Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
The Secret History of Chicago Music may have my name on it, but it’s never a one-man show. I often consult experts, especially when I’m covering an unfamiliar genre or I hit a dead end in my research. Earlier this month, in fact, I turned to Chris Young of the excellent blog Downstate Sounds to tell the story of garage band the Rooks. When I write about R&B artists, I always consult Robert Pruter’s authoritative Chicago Soul. I also hit up local author Aaron Cohen, a fellow Reader contributor whose credits include writing the 2019 book Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power and cowriting Ramsey Lewis’s 2023 memoir.
When I cover a soul or R&B artist, often Cohen will write me afterward to casually share an extensive interview he’s already done with them. So this time, when I started digging for information about soul singer Mitty Collier, I made sure to contact Cohen in advance. “Pastor Collier,” he immediately replied. “Don’t call her Mitty.”
Collier released a long string of singles on Chess Records in the 1960s, but she left her secular singing career behind in the early 1970s. Her second act as a servant of the Lord has lasted more than three times as long. She was ordained in 1989, and today she preaches the gospel as pastor of the More Like Christ Christian Fellowship Church, which she cofounded in 2003 and moved to its current home at 8201 S. Dobson in 2005.
When I reached out to Pastor Collier, I made sure to address her properly—but her reply, while friendly, consisted of a smiley-face emoji and nothing else. Luckily Cohen covers Collier in Move On Up, and she appears in Pruter’s book too. Thanks again, gentlemen!
Mitty Lene Collier was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on June 21, 1941, the youngest of seven children of Rufus and Gertrude Collier. She started singing in church as a teenager and toured Alabama and Georgia with gospel group the Hayes Ensemble. After graduating from Western-Olin High School, Collier studied English at Alabama A&M College and Miles College. By then she was also singing R&B in nightclubs to subsidize her education, and when she was 18 she made a visit to Chicago that changed her life.
“I came to Chicago in 1959 to visit my brother who was living here,” Collier told Pruter. “While I was here I met my French teacher from college, who had helped me a lot in Birmingham. He came here the same year also visiting, and he found different talent shows for me to be on while I was here.”
One of those talent shows was Al Benson’s production at the Regal Theater, which Cohen describes in Move On Up as the biggest such contest in the area. Benson was also one of the city’s best-connected and most influential DJs. “I won that for six weeks straight, first place,” Collier recalled in Chicago Soul. “I did a song called ‘Someday You’ll Want Me to Want You.’ Della Reese recorded it at that particular time.”
Cohen and Pruter tell different tales about how Collier got from Benson’s talent show to her Chess Records deal. Cohen says Benson rewarded her with a gig opening for B.B. King and Etta James and introduced her to a scout for the label. Pruter quotes Collier seemingly saying that the scout saw her at Benson’s talent show. “Ralph Bass, who was with Chess Records, was out there in the audience and he heard me and offered me a contract to sing for Chess,” she said. “That’s how I got a contract with them in 1960.”
In any case, once Collier landed at Chess, she frequently partnered with songwriter-producer Billy Davis, who joined the label in 1961. He’d cut his teeth working with Jackie Wilson at Motown in the late 50s and soon rose to lead Chess’s A&R department. For Collier’s first single, 1961’s “I’ve Got Love” b/w “I Got to Get Away From It All,” she was paired with arranger Riley Hampton and his orchestra, who’d previously worked with Jerry Butler. That record didn’t sell well, though, and Collier wouldn’t have a real taste of success till 1963.
Her first hit single, “I’m Your Part Time Love” b/w “Don’t You Forget It,” reached the top 20 on the Billboard R&B chart in fall of that year with its pleading A side. An answer tune to Little Johnny Taylor’s blues hit “Part Time Love,” it featured recent Secret History subject Gerald Sims on guitar. Powered by that success, Collier began touring the country, eventually performing with and befriending the likes of Gladys Knight, Otis Redding, Patti LaBelle, Marvin Gaye, and Barbara Lynn.
Chess and Collier seemed to be trying to figure out which styles suited her best, and for the 1964 single “I Had a Talk With My Man” b/w “Free Girl (In the Morning)” she looked back to her roots. The classy A side is basically a gospel tune rewritten for a secular setting: it features piano, French horn, and a string section, and it’s loosely based on James Cleveland’s “I Had a Talk With God.” Pruter nails it with his description: “The juxtaposition of Collier’s deep contralto and the sweetening strings produced a profoundly moving and soulful sound.”
This beautiful ballad stayed on the Cash Box R&B chart for 13 weeks, peaking at number three and becoming Collier’s best-known song. It was still big enough two years later, in 1966, that she was invited to perform it on the short-lived TV show The !!!! Beat, hosted by Nashville DJ Bill “Hoss” Allen. Dressed to the nines, she’s accompanied by the show’s large house band (led by Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown) and a couple of dancers in go-go boots who seem unsure how to respond to its gentle tempo. The song was eventually covered by the likes of Dusty Springfield, Jackie Ross, and Shirley Brown.
Another gospel tune from Cleveland’s repertoire, “No Cross, No Crown,” became the basis for Collier’s next 45, 1964’s “No Faith, No Love.” Likewise rewritten as a secular song, it also made an extended stay on the Cash Box R&B chart. After she released several more tracks as singles, Chess collected a dozen of them on the 1965 LP Shades of a Genius (something of a rarity these days).
Collier reached the top ten on the Billboard R&B chart with a slow-burning 1966 cover of “Sharing You” by Carl Henderson (a Sam Cooke-style soul man whose songs have appeared on a couple of the Numero Group’s Eccentric Soul compilations in the past few years). She continued to release great 45s, including the funky, attitudinal groover “Git Out” in 1967 (cowritten by the great Cash McCall), but she’d never score another hit.
During her final few years with Chess, Collier recorded with Leonard Caston Jr. and Monk Higgins in the Windy City and with Rick Hall at the legendary Muscle Shoals in Alabama. But the music business was a minefield for young artists like her, who could be exploited easily because they didn’t have the experience to know how much money they should be making from their records. Chess was hardly an exemplar of honorable dealings (as has been described exhaustively and repeatedly elsewhere), and when she got wise to what was happening, she left the label.
“With us being young, we accepted what they gave us,” Collier told Cohen in Move On Up. “If they gave us an advance we thought that we were something. If they gave me $10,000 and a car, or a leased car, [with me] not knowing that these things would put me in debt for the rest of my life with that quarter of a penny they were giving us for royalties, and having their attorney as our attorney when you’re supposed to have an attorney to protect your rights, but actually protecting the rights of Chess, we didn’t care—we had good clothes, a car, and had some money.”
In 1969 Collier moved to the Peachtree Record Company in Atlanta, but none of her four singles that year did well—despite strong material such as the sublimely powerful soul of “Share What You Got.” Then in 1971 Collier developed polyps on her vocal cords and had to give up singing to recover.
Collier returned to music the following year, but her hiatus seemed to have transformed her—she soon stopped making secular music entirely, devoting herself to gospel. The cover of her ambitious 1972 LP, The Warning (on Chicago-based religious label III A.M.), depicts Collier decked out in a boldly patterned red-and-white muumuu and pointing at an illustration of the planet engulfed in flames—an image just as unforgettable as the devoutly funky songs in its grooves. With the caveat that the Discogs marketplace often inflates prices, its cheapest copy of The Warning as of this writing is going for $75.
Collier would only sporadically release recordings thereafter, including the 1978 LP Hold the Light. . . . , the 1987 album I Am Love (with her daughter Elisha, who’d been born in 1971), and the 2012 CD and DVD I Owe It All to the World. Compilations of her secular work have been appearing for decades, including the 1991 collection Sharing You, the 22-track CD Shades of a Genius in 1998, and the 2008 release Shades of Mitty Collier: The Chess Singles 1961-1968.
From 1978 till 2003, Collier worked as an editorial assistant for The Journal of Chemical Physics at the University of Chicago. Even before she helped launch her own ministry at More Like Christ, she founded a long-running telephone prayer line and an outreach program called Feed a Neighbor. She’s also received several honorary degrees and humanitarian awards.
In 2012, Collier explained to the Sun-Times that she can’t serve two masters—unlike Aretha Franklin and Al Green, she can’t move back and forth between gospel and secular music. Though at the time she was performing a few of her old tunes in a play she’d written about her life, she insisted that otherwise she won’t sing soul or R&B for any amount of money.
Collier still occasionally sings gospel, though, for the congregation she’s built in a former laundromat on the south side. I’m a nonpracticing Jew, but I’d go to church to hear her powerful pipes in person.
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived here.
