- T. Watts
- Posted On
The soulful trip of Gloria Scott
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Here’s a nice Dr. Feelgood read for you. We have quite yet another star in the Lake County constellation.
She is a singer/songwriter who went on the road with Dick Clark’s Rock & Roll Road Show. Her first record was produced by Sly Stone. She worked her way up the ranks of Ike & Tina Turner’s review as an Ikette. Tina Turner mentions her in her acclaimed biography.
She signed with Barry White’s Soul Unlimited label and has recorded an album produced by him.
With an underground following in Europe since one of her recordings was re-released in London, she had played the acclaimed Baltic Soul Weekender for 14 consecutive years until the dread COVID-19 stopped that festival in its tracks this year
Gloria Scott lives in Nice, California, and is still making music. She recently shared her story with Lake County News.
Of course, the first question was how did she come to land in Lake County?
“I lived and entertained in Guam for a while. I became good friends with Dianne, wife of the bass player, George Rawls, in the band I was singing in. We stayed in touch and a couple of years ago I was looking for a place and Dianne started helping me look. Suddenly, her rental property became available and that’s where I’m staying now. Dianne is one of my best friends,” Scott explained.
Like Janis Joplin, Gloria Scott was born in Port Arthur, Texas. At 9 months of age, she was moved to Houston where her first musical memories of being in church happened.
“My mom was very musical,” she said. “As a matter of fact, we’d have to go to church all day long. I would fall asleep and hear my mother sing and wake up. When she would finish singing, I would fall back to sleep. Later in life, she told me she once sang on a Gospel show with Sam Cooke & the Soul Stirrers. But she decided to have a family and married very young. So her work with Sam Cooke was before she was married.”
The piano lessons the young Gloria started at the age of 10 were curtailed early on when they became too expensive for the household.
“I did learn a little bit though, and later on started teaching myself chords. So that’s how I started writing songs. I still dabble a little bit. In fact, I currently play for a little church in Lucerne,” she said.
Gloria and her family moved to California in 1960, initially East Palo Alto then Sunnyvale. It was in Sunnyvale where she met Sly Stone.
“The first time I saw him was through my aunt when we first moved to East Palo Alto,” Scott said. “We stayed with her until we found our own place. My aunt, Centranella Boulding, had a rehearsal of her Gospel group at her place. The group consisted of Sly, his sister Rose, their cousin, and my Aunt Centranella. I was 14 years old at the time. The next time I saw Sly was at a school dance during summer school. Sly and his group at the time, The Mojo Men, were playing. My friend got Sly’s attention, pointed to me and told him, ‘She can sing.’
“‘Well, come on up here and sing then,’ he said. So I got up there and sang Gee Whiz. I must’ve impressed him because he started taking me around to sing at their gigs in the Bay Area. I don’t know that I put two and two together about the first time we met or not. It became clearer later,” she said.
“Sly became the first person to take me into the studio and produce me when I recorded ‘I Taught Him’ and ‘Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You’ as Gloria Scott & the Tonettes. When we played one of many Rock & Roll shows at the Cow Palace, the Tonettes were Sly, his Sister Rose, and their cousin La Tonya. I met Marvin Gaye and Betty Everett at the Cow Palace show. When San Francisco-based Bobby Freeman, who was also being produced by Sly, heard ‘Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You,’ he told Sly, ‘I want you to write me a song like that.’ That’s when they came up with ‘The Swim.’ Bobby Freeman was a gifted singer and performer. We shared the bill at many dances and sock hops during that time. Sly looked out for me and didn’t want anybody messin’ with me,” Scott said.
After working with Sly Stone, and other Bay Area artists including John Turk and Clifford Coulter, Scott worked jobs and sang at night and on weekends.
“Eventually, I met Charles Sullivan, whose nickname was the ‘Mayor of Fillmore.’ He was the most successful independent booking agent on the West Coast. He had the lease on the Fillmore Auditorium before Bill Graham. He heard me sing and told me that he wanted to introduce me to some people. One night I got a call from him asking me to come down to the Fillmore Auditorium. When I got there, I auditioned for Ike & Tina Turner. They hired me and took me to L.A. immediately,” Scott said.
“I worked with them for about nine months. It was really a good experience despite my not having the stomach for Ike Turner’s shenanigans. I think he was kind of demonic, actually. I can probably tell some stories that have never been told,” she explained.
“I didn’t start working with them right away. I hung around for a few weeks and said, ‘I wanna go home.’ I wasn’t on the show. I was only singing at auditions which Ike Turner held frequently. I went back to the Bay Area and got another call from Ike who wanted to send me and another group of women as the Ikettes out on a Dick Clark Tour. Ike had four or five sets of Ikettes of which I was in one set. I remember Ike and Tina came to our show after I had moved back to the Bay Area. Later, when I moved to L.A. again, Ike came over one day and said, ‘You wanna be an Ikette?’ And with as much excitement as I could muster I replied, ‘Yes, I wanna be an Ikette!’ What happened was the girls on the Dick Clark tour were making more money than the real Ikettes which made them so mad they quit,” Scott recalled.
“Tina really liked me and eventually she let me sing lead on most of the Ikettes songs because I had found the other girls. She even mentions me in her book. I had my own place when I worked with them, but before I was an Ikette, I stayed at their house. My mom had a café in the Bay Area and I took Tina there when we played the Bay. As an Ikette I did a lot of gigs. We were always going somewhere. The final straw for me came when we missed the bus when we were flying to Houston. Ike said, we would have to fly ourselves and be fined one night’s pay. We already weren’t making much money and I said, ‘If he fines me, I’m gonna quit,’” she said.
“I remember Tina recounting to me that she said to Ike, ‘Gloria said if you fine them, she’s going to quit.’ Ike’s response was, ‘Let the bitch quit then.’ And that’s just what I did. I went back to the Bay Area and worked in retail. A friend of mine convinced me to move back to Southern California. I met my songwriting partner, Herman Chaney, in L.A. and after we wrote a few songs, I got a gig doing entertainment for the Job Corps.
“As I went on the road, Herman said he wanted to introduce me to this guy who was interested in a song of ours. We did about 60 shows in 30 days. When I got back home we went right down to Soul Unlimited on Sunset Boulevard. I met Barry White there and played my songs for him and right then and there he said, ‘I’m gonna sign you as an artist. He signed me to a seven-year artist’s contract.
“And though we didn’t do any of my songs, he did put a lot of arranging and orchestration work on the album he produced and arranged for me which was called, ‘What Am I Gonna Do.’ It made a big splash in Germany though it didn’t do so much here. It was on the Casablanca record label. It was only the second album they ever released. The first was by the shock rockers, Kiss. I was at Casablanca before Donna Summer and the P-Funk group Parliament.
“While I was under contract to Barry White, he kind of left me on the shelf. I was working with this guy at Motown and he introduced me to Mary Wilson of the Supremes. I auditioned for her show and she said, ‘Well, we like your singing but you have to lose some weight because we can’t afford to buy more gowns.’ So, I lost about 30 pounds and worked with her about two years; recording and performing. Interestingly, Barry frowned on me working in clubs.
“Meanwhile though, they were playing my album in Europe and I didn’t know. Years passed before I found out. I was living and working in Guam and I met the owner of a club called the Underground and he said, ‘Your name sounds familiar.’ The next time I saw him he had printed out a list of songs that were charting in London and a single of mine titled ‘A Case of Too Much Lovemakin’ from the ‘What Am I Gonna Do’ album had been re-released,” Scott said.
Before COVID-19, Scott had been singing at various music events in Lake County, sitting in with top-shelf locals like Rob Watson and Howard Reggie Dawkins.
“I’m still hoping to get booked at the casinos if the restrictions on live performing ever get lifted,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’m staying busy by creating a line of designer face masks which people have expressed an interest in.”
For booking, Ms. Gloria Scott can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
T. Watts is a music journalist who lives in Lake County, California.