know?"

The first Sylvester LP Jeanie appeared on was "Living Proof", released by Fantasy Records in 1979. The majority of the album was recorded live at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera on March, 11 1979. Like several other Sylvester albums, "Living Proof" has been re-issued on CD by Fantasy and listening to that particular record now, some seventeen years later, the sheer energy emanating from Sylvester, the Two Tons O' Fun and Jeanie Tracy is just as intense as the night it was recorded. "Oh yeah. We really turned it out!" Jeanie said. "That was a night I'll never forget. That was the night I was introduced into the Sylvester family. It was my first show with him and it was the most magical thing. I've never experienced anything else like that again. You can hear it on the album, it just comes through."

Life on the road with Sylvester and the Two Tons O' Fun during the heydays of Disco surely deserves an entire book in itself. Jeanie's memory is full of hilarious stories, like the one about Izora Armstead's habit of bringing her entire kitchen with her, wherever the entourage went:
"Izora used to carry her own utensils! She had a great, big trunk and there were no clothes in there, just her pots and pans and stuff like that. When you'd go to her room, you would smell this food coming down the hall, so you'd go:'What are you doing?' and Izora would reply: 'come on in. girl'. Izora's the ticket! And instead of having her clothes in the dresser, she would put food in there. There was bacon, eggs, bread and canned foods in there!" As Jeanie went down memory lane, she laughingly recalled an incident, where Izora Armstead once again was involved. "Miss Izora loves bingo, still does. She almost made us late for a show one time! She had us waiting on her in a limousine, because she was somewhere playing bingo. Sylvester was livid! Me and Martha were already beaten. We were painted, dressed up and ready to go to the show and then, finally, Miss Izora showed up, in some house-slippers! She had to get right in the car!"

1980 was a hectic year for Jeanie. She did backgrounds on The Two Ton's O' Fun's self-titled, Harvey Fuqua-produced debut, as well as contributing to Sylvester's next album "Sell My Soul" (Honey/Fantasy, 1980) and the Two Tons' second LP, "Backatcha" (Honey/Fantasy, 1981). Also in 1981, Jeanie and Sylvester shared leads on "Magic Number" for Herbie Hancock's excellent "Magic Windows" album and on Sylvester's '81-set, "Too Hot To Sleep" (Honey/Fantasy), Jeanie's input had increased largely. (The Two Tons O' Fun, were busy promoting their own career and consequently are missing entirely from the sleeve notes). Jeanie is credited for supporting the backing vocals on every, single track on "Too Hot To Sleep" and in addition, she co-wrote "Give It Up (Don't Make Me Wait)" and duetted with Sylvester on "Here Is My Love". For several reasons, "Too Hot To Sleep" is an atypical Sylvester album. To most people, Sylvester equaled dance-orientated uptempo numbers, coupled with his incredibly high, gospel-influenced falsetto, but "Too Hot To Sleep" presented him occasionally singing in a lower register. Musically, he was clearly moving closer towards R&B, a transition Jeanie certainly played a big part in.
"That's what I wanted to bring to Sylvester's fans," she confirmed. "When we did the song 'Here Are My Gloves', that's what we called 'Here Is My Love', he wanted to sing high and I encouraged him to sing low. I said to him 'I know you love to be this Disco-queen, but you need to show people that there's so much more to you'. Sylvester said 'Oh girl..' I told him 'we can't be two women here! You have to be the man!'. So I encouraged him to sing low. That (Too Hot To Sleep) was one of my favorite albums. I loved all of his stuff, but that was my favorite album, because he did sing low. He went into another direction. You know, when I listen to Prince, I know that Prince must have listened to Sylvester, because there are times when Prince sounds just like Sylvester.. You know how Sylvester used to go down in that low voice and go up in his high register... It's not a bad thing, though. It's good."

1982 saw the release of Jeanie's first album in her own right, "Me And You", which came out on Fantasy and was produced by Harvey Fuqua. Apart from one Disco track, the majority of the LP was a rather mellow, but nice R&B affair. Surprisingly enough, it wasn't aimed directly towards at the club-going audience. "We didn't know what direction to go in, so we just did a little of everything," Jeanie said. "There were some beautiful mid-tempo songs on there that I really liked and basically I've always wanted to be a balladeer. The Dance music I love, but I also want to be known as being able to do really good R&B, so hopefully that will happen in the future. Don't get me wrong, I really love House music. It still has that energy that no other music has. R&B ballads have a certain intensity, but House or dance music has a special feeling, it puts you in a certain mood. When I come out on the stage and that music starts a-pumping, people get energized, I get energized. It's a wonderful feeling."

As laid-back as the majority of the material on Jeanie's first album was, it also spawned the lady's funkiest single to date; the irresistible "I'm Your Jeanie", where the tables were turned and Sylvester, in his low voice, was featured on background vocals. When reminded of it, Jeanie roared with laughter. "OHHH! Golly! 'I'm your Jeanie, come and free me', I wrote that! Yeah, 'let me funk with your emotions'...You remember that song Sylvester had out, 'Do You Wanna Funk' ? He got the idea for it from my 'I'm Your Jeanie' song. He was so thrilled. He asked me: 'who wrote that let-me-funk-with-your-emotions line?'. I told him I did and he said 'ooh, girl. That's clever! That's brilliant!' and he went and wrote 'Do You Wanna Funk'. It was a massive hit and I used to tease him about it, saying 'you owe me!'."

For "Do You Wanna Funk", included on the 1982 album "All I Need", Sylvester had changed labels, from Fantasy to Megatone, a San Francisco-based company. The move also marked a return to Dance-music for Sylvester and as he became increasingly popular on the high-energy scene, Jeanie followed suit and signed with Megatone too. She backed Sylvester on his "Call Me" (1983) and "M-1015" (1984) LP's and released a couple of hi-energy twelve inches of her own, such as a high-energy version of Thelma Houston's "Don't Leave Me This Way". In 1985, Jeanie recorded a duet "You Are My Love" with the School Boys and following year, sang with Sylvester on what was to be last album: "Mutual Attraction".

Jeanie found more and more session work and backed Jeffrey Osborne and Narada Michael Walden, amongst others, but even so, the late eighties was not the best period in Jeanie's life.
"I got stuck in that hi-energy mold" Jeanie explained. "That was really the kind of label Megatone was. I was trying to go into another direction, because music started shaping different again. I still had a big dance-following, even though the stuff wasn't played on the radio and I was still working a lot in the clubs. It was just hard to get out of that hi-energy mold. Finally, I said to myself 'enough is enough, this is going nowhere'. Plus Sylvester had died, my manager passed away right after that, the president of Megatone died.. Music got to be no fun to me for a minute. That part of it, the recording. I still loved music, but getting stuck there and everybody just passing away... There seemed to be no end. I just needed to put that aside until I found where it could be fun again. Music as I knew it had sort of taken a back seat during this time. I saw where the music was going and it really didn't interest me. Then all these people were dying in my life and I went into a slump that I just couldn't shake."

Understandably, Jeanie decided to put her recording career on the shelf, in favor of theater, session work and singing commercials. "Theater was really another extension for me, where I could do another character and have fun with it. I did a lot of theater and session work, that I love, plus I was quite busy doing commercials. I got really interested in that and I had about nine or ten TV-commercials out at one time. It was good money, so I really didn't think about doing anything for myself, for my sole satisfaction. It kinda got to the point where a friend of mine said to me that it was awful. She said: 'I think it's terrible and selfish what you do. What are you doing to your friends and fans? We wanna be able to go to the store and buy your new product and we can't do that. We have to sit by the TV and watch the commercials and have guessing games: 'I wonder if that's Jeanie singing or not?'. Jeanie chuckled and admitted that she at first had been very upset with this friend's nerve, before realizing the person had a point. "I thought about it and she was right, I mean, I have this talent, I have this gift and who am I to take it away if you all still wanna receive it? "

It was on the plane to San Diego, where she was scheduled to do a show with producer, songwriter and dance-artist Ernest Kohl , that the first step in Jeanie's come-back took place. Ernest tried to persuade Jeanie to let him produce her and after hearing material that Kohl and his partner Steve Skinner had done for another dance-artist, Jeanie decided to invest the time and money necessary. " I called and said to them: 'just send the track and I'll write the words to it'. That's how I wrote 'It's My Time'. At that time, I was really tired of the way things were going for me, musically," Jeanie said and cited the lyrics to explain what her feelings were: "'It's my time to live again, it's my time to stand up and shout'. I'm moving on, that's what the song is about."

Jeanie flew to New York to work with her old friend, Martha Wash, and while she was there, took some time off and recorded "It's My Time" with Skinner and Kohl. The single was picked up by 3-Beat Records in the U.K. and about a year after its release on 3-Beat, another U.K.-based dance-label showed interest. Pulse-8 wanted an entire album and in 1994, Jeanie went to London and spent some fifteen weeks in the studio, working with the remix/production and song writing team Band Of Gypsies (Tim Cox and Nigel Swanston), the guys behind Rozalla. The uptempo number "Do You Believe In The Wonder"and "If This Is Love" were issued as singles in '94 and in early '95 "It's My Time" was remixed and re-released . The album, also entitled "It's My Time" came out towards the end of 1995, followed by two more singles, the first being a cover of the James Brown classic "It's A Man's Man's World", where Jeanie and Bobby Womack (!) shared the microphone. "We had a wonderful time, doing that song. The Band Of Gypsies suggested I'd cover 'It's A Man's Man's World' and they thought it would be great to do it like a duet with Bobby. I thought so too and since I had opened for Bobby back in the eighties and still had his number, I gave him a call and he remembered me! It was a thrill to work with him."

The last single lifted from the album," Crying In My Sleep", was one of the few ballads on the album, where Jeanie really had a chance to belt out. Is it a coincidence that so many of the finest vocalists from the sixties and seventies, the individuals with the most personal and soulful voices, have either left R&B altogether or are active on the Dance music scene?
"No, it's not surprising to me that people like Martha Wash, Loleatta Holloway and people like that are doing House music, because R&B has gone to a place where I really don't wanna go," the frank Jeanie replied. "Now, everybody sounds alike, there's no diversity..Even the women sound like the men. I don't know what the companies are doing, but it's not a good thing to me. Used to be, like ten years ago, if you took an artist and they sounded like someone, they couldn't get a deal: 'Oh, you sound too much like Anita Baker, there's already an Anita Baker out there.' Now, if you sound like Jodeci, Boys II Men or Mary J. Blige, it's good thing and you get signed right away. So, in ten years, what's the music gonna sound like?", Jeanie chuckled. "And everybody's re-doing old classics. Nobody's making new music, except Babyface and maybe a couple of others. Me and Bobby Womack was talking about that. They took a song of his and made a great, big, huge hit out of it a couple of years ago and I wondered why they didn't get Bobby to sing it. Instead they had one of the boys from Jodeci and I asked Bobby how he felt about it. He said 'well, they could have asked me, since they had him singing it just like me anyway'. "

Since the release of her sophomore album in 1995, Jeanie's been singing on tons of commercials and countless sessions, including Curtis Mayfield, Puff Johnson, Michael Bolton, Grover Washington, Tevin Campbell, Kenny Loggins, Natalie Cole and ex-Take That singer Gary Barlow. Jeanie -who's stated that she likes to do a little bit of everything- is on the verge of branching out into a completely new line of work. "Yes, I'm getting ready to do a television series. It's called 'Kangarate' and it's an animated thing. We'll start shooting it in August. I'm very excited about it, because I've been wanting to do more television things. I wanna do a sitcom and that's what I'm getting myself geared to, more television work. Somebody recommended me, they thought that my voice would be great for doing this part and for singing the theme song for the show. The show is about a kangaroo that does martial arts, but it's not violent , it's about respect. I'll be singing the (Aretha Franklin) song 'Respect' and do the voice of the snake, who's called 'Bantu'. The snake is the kangaroo's friend and is supposed to be real sassy and I'm really exited about it, as you can hear. Anyway, I'll be playing the part of a little snake, Mickey Thomas from Jefferson Starship, he has an incredible, incredible voice, he'll be doing the voice of the kangaroo and the guy, Pat Morita, 'Miyagi', from the movie 'Karate Kid' is gonna be in there too."

In the spring of '97, Jeanie went back to the U.K. (where her last album was cut) to work with British Dance music producer Paul "Wand" Masterson, the man behind the 1995 club classic "Let's Whip It Up (You Go Girl)" by Sleazesisters With Vicki Shepard, who just happens to be a very good friend of Jeanie's. Under the "Wand" moniker, Paul and Jeanie's first effort "Happiness", was released on the DeConstruction label, but unfortunately came out in the U.K. when Princess Diana had just died in that horrible car accident. Perhaps the song's positive message "Sometimes in life, things get you down, I need a release, I need a release from the pressure, happiness" didn't fit in too well with the current mood. In any case, it sadly went pretty much unnoticed. However, there is a good chance of it being picked up by another label and given a second chance later this year. Another track Jeanie penned with Paul Masterson, "Into Tomorrow", is soon-to-be released on 3-Beat/BMG, home of Jeanie's last album "It's My Time". Jeanie is no longer signed with Pulse 8, but recently re-united with the "It's My Time" album's team of producers, the Band of Gypsies. There is not a definite release date on the result, a single called "Answer My Prayer", but reports suggest it is something worth waiting for. The first 13 episodes of "Kangarate" are finished and will be aired on P.B.S., starting in April or May '98.


Biography Courtesy of Maria Granditsky