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.
Lately the Secret History of Chicago Music has been playing a losing game, trying to keep up with the all-too-frequent passings of underappreciated musicians from the 1960s and ’70s. I’ll celebrate some living artists soon, but first I want to shine a light on Gerald Sims, who died in May. Sims made immortal contributions to soul, blues, and rock, mostly as a songwriter and producer, and he also owned and helped maintain a Record Row building that’s hallowed ground to anyone who cares about Windy City music history. Last but not least, as a session musician he played on two of the best-loved soul songs of all time.
Gerald Sims was born in Chicago on January 5, 1940, but when he was still very young his mother moved him and his three brothers by bus to Kalamazoo, Michigan—she thought there was too much trouble for them to get into in the big city. Because Sims had developed a limp due to a childhood polio infection, though, he avoided a lot of physical activities. He didn’t get into sports like his brothers, instead teaching himself how to play guitar.
At age 19, Sims returned to Chicago, and within a couple years he’d found one of his first regular jobs as a musician—playing with transplanted Alabama band the Daylighters. The group initially consisted of Tony Gideon, Eddie Thomas, Charles Boyd, and brothers Dorsey and George Wood, and they’d formed in 1956 at Hooper City High School in Birmingham. After relocating to Chicago, they collaborated pre-stardom with soul goddess Betty Everett on “Why Did You Have to Go.”
The Daylighters were in need of a guitar player and a songwriter, and WGES radio DJ George “G.G.” Graves introduced Sims to the group. Their previous recordings had leaned toward doo-wop, but after Charles Colbert Jr. (later of the American Breed) replaced Gideon, the group developed a more modern, soulful sound. Sims became their producer, writer, and lead vocalist in time for their sophisticated ballad “Oh What a Way to Be Loved,” released late in ’61.
More famously, Sims would also write and sing the local hit “Cool Breeze” for the Daylighters. The tune was released on the Tip Top label and reached number 17 on the WLS chart in late 1962. Its smooth Sam Cooke-style lead, do-do-do-ing female backing vocals, funky drum break, and classy string arrangement by Johnny Pate (who was about to become famous for his work with Curtis Mayfield) have made it an enduring favorite of the Northern Soul crowd.
Sims got noticed by Carl Davis of Okeh Records (later of Brunswick), and he left the Daylighters to release a few singles for Okeh under his own name. By the mid-60s, though, he’d grown more interested in the production side of music making. While at Okeh, Sims worked with Davis on scoring and arranging recordings by the likes of Gene Chandler and Walter Jackson. Soon he graduated to handling projects on his own, including Major Lance and the Artistics—he had a hand in the group’s two biggest hits, “I’m Gonna Miss You” and “Girl I Need You,” in 1966 and ’67.
Sims had pretty mixed feelings about Davis, though. “He taught me everything, but then he didn’t want to pay me. Our relationship was getting strained, and I was tired of being a ‘student,’” he told music historian Robert Pruter, author of Chicago Soul. Sims split with Okeh in the late 60s.
Luckily, Okeh wasn’t the only way Sims was making money. Throughout the 60s he played live steadily—in fact, he met his future wife, singer Carol McGillicuddy, at a south-side gig they shared in 1960. They became an open interracial couple at a time when that wasn’t easy in many parts of the city. He also worked for most of the decade as a studio guitarist for Chess Records.
At Chess, Sims would lend spiky guitar to the 1963 single “I’m Your Part Time Love” by soul diva Mitty Collier, and he would cowrite “Voice Your Choice” in ’64 for the Radiants. In 1965, though, he’d make a date with soul-music destiny. At the Chess studios, writer-producers Carl Smith and Raynard Miner, arranger Phil Wright, and soul singer Fontella Bass came together for a woodshedding session where they’d write and refine the future monster hit “Rescue Me.” Once they had their song, they needed a band to record it.
At the sessions for “Rescue Me,” Sims played guitar alongside Pete Cosey (who’d go on to play in Miles Davis’s electric bands). The group also included the rhythm section of Maurice White and Louis Satterfield (both later of Earth, Wind & Fire), tenor saxophonist Gene Barge, organist Sonny Thompson, and backing vocalist Minnie Riperton, plus Miner on keyboards and Charles Stepney on vibraphone. They nailed the song in three takes, and it topped the R&B charts for four weeks and reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100. Frustratingly, Bass didn’t receive a cowriting credit, despite having been involved in creating the tune.
A couple years later, Sims played guitar on another iconic R&B number, Jackie Wilson’s 1967 smash “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher,” also cowritten by Smith and Miner (with Gary Jackson). The credits on the center label identify Sims as having directed the accompaniment on the track, and he also played additional guitar (according to his Sun-Times obituary) alongside Robert White of the Funk Brothers.
Throughout his career, Sims played with a staggering list of important artists, including Etta James, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, the Dells, the Chi-Lites, Barbara Acklin, Ramsey Lewis, Billy Stewart, Nancy Wilson, Willie Dixon, and Mary Wells (he cowrote her 1965 hit “Dear Lover”). In the 1960s, according to the Sun-Times, Sims owned a music school and store near 79th and Cottage Grove, where one of his famous students was his friend Chester Arthur Burnett, better known as Howlin’ Wolf. When Wolf, who was six foot six, showed up for his Tuesday lessons with Sims, his towering frame made his guitar case look as tiny as a violin.
For a few years in the early 70s, Sims worked as an arranger and producer for Jerry and Billy Butler’s Fountain Record Productions, an imprint of Mercury. (He also appeared as a guitarist on Gene Chandler and Jerry Butler’s 1970 LP One & One.) Throughout that decade, Sims would collaborate with artists as diverse as rootsy songwriter Phoebe Snow and gospel group the Spencer Jackson Family.
Sims eventually got into property management and owned several apartment buildings on the south side. He had a reputation as a kind landlord, even when his tenants’ rent wasn’t always on time. “He was a good dude, and that’s what I hope people remember about him,” his son Gerald Jones told the Sun-Times. In 1982, Sims pulled a full-circle move and bought the building at 2120 S. Michigan that Chess Records had occupied until 1965.
Sims ran his own label out of the building for a time, and he dreamed of turning it into a museum. That did eventually happen, but not till after he sold it in 1992 and retired to Florida. Sims suffered from Alzheimer’s late in life, and his family moved him to Burien, Washington, to better care for him. He died at age 83 on May 8, 2023.
A few outlets in Chicago and beyond eulogized Sims (the Sun-Times wasn’t the only one), so it’s not like he’d been totally forgotten in the decades since his retirement. But I guess I’m still disappointed, because I think he’d deserve a place in the most exalted of musical Valhallas just for his work on “Rescue Me” and “Higher and Higher.” We shouldn’t be stingy with those honors just because an artist preferred to work behind the scenes.
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.
