Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Friday, June 16. I’m Gustavo Arellano, reporting from Orange County. I’m a columnist, which means I’m allowed to have opinions. Such as:
Jesse Belvin deserves better.
The South L.A.-based R&B singer died instantly in a car accident in 1960 in Arkansas after performing at a Little Rock concert headlined by Jackie Wilson. Belvin was on the cusp of mainstream success — a singer-songwriter who grew up with soul titans like Etta James and Richard Berry (author of “Louie, Louie”) and whose earliest gigs came through local legends Big Jay McNeely and Johnny Otis. Lou Rawls once said that everyone in his crew “bowed down to Jesse, even Sam.”
As in Sam Cooke.
Although his career was short, Belvin nevertheless secured his spot in music history through three songs that still get played 65 years after their release. He’s one of the co-writers of “Earth Angel,” perhaps the most famous doo wop track of them all, and sang the dreamy “Goodnight My Love,” the closing theme to Alan Freed’s pioneering rock ‘n’ roll show. And Belvin switched from a velvety tenor to an impossible falsetto for the Shields’ ”You Cheated,” which appeared on the late Art Laboe’s “Memories of El Monte” compilation.
But one still wonders what could’ve been.
“We all knew Jesse was the next superstar,” James wrote in her autobiography. Decades after Belvin’s death, she still dreamed about him.
His sad story is getting extra attention this year with the release of “Earth Angels: The Short Lives and Controversial Deaths of Three R&B Pioneers” by Texas A&M University Press. Author Steve Bergsman — who previously published books on Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and the Dixie Cups — examines what happened to Belvin, Guitar Slim and Johnny Ace, who infamously shot and killed himself before a performance in 1924 at just 25.
Conspiracies have swirled around Belvin’s death for decades. Shortly after his passing, newspapers reported that racist fans in Little Rock had slashed the tires of the car that was driving him and three other people to his next show in Fort Worth. It’s an urban legend that has only grown in the decades since his passing, but Bergsman argues it was just a tragic accident and nothing more. He noted no eyewitnesses ever alleged anything nefarious in the immediate aftermath, and that both Wilson — who tried to sing at Belvin’s funeral but “was so broken up he could barely make a sound” — and James discounted the conspiracies.
One true fact: Jo Ann Belvin, Jesse’s wife and manager, survived the crash but was denied medical service until Wilson could drive back from Fort Worth to pay for care. She lapsed into a coma and died.
The Belvins were laid to rest at Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights. The burial ground is notoriously unkempt, but when I visited the Belvins’ gravesite last month, what I saw was even worse than I imagined.
I couldn’t find it.
The exact location of the couple’s grave is available on Find a Grave, but prickly foxtails and weeds wielding burrs covered Jesse and Jo Ann’s gravestone. I had to clear it just to get the above photo.
It’s one final insult to Belvin’s promise, and the future doesn’t look good. The doo-wop societies that used to keep the memory of Belvin and his contemporaries alive are mostly gone, and the only redoubt for oldies-but-goodies left on terrestrial radio is KPFK’s long-running “Rhapsody in Black,” which is exiled to Saturday afternoons.
Hopefully, “Earth Angels” will spur a renewed interest in Belvin. Hopefully, news of his grave’s condition gets to Stevie Wonder, who once described Belvin to the New York Times as “the smoothest, but still one of the most dramatic singers I’ve ever heard anywhere,” to pay for regular upkeep of the site.
Hopefully.
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