What a tune this is! Brilliant by The Rolling Stones, it’s equally brilliant by Jagger’s co-shrieker Merry Clayton, and perhaps even more brilliant in this funked-up version.
Backed by Funkadelic at their loosest and funkiest, Ruth Copeland’s strident rasp of a voice could strip paint from the walls. So it’s a surprise to find that she comes from County Durham, where her father worked for the Consett Iron Company.
In 1965, still in her teens, Copeland travelled to Detroit, where her sister Norma already lived, and soon began performing in clubs there as a blues and folk singer, initially under the stage name Kelly Michaels – and recorded a single, I Need Him.
After being spotted singing by Edwin Starr, she met Motown songwriter and record producer Jeffrey Bowen, who went on to set up Invictus Records with Holland, Dozier and Holland – and become her husband.
In 1969 Copeland signed a contract with the newly-formed company in 1969 who she later revealed had plans to turn her into “a white Diana Ross” though her first effort, as a member of the newly signed group The New Play, was a single called Music Box, failed to take off.
She was then asked to write lyrics for a Holland-Dozier-Holland tune and came up with some words about missing her dog in England; the producers disliked the results and instead hired Ron Dunbar to write new words to the song that became the hit Band Of Gold.
Copeland’s biggest success came when she became involved with the label’s newly signed group Parliament, co-producing their debut album Osmium with George Clinton and writing two tracks – Little Ole Country Boy (complete with yodelling and Jew’s harp) and The Silent Boatman (the first song she ever wrote on her own) – both influenced by British folk and American country music.
Alongside her work on Parliament’s debut, Copeland also began working on solo material. Her first album, Self Portrait, was released by Invictus in October 1970 featuring contributions not only from Clinton, but from a range of other Parliament-Funkadelic musicians, including Bernie Worrell, Eddie Hazel, Tawl Ross, Billy Bass Nelson and Tiki Fulwood.
Its many styles included folk, funk and opera, with one track recorded with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. A second album, I Am What I Am, was released in July 1971.
Once again she was backed by a range of P-Funk musicians, who stayed on as her backing band when she toured to promote her album, regularly supporting Sly and the Family Stone… until he took umbrage at her introducing her band as Funkadelic (even though they were).
At around the same time her marriage to Bowen and Invictus contract came to an end but she co-wrote two more singles for Parliament – – Come In Out Of The Rain and Breakdown – and in 1972 she supported David Bowie on his US concerts.
In 1976 she recorded her third and final album, Take Me to Baltimore, in Philadelphia, featuring a duet with the record’s co-producer Daryl Hall called Heaven, but it flopped.
Shortly afterwards she retired from the music business, remarried, and started a new career as a production executive at a publishing firm, The Blue Book Network of Commercial Construction.