Willie Hutch: An Overnight I'll Be There Lyric and The Mack's Soundtrack

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William McKinley Hutchins was born in Los Angeles in December 1944 and raised in Dallas, where he sang in the teenage choral group the Ambassadors and graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in 1962. As Willie Hutch he began recording in 1964 on the Soul City label, then returned to Los Angeles, where he wrote and arranged for the 5th Dimension. In 1969 he signed with RCA and released Soul Portrait and Season for Love. Motown producer Hal Davis then called him late one night needing lyrics for a Jackson 5 song. Hutch wrote them overnight, the group recorded them the next morning, and the song became I'll Be There.

Berry Gordy signed him as a staff writer, arranger, producer and musician, and he worked with Michael Jackson, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Marvin Gaye. In 1973 he released the solo album Fully Exposed and the soundtrack to The Mack, followed by the 1974 Foxy Brown score, setting funk and layered vocals to Blaxploitation films. He moved to Norman Whitfield's Whitfield Records in 1977, returned to Motown in 1982 with the club hit In and Out, and contributed to The Last Dragon in 1985.

• The Mack soundtrack included Brother's Gonna Work It Out and Slick.
• He released at least six Motown albums in the mid-1970s, and Love Power reached No. 41 on the Hot 100 in 1975.
• His Last Dragon songs were Keep On Jammin' and The Glow.
• Manager Anthony Voigt remembered him as kind, giving and considerate.
• He returned to Dallas by 1994 and died there in September 2005 at 60, and his nephews include Cold 187um of Above the Law and Kokane.