WOW Gal Angel

Linda (Epstein) Creed

Linda Creed grew up in North Philly. Her mother cleaned other people's houses. Her father worked construction. They didn't have much.

But Linda had something no one could take from her. Words. She filled notebooks with poetry from the time she could hold a pen.

Pain became rhythm. Longing became melody. Feelings her neighborhood had no language for Linda found for them.

At 16, she was showing up outside recording studio doors. Not to perform. Not to audition. Just to watch. Just to stand close enough to the music to learn how it was made.

The producers soon noticed her. A young Black woman who understood how words married music. Who could feel what a melody needed before it was finished.

When she finished high school, Linda, like so many others before her, headed up the Turnpike to New York City to realize her dreams. She got a music business job working as a secretary for Mills music and in her spare time she worked on developing her lyric writing skills. But her dreams, like those of so many before her, died on the streets on the Big Apple and she returned home to Philadelphia, feeling defeated, eight months later.

All was not lost, however. She refused to give up and she was only 22 years old when her break came as Dusty Springfield recorded Linda’s song “Free Girl.”

At around that time, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff had gotten Philadelphia International Records off the ground and had formed a subsidiary company called Mighty Three Music. The third member of the trio was songwriter/arranger Thom Bell. She was signed to Mighty Three Music and began working on songs with Bell. She had found her partner: composer Thom Bell. He built the music. She built the words. Together, they created something Philadelphia hadn't heard before.

In 1971, Bell was producing the Stylistics and one of the songs they chose to record was a Bell/Creed composition called “Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart).” The single was a hit, reaching #6 on the Billboard R&B chart and crossing over to Top 40 success on the pop chart. Then came "Betcha By Golly Wow." This song that played at every wedding, every slow dance, every anniversary for fifty years straight. Every word of it was Linda's.

She was 23 years old when she wrote "You Make Me Feel Brand New." It landed Number two on the charts and earned her a Gold record. Millions of copies sold around the world.

She wrote for The Stylistics, The Spinners, Johnny Mathis, Artists whose names filled arenas. Her name filled nothing. She made decent money. Not wealthy. Not famous. Just a working songwriter whose words made everyone around her rich and known.

Linda got married in 1972 and her string of hits continued with tracks by Johnny Mathis (“Life is a Song Worth Singing,” later covered by Teddy Pendergrass), Phyllis Hyman (“Old Friend”), and others. In 1976, She and her husband, along with their baby daughter, left Philadelphia to live in Los Angeles. The future seemed bright but there were dark clouds on the horizon. That same year, Linda underwent a radical mastectomy after being diagnosed with breast cancer.

Then, in 1976, something changed inside her body. Exhaustion that sleep couldn't fix. Bruises that appeared without reason. A bone-deep pain that simply would not stop. The tests came back. Breast cancer. Stage 3. Aggressive. Already moving through her lymph nodes.

Chemotherapy. Radiation. Surgery. Her hair fell out. Her weight dropped. Her body, the one that had carried all those words for 27 years, was being dismantled from the inside. She kept writing. Through every treatment. Through every hospital corridor. Through every morning she woke up unsure whether she was getting better or running out of time.

In 1977, she wrote something different. It was commissioned for a Muhammad Ali film — a song about a fighter. About what it takes to keep standing when everything wants to knock you down. But Linda wrote something deeper than a boxing metaphor. She wrote what she had learned in those hospital rooms. What she had discovered when her body stopped being something she could rely on. "Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all."

She wrote those words while cancer was consuming her. While she was relearning, day by day, what it meant to value her own existence — not for what she could produce, not for the hits she could write, but simply because she was alive and she mattered.

Composer Michael Masser set her lyrics to music. George Benson recorded it first. It became a genuine hit. Climbed the charts. People loved it. Most of them never looked at who wrote it.

The cancer went into remission in 1978. She believed she had won. Two years of real, breathing hope. She kept writing. More songs. More invisible success. Then 1980 arrived.

The cancer returned. This time it had spread further — her lymph nodes, her liver, her lungs. She kept writing anyway. By 1985, she was in and out of hospitals. Connected to machines. Running out of options. She kept a notebook beside her hospital bed.

She was still filling it when a young singer named Whitney Houston walked into a recording studio and laid down a vocal performance that would shake the world.

By 1980, Linda and her family, which now included a second daughter, were back in Philadelphia. There, she had more success with Pendergrass (“Hold Me,” a duet with Houston), Johnny Gill (“Half Crazy”), and others. Over the years her songs have been covered by artists including Roberta Flack, Rod Stewart, Smokey Robinson, and Michael Jackson.

Whitney Houston’s version of “The Greatest Love of All” was released on March 18, 1986. Linda lost her long battle with cancer less than one month later.

One would like to think she knew that her lyrics, which were written while she was struggling with cancer and dealt with trying to cope with the challenges that life brings, helped to take the single to the top of the charts. It was one last beautiful message that Linda left us as her all-too-short life came to an end at the age of 38. A short life surely, but just as surely one of incredible achievement.

In 1992, Linda Creed was posthumously elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

You may not know her name and yet she was responsible, in part, for some of your favorite records. The more you learn about Linda Creed, the more you realize just how extraordinary her journey was from the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia to the top of the pop and soul charts. Her journey was as unlikely as it was spectacular.

Compiled & Contributed by Fan, Carolyn Shannon

Resources for More Info:

https://popdose.com/soul-serenade-linda-creed-songwriter/

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