Barry White and Love Unlimited (Orchestra)

Reviews and playlists

Aug 11, 2021

It’s with great pleasure and joy I bring to y’all one of the two great pillars of my musical life… BARRY WHITE!

Malcolm Clarke/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Obviously that’s White in the above photo and he is surrounded by Love Unlimited (from left to right: Glodean White, Diane Taylor, and Linda James). You can’t talk about Barry White without Love Unlimited. And you can’t talk about either without the Love Unlimited Orchestra.

It’s a three-for-one deal since they were all over the work of the others.

Anyways, Barry White was born in Galveston, but grew up in Los Angeles. He did some petty crime as a youth before getting himself right and involved in the world of music. He never learned to read or write music, but the man had a creative mind that earned him a few writing credits during the late 1960s.

By the early 1970s, he’d met sisters Glodean and Linda James and their cousin Diane Taylor. The trio would become Love Unlimited and White wrote, produced, and arranged their self-titled 1972 debut album. It had a hit single, “Walkin’ in the Rain With the One I Love” and White’s musical empire was off to the races.

Through 1975, White, Love Unlimited, and their itinerant Orchestra released 10 albums combined including one that topped the Billboard charts and seven of which went gold. They also had a total of five #1 R&B singles and two #1 pop singles in the United States.

This early period, which I call Barry White 1.0, was marked by lush orchestration that helped build and then further disco music. However, with such a hectic release schedule, the formula started to wear a bit thin on quality, if not design.

Barry White 2.0 commenced in 1977 with Barry White Sings For Someone You Love. White still loved his strings, but the music became heavier on the beat. Renewed artistic and commercial success continued through 1980 before things dried up badly in the early 1980s.

By 1983, Love Unlimited and the Orchestra were defunct and White stopped recording new solo music. Adding tragedy to the proceedings, Taylor died of cancer in 1985.

Barry White 3.0 kicked off in 1987 as The Maestro finally got back into the studio. He released a couple of respectable albums, but finally hit pay dirt in 1994 with The Icon Is Love. The comeback LP was the best selling album of his career. His final album was released in 1999 before his death on July 4, 2003.

Glodean James (who had married Barry back in the early 70s) and her sister Linda are still around as are numerous musicians who had early starts in the Love Unlimited Orchestra including Ray Parker Jr., Kenny G, and Nathan East.

ALBUM REVIEWS and PLAYLISTS

soulfinger

Discussion about this post