Star Smile Mad

Nick Ashford, of Motown Writing Duo, Dies at 70

(source: NYTimes.com)

Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson performing in 2006 at the Regency Hotel in Manhattan.

Nick Ashford, who with Valerie Simpson, his songwriting partner and later his wife, wrote some of Motown’s biggest hits, like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” before they remade their careers as a recording and touring duo, died on Monday in New York City. He was 70 and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Ashford had throat cancer and was undergoing treatment at a New York hospital, but the cause of his death was not immediately reported. His death was announced by the music publicist Liz Rosenberg.
One of Motown’s leading songwriting and producing teams, Ashford & Simpson specialized in romantic duets of the most dramatic kind, professing the power of true love and the comforts of sweet talk. In “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” from 1967, their first of several hits for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, lovers in close harmony proclaim their determination that “no wind, no rain, no winter’s cold, can stop me, baby,” while also making cuter promises like “If you’re ever in trouble, I’ll be there on the double.” Gaye and Terrell also sang the duo’s songs “Your Precious Love,” “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” and “You’re All I Need to Get By.” After leaving the Supremes in 1970, Diana Ross sang their “Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand,” and later that year her version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” became her first No. 1 single as a solo artist.
“They had magic, and that’s what creates those wonderful hits, that magic,” Verdine White of Earth, Wind and Fire told The Associated Press after learning of his friend’s death. “Without those songs, those artists wouldn’t have been able to go to the next level.”
Nickolas Ashford was born on May 4, 1941, in Fairfield, S.C., and raised in Willow Run, Mich., where his father, Calvin, was a construction worker. He got his musical start at Willow Run Baptist Church, singing and writing songs for the gospel choir. He briefly attended Eastern Michigan University, in Ypsilanti, before heading to New York, where he tried but failed to find success as a dancer.
In 1964, while homeless, Mr. Ashford went to White Rock Baptist Church in Harlem, where he met Ms. Simpson, a 17-year-old recent high school graduate who was studying music. They began writing songs together, selling the first bunch for $64. In 1966, after Ray Charles sang “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” a song Ashford & Simpson wrote with Josephine Armstead, the duo signed on with Motown as writers and producers.
They wrote for virtually every major act on the label, including Gladys Knight and the Pips (“Didn’t You Know You’d Have to Cry Sometime”) and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (“Who’s Gonna Take the Blame”).
While writing for Motown, Ashford & Simpson nursed a desire to perform, which Berry Gordy Jr., the founder of the label, discouraged. They left the label in 1973 and married in 1974.
Ashford & Simpson’s initial collaborations sold poorly, but by the late ’70s they had become fixtures on the upper rungs of the rhythm-and-blues charts with songs like “Don’t Cost You Nothing,” “It Seems to Hang On” and “Found a Cure.” Their biggest success was “Solid,” from 1984, which went to No. 12 on the pop chart in the United States and in Britain climbed as high as No. 3.
They sang of monogamous devotion, and on their album covers the couple were usually pictured pulling each other close in various states of undress. But with his shock of slicked black hair, shirts open to the sternum and playful smile, Mr. Ashford also cut a perfect figure as a seducer for the swinging ’70s.
They continued to write for other singers. “I’m Every Woman” was a hit for Chaka Khan in 1978, and later for Whitney Houston on the soundtrack to the 1992 film “The Bodyguard.”
In 1996, they opened the Sugar Bar on West 72nd Street in Manhattan. Recently they received a credit on Amy Winehouse’s song “Tears Dry on Their Own,” which features a sample from “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”
Mr. Ashford is survived by Ms. Simpson as well as two daughters, Nicole and Asia; three brothers, Paul, Albert and Frank; and his mother, Alice Ashford.
Ashford & Simpson toured throughout their career, their harmony and vocal interplay illustrating the passion of their lyrics and of their life together.
“When Ms. Simpson sits down at the piano and begins to sing in a bright pop-gospel voice, unchanged since the 1970s,” Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote in a review in 2007, “she awakens the spirit and tosses it to Mr. Ashford, whose quirkier voice, with its airy falsetto, has gained in strength from the old days. Soon they are urging each other on. By the time their romantic relay winds to a close, both are sweating profusely, and the audience is delirious.”


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