Delores Hall: the Broadway actor who moonlighted as a northern soul star
It is easy to get swept down one particular path when it comes to the creative industries, following wherever the success and riches take you, but that rather blinkered view of the cultural landscape does something of a disservice to an artist like Delores Hall, whose soul-tinged talents were always impressively multi-faceted.
Broadway theatre ushered in Hall’s 15 minutes of fame back in 1968, when she was cast as an understudy in the original production of Hair, a role which would eventually see her join the cast of the Los Angeles production later the same year. Her role mainly consisted of performing the solo in the track ‘Aquarius’, a part for which the natural-born vocalist was exceedingly overqualified, but it did enough to establish her as a semi-successful actor of the stage and screen.
As any recent graduate of RADA will tell you, though, acting doesn’t always pay the bills. During her early years, then, Hall moonlighted as a soul and R&B recording artist for cult labels like Mirwood and Keyman in Los Angeles. While those few recordings – the clear stand-out being 1968’s ‘W-O-M-A-N’, a commanding floor-filler which affirms the incredible vocal talents of Hall, while clearly trying to recapture the combination of spelling and feminist empowerment that had worked wonders for Aretha Franklin and ‘Respect’ a year prior.
Ultimately, that fleeting recording career didn’t bring Hall a great deal of attention back in the late 1960s, although she did release two LPs via RCA and Capitol during the 1970s that fared a little better with the power of a major record label behind them.
That is not to say, however, that Delores Hall’s early recordings fell into complete obscurity. In fact, both ‘W-O-M-A-N’ and her debut single, ‘Whether I’m Right Or Wrong’, recorded alongside Jackie Lee, eventually found their way to the northern soul scene, which sprang up in the industrial towns and cities of northern England during the 1970s.
Northern soul DJs and collectors coveted the kind of obscure yet incredibly powerful soul singles that Hall was producing in her pre-Hair days, and what’s more, both Mirwood and Keyman quickly grew cult followings within the northern soul scene for their extensive rosters of woefully underrated releases. The footstomping success of the LA-based vocalist, then, was something of an inevitability as far as the northern soul scene was concerned.
Nevertheless, the sprung dancefloors of Wigan Casino were thousands of miles away from Delores Hall, who spent much of the 1970s continuing to act on Broadway in productions like The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Your Arms Too Short to Box With God – for which she earned a Tony Award in 1977.
A 1976 review in The New York Times even cited Hall as a “fervent star” who “sings as if her heart depended upon it” – a fitting summary of her activity both on the stage and in the recording booth.
In fact, the likelihood is that Hall never gave another thought to those early singles after they failed to enter the pop charts on their initial release. She was, after all, on to bigger and better things shortly thereafter. The possibility that thousands of sweaty, amphetamine-fueled young people were dancing all night to those songs, in cities and towns which she had likely never heard of, probably never entered her mind – indeed, why would it?
Since the 1990s, Hall has been living in relative obscurity – in fact, over the course of researching this article, I could find no concrete evidence that she is still living – with her last credits being for the television programme Diagnosis Murder, in which she played a nurse.
There is a distinct possibility, however depressing, that Hall never became aware of her cult status on the northern soul scene. However, her legacy certainly lives on, both in the history of Broadway theatre and on the talcum-covered dancefloors of northern England; the kind of career diversity that isn’t afforded to many.
