Sylvester’s Private Recordings Reveal His Origins

‘They all said disco died,’ Sylvester remarked in 1980, ‘but I don’t know. I go out dancing all the time.’ The groundbreaking singer – dubbed the Queen of Disco – wasn’t merely deflecting, or downplaying shifts in popular taste. He was stating a lifelong resistance to categories and labels. To Sylvester, dancing, not disco, was the music. A song was a song. How does it move you? 

Private Recordings, August 1970 (2023), released by Dark Entries Records on what would have been Sylvester’s 76th birthday (he died from AIDS-related complications in 1988), moves. At first listen, the unvarnished nine-song album recorded with Peter Mintun on Weber upright piano may seem a sonic world away from the surging Patrick Cowley-produced chart-champion ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),’ (1978) but Sylvester’s distinctive falsetto is immediately recognizable, and magnetic. This collection of blues, jazz and gospel songs shows the singer’s origins and influences, serving as a template for his later recordings.

The album opener, Billie Holiday’s signature ‘God Bless the Child’ (1941), was included on Sylvester and the Hot Band (1973) in a bluesy horns-inflected rock‘n’roll version, with the Pointer Sisters on backing vocals, for the Blue Thumb label. The group toured the US and opened for David Bowie at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, but both its albums sold poorly and the Hot Band parted ways with Sylvester in 1974. The fleshed-out full band version doesn’t capture the vulnerability and bad wisdom of the song like the stripped down one on Private Recordings, August 1970. Underlying this rendition, unmistakably, is the influence – musical and personal – of the all-day worship services at the Pentecostal Palm Lane Church of God in Christ, in South Los Angeles where Sylvester first sang and was met with praise and adulation as a child, before later being shunned for his sexuality, finally leaving the church at 13. 

The parlour-style rawness of the songs – including snippets of banter and jangling bracelets – suit the material. Mintun, with whom the singer performed at Nocturnal Dream Shows, the midnight extravaganzas staged by anarcho-drag troupe the Cockettes, is a simpatico collaborator. He even staged stunning black and white photos of Sylvester in vintage finery, channelling those yesteryear chanteuses, which are included with Private Recordings. As a nightclub singer on a daytrip, Sylvester’s flair for the dramatic is on full display, as is his belief in music’s power to transform and create other realities.

Sylvester imbues standards like ‘Stormy Weather’ (1933) and ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ (1929) with the personal and the historical. He opens a door to a period of time: music of the 1920s and 1930s, his mother’s music. There are campy flourishes, but his phrasing draws on Dinah Washington, Bessie Smith and Decca-era Holiday. Some of Sylvester’s near-gossamer moments recall Little Jimmy Scott’s early 1950s (and criminally uncredited) recordings with the Lionel Hampton band, and ‘Embraceable You’ (1928) with Charlie Parker, which was miscredited to female vocalist Cubby Newsom. (Scott could not catch a break.) 

Sylvester was only 22 years old at the time of the recording. He’d already lived a lifetime, between what he’d endured at church and leaving home young, followed by years bouncing between his grandmother’s and friends, then running with the Disquotays, a group of gay black men who risked arrest under ‘anti-masquerading’ laws, and threw parties at Etta James’s house when she was out of town. He arrived in San Francisco from Los Angeles in 1970 and carved out a place for himself with the Cockettes. His singular performances as Ruby Blue, a persona he described as ‘Billie Holiday’s cousin once-removed,’ are the foundation of this recording, with its fly-on-the-wall vibe. On ‘Carioca’ Sylvester asks Mintun, ‘are we taping this?’. Whereas ‘When My Dreamboat Comes Home’ finds them working out the song as they perform. The wordless jazz vocalizing of ‘Viper’s Drag’ and the duet on ‘Indian Love Call’ have a late-night party charm.

Sylvester would go on to have disco hits, but they also bore the marks of his influences – the church was often present in his voice. The glitter gospel of the sublime, transporting eleven-plus minutes of ‘I (Who Have Nothing)’ (1979) is a testimony to yearning. He wrote and recorded many songs inflected with rhythm and blues, the standards never far from his heart. And he continued to shrug off any attempts to pigeonhole his gender presentation or musical genre. On The Late Show with Joan Rivers in 1986, the legendary comedian asked him what his family thought of him being a drag queen. ‘I’m Sylvester!’ he replied. 

Sylvester’s Private Recordings, August 1970 is released by Dark Entries Records on 6 September, which would have been the artist’s 76th birthday. All proceeds from the record will go to the two charities that Sylvester left his royalties to after his death: Project Open Hand and PRC (formerly AIDS Emergency Fund)

^{Main image: Sylvester, Private Recordings, August 1970, 2023, detail, featuring Peter Mintun’s photograph. Courtesy: Dark Entries Recordings}