Detroit deejay LeBaron Taylor introduced him to Ed Wingate, owner of the Ric-Tic label, and he signed Starr to a recording contract. “This is a current topic now, and if I do wait, by the time I get a chance to actually go in a record it, it’ll be old hat.”Ĭonvinced that his secret agent song was a surefire hit, Starr quit Doggett’s group, and the opportunity to record it swiftly presented itself. “I said to him, I can’t wait a year”, Starr recalled to Dahl. Starr went to Doggett and told him that he wanted to record his new song, but Doggett didn’t think he was ready for a solo career and advised him to wait a year. And I came up with ‘Agent Double-O-Soul’.” I watched the movie like three times, and then went back to my hotel room, and I was sitting there contemplating on the idea of what the movie was all about, and trying to figure out how to incorporate that into a song. And that whole ideology behind the James Bond films, happened to be the flavor of the month. “I went to the movie while I was there, and the movie happened to be Goldfinger, you know, the James Bond movie. “We had like three or four days off in New York,” he told writer Bill Dahl. While playing in New York City, Starr had a cinematic epiphany. One night he introduced me as Edwin Starr and played a riff, so I knew my new name would cost me five dollars.” “If you’d done something wrong,” Starr recalled, “Bill would play a little riff on his organ, which meant you would be fined five dollars. Starr traveled with Doggett’s organization for two-and-a-half years and gained valuable road experience. After hearing Edwin’s voice, Briggs told him that he would be a star some day and said that he should use the name ‘Starr’ with the extra ‘r’. It was Doggett’s manager, Don Briggs, who invited him to join the combo and also suggested Starr’s stage name. Doggett was a pianist/organist who had charted nine R&B instrumental singles in the 1950’s, including his biggest hit, “Honky Tonk (Pts. Billie Holiday was starring, and I was completely in awe of her because I was meeting the greatest singer ever."įollowing a two-year hitch in the army, which included being stationed in Germany, Starr joined Bill Doggett’s combo as a singer. The real prize was an appearance for the group at a nightclub. “So he bought it off us and we split the money. “Luckily, the father of one of the guys had a bad back”, Starr told him. The group lasted from 1955 to 1960, and they performed mostly at school dances and other social functions.Įdwin StarrStarr told interviewer Spencer Leigh that the Futuretones won an orthopedic mattress on a local television talent show. Inspired by his musical hero Jackie Wilson, Starr began singing in a teenaged doo wop group called the Futuretones. His father was a serviceman, so the family moved around quite a bit before finally settling in Cleveland, Ohio. Starr was born Charles Edwin Hatcher on January 21, 1942, in Nashville. Although the song did not specifically refer to Vietnam, it became an anthem of the anti-war movement, and it has been used for comment on conflicts around the world ever since. At Hitsville U.S.A., his extraordinary recording of “War” touched a generation. Starr also sang lead for the Holidays, who recorded for Golden World, Ric Tic’s sister label.Īfter Motown purchased Ric-Tic/Golden World, Starr would eventually join the stable of great artists who were producing ‘ the sound of young America’. His rough, powerful voice was first heard on the James Bond-inspired “Agent Double-O-Soul”, released on Detroit’s Ric-Tic label in 1965. Great as the talent was at Motown, nobody could out-sing Edwin Starr.
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