Ever since word came, this past summer, of Luther Vandross' death, I've wanted to write a column about the impact of his music on my life.

Understand this: I'm a Luther girl. I was there with him in good and bad times, in much-publicised sickness and in health. Dance tunes or ballads. Whether fat Luther or skinny Luther. The old songs and the new. I was a fan all the way. Will always be, I guess.

The first of these weekly columns I wrote in June 2003 was titled "Where have all the singers gone?" It was in part a tribute to Luther and the other real singers of that era, and came about as a result of the recent news that he'd suffered a stroke.

VANDROSS. wanted to be remembered as a premier singer of songs

I remember writing about how devastated I was at both Luther's and Barry White's health problems. Barry White went on to die but I held out hope that Luther would make it. Dance With My Father was great. But I fantasised about him coming back, rising like a phoenix from the ashes, with another number one hit. I didn't think the world was ready to be rid of as prodigious a talent as his.

I didn't know Luther Vandross personally. I daresay not many of his fans did. But that didn't stop us from loving him. He was an extremely private person. We understood this about him. And we respected it.

We respected him. He was not from that school of Deconstruction that's so de rigueur nowadays in showbiz, where the artiste, as well as his work are put under the microscope. I didn't know what kind of underwear Luther preferred.

I didn't care. It had nothing to do with anything, as far as I was concerned. He rebuffed a BET interviewer who once enquired of his sexuality, stating that his personal life was nobody's business but his own.

He was right, of course. In the end, all that mattered was, is, the work. (And, with more than 25 million copies sold, and every one of his 14 solo albums achieving platinum or multi-platinum status, man, did his work speak.)

Still, I cared deeply about Luther, felt fiercely protective of him. I took exception, for example, to those crass rumour-mongers who speculated about the reasons for his dramatic weight loss. It's funny how someone of whom I knew so little became such a big part of my life for so long.

Twenty-four years. A helluva long time. Longer than any relationship I've had with any guy.
Luther, you must remember, came through to the Jamaican airwaves at a moment when our local music was not enjoying the amount of airplay it does today. I knew more about the foreign R&B artistes than I did our local ones.

The music of Luther Vandross was (I think, more than any other foreign recording artiste's of the time - with maybe the exception of Michael Jackson) - the soundtrack to my coming of age in the eighties.

For every pivotal moment of my life, then, I can remember a Luther song that was playing on the radio. This is no joke, you know. When I think about songs like Creepin', Wait For Love, If This World Were Mine, So Amazing, Sugar And Spice, A House Is Not A Home, If Only For One Night, Any Love, Sometimes It's Only Love, I'm brought vividly back to teenage angst, young-adult infatuation, first-time-honest-to-God-grown-up love, and even the sting of heartbreak; all those lurid emotions I experienced when these songs comforted and consoled me.
I became a Luther girl right after his first solo album 'dropped', as the hip-hopsters of the 106&Park generation say today.

1981 and Never Too Much, an album he produced himself with his own money after crushing rejection by the big record outfits of the day, and which went on to sell two million copies. I can still remember, at 16, the utter rhapsodic delight I fell into at the lines of the title single: ".a thousand kisses from you is never too much/ a million days in your arms is never too much."
Wow.

Grammatical unsoundness be damned. The power of the sentiment expressed in the song is what bowled me over.
And this was what I reflected on after Luther's death Friday, July 1, 2005 when I drew my window shades, locked my door and stayed inside listening to his music all weekend long: the power of his songs.

That morning I was maudlin in my grief, tearfully warbling along with the radio and remembering that one time I saw him in concert in Miami.

My melancholy, I reasoned, had to be about more than the passing of a pop cultural icon with whom I associated a special period of my life. Other pop cultural icons have expired in my lifetime, but their deaths haven't had the same impact on me. It finally dawned on me why.

I'd always found in Luther a kindred spirit. Luther's music always dealt with love and relationships - the ups and downs, the highs and lows. We tend to gravitate towards the musical icons of our youth who have some quality about them that, without necessarily our knowing it, broadly define the kind of people we are or want to become.

When I listened to Luther back then in the early eighties, I did not know it at the time, but I was identifying with the voice he was giving vent to; that voice I would later find for myself in my fiction and, to some extent also, my non-fiction.

The voice that became preoccupied with the various permutations of love.

Luther sang about love and relationships ad nauseam. Yet, there wasn't a sense of boring repetition about them. Every time he came out with another song, you could be sure it would be from some different, heretofore unexplored angle.

We always saw love with fresh eyes, in a different light. For me, Luther's songs helped define how I perceived that most essential of emotions, and how I now write about it.

"I'd like to be remembered as a premier singer of songs," he once remarked, "not just a popular act of a given period." His body of work will see to it because that was the power of Luther Vandross. That was the power of his love.

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'

Cheeky's World