Everything Is Everything by Donny Hathaway

Everything Is Everything is the first studio album by American soul artist Donny Hathaway, which was released on July 1, 1970 on the Atlantic Records' subsidiary, Atco. The album was Hathaway's first release after being signed to Atlantic in 1969. Hathaway had already built a reputation early in his life, first as a gospel singer as a child under the name Donny Pitts. Raised in St. Louis, with religious influences, his grandmother Martha Crumwell was herself an accomplished gospel singer and guitarist. After dropping out of Howard University in 1967, Hathaway moved to Chicago, his birthplace, and started working on music for Curtis Mayfield's Curtom Records label where he was a songwriter, producer, arranger, composer, conductor and session player. Everything Is Everything was produced by Hathaway and Ric Powell, who plays drums and percussion on the album; Hathaway wrote or co-wrote five of the album's nine songs. Hathaway had met Powell while at Howard University, as well as the future Impressions lead singer, Leroy Hutson, who jointly wrote the hit song that would eventually make it on the album, "The Ghetto". The track was mostly an instrumental, except for Hathaway's vocal ad-libs and his singing of the chorus. Hathaway and Hutson composed another socially conscious song for the album, titled "Tryin' Times". Other songs were split between covers (Ray Charles's "I Believe to My Soul" and Nina Simone's "To Be Young, Gifted and Black"), spiritual affairs ("Thank You Master for My Soul") and love songs ("Je Vous Aime (I Love You)"). Released in July 1970, the album peaked at #73 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart and #33 on the Billboard R&B Albums chart. Critics have since called Hathaway's debut his finest album. Joel Dorn wrote that the album was the artist's best and that it had, "a certain innocence to it. Afterwards, he was a genius, but right then, he was just another guy tryin'" It would be one of four solo studio albums, including the soundtrack for Come Back, Charleston Blue, that Hathaway released in his lifetime.