Before there was Earth, Wind & Fire, there was the Salty Peppers. This was White’s first attempt at assembling a band, having previously cut his teeth as a successful session drummer with the Chicago jazz imprint, Cadet. With White handling percussion, he brought aboard keyboardist Don Whitehead and vocalist Wade Flemons. As the Salty Peppers, the group released a pair of singles, including the smooth, soulful Your Love Is Life which had the backing of Capitol Records yet failed to hit. Undeterred, White and company decided to seek their fortune elsewhere, decamping for Los Angeles in 1970. Salty Peppers was not a name destined to last and White turned to the stars for new inspiration. Born under the Sagittarius sign, White told interviewer Rickey Vincent: “In my astrological chart, the elements are earth, wind and fire.”  There’s no such thing as an overnight success and that certainly was the case with EW&F. Soon after the move to LA, White landed the group both a record deal with Warner Brothers and the opportunity to serve as the soundtrack band for Melvin Van Peebles’s surprise hit 1971 blaxploitation film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Despite these auspicious signs, the group’s eponymous album barely made a dent in an already crowded market for young R&B groups. Fans who discovered the group through their polished mid-70s hits like Shining Star or Devotion might be surprised to hear how raw EW&F were in those first years. You can hear the influence of Sly and the Family Stone’s experiments in psychedelia and the twitchiness of James Brown’s funk sides not to mention the heavy horns you might expect from Kool and the Gang in their own early incarnations, especially on the tense, pulsating Moment of Truth.  The group’s failure to launch with Warner Brothers led White to change labels and move over to Columbia, jettisoning much of his original band in the process. The “modern” EW&F lineup came into formation, including bassist Verdine White (Maurice’s brother), organist Larry Dunn and vocalist Philip Bailey, whose honeyed-voice would power many of the group’s later ballad hits. Power is notable as one of the first times Maurice White put his beloved kalimba thumb piano on to a record. White had experimented with the kalimba – an African thumb piano – back in his Cadet days and he gradually began to incorporate its dulcet, bell-like melodies into more and more of Earth, Wind & Fire’s songs. As he shared in the liner notes to the group’s Eternal Dance anthology, “the kalimba represented my link to Africa. It was my way of taking part of that culture and spreading it all over the world.”  Though Sun Goddess is credited to pianist Ramsey Lewis, it is arguably far more of an EW&F song, especially since White co-wrote it while most of the players were all from the band, including vocalist Philip Bailey and White’s bassist brother, Verdine. White and Lewis went back to those Chicago days and by this point in the mid-1970s, both men were deep into funk-infused excursions in soul-jazz so a collaboration between them felt both natural and inspired. The opportunity to record Sun Goddess came spontaneously, when EW&F breezed into Chicago between shows to tape with Lewis. Towards the end of the recording process, White still felt like something was missing and as Lewis recently recounted for Jazz Weekly: “They were leaving for California the next day, so [White] said, ‘Tell you what; I’ll go in. Me and Philip [Bailey]. We’ll just say ‘Way-oh, Way-oh’.” Lewis told White: “All right. That will work.” The Sun Goddess album would soon go on to top the jazz, pop and R&B charts.  By 1976, Maurice White and EW&F were in the midst of a string of hit singles and albums that allowed White to approach Columbia and land a production deal. One of the first acts that White brought under Kalimba Productions was the Emotions, the girl group originally signed to Volt Records who, at that point, hadn’t released any new material in four years. White shepherded the Emotions back into commercial relevancy with Flowers, producing the entire LP and co-writing the title song, along with EW&F guitarist Al McKay. Considering the denser disco sound of EW&F in that era, Flowers moved with an unexpectedly light touch that meshed well with the bright voices of the Emotions themselves. White also brought the group on tour to help open for EW&F and the Emotions’ singer/songwriter Wanda Hutchinson told SoulMusic.com in 2011: “They started calling us the Girl Earth, Wind & Fire when we were on the road, and [White] said he used us as his horns and percussion. They called us the Percussion Horns of Maurice.”
Soul Side’s blogger Oliver Wang takes a dive into the funk icon’s back catalogue to unearth some hidden gems