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My Life with
Earth Wind & Fire
by Maurice White with Herb Powell
c.2016, Amistad
$27.99 / $34.99 Canada
385 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
Your needs are very simple.
Food, shelter, water. Those are the essentials, but then
there are the things you need for yourself: family, good
friends, a warm bed, a good book, and a place of welcome.
You wouldn’t die without them, but those things spice
your life. And if you were Maurice White, author of
My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire (with Herb
Powell), you’d add one more: music.
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Born in Memphis at a time when Jim Crow ruled the south,
Maurice White was four years old when his mother told him
that she needed to go to Chicago to find a job. She left him
with a friend who became White’s “Mama,” and who raised him
with strength and wisdom.
He was a quiet boy, a born introvert, but Mama taught him by
example to love God, Mahalia and Ray Charles, though he was
in junior high when he fell “deep under the spell of music.”
White and his best friend pulled together a band then, and
one of the members encouraged White to find his spiritual
core and think in different ways.
At 18, not long before his Mama died of cancer, White headed
for Chicago to live with his “Mother Dear,” his birth
mother, who’d remarried and was raising six children. She
offered him a place to stay, but he wanted to be his own
man; he also wanted to emulate his stepfather and attend
medical school, but music had such an allure that he told
“Dad” that he’d been called to a different vocation. White
became “a sponge” to soak up all he could learn about the
music business.
By early 1970, he knew what kind of music he wanted to play.
He’d been a bandleader before, and he was eager to do it
again. An astrologer had even handed him a “piece to my
puzzle,” an astrological chart was filled with “‘only fire,
air, and earth signs’.”
Which brings us to page 77, almost the quarter-point of this
memoir. That means My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire is
one very wordy book.
That’s not to say it’s bad – at least not the first half of
it, anyhow. The late author Maurice White (with Herb Powell)
tells of Jim Crow from the point of view of a child, of the
Civil Rights Movement, and what it was like in the early
days of Motown, Chess Records and a new kind of rock & roll.
Because White and Powell are so casual in their
storytelling, those memories feel like a conversation with
readers.
At roughly the part where White switches gears musically, so
does the book. There’s where we get a lot of detail about
the band, players, gigs and such – valuable info if you can
follow along. Musical mud, if you can’t.
Therefore, the audience for this book, I think, is with a
professional musician or a die-hard EW&F fan. Pass on it, if
you’re not – but if you are, My Life with Earth, Wind &
Fire could be elemental.
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