James Gadson, Drummer for Diana Ross and Bill Withers, Dead at 86

James Gadson, the drummer most famous for recording funk, soul, and disco classics with Diana Ross, Bill Withers, and Marvin Gaye but whose discography includes sessions with Beck, Kelly Clarkson, and Leonard Cohen, among several others, died on Thursday. Gadson’s wife, Barbara, confirmed the news to Rolling Stone, saying he’d had some health challenges recently including surgery and a bad fall that hurt his back. He was 86.

“He was a wonderful man,” Barbara says. “He was a great husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather, and one hell of a drummer.”

A versatile and talented drummer, Gadson kept the beat on the one for Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd St. Rhythm Band’s funky “Express Yourself,” played behind the beat on Withers’ feel-good “Lean on Me,” and mastered the four-on-the-floor disco beat for Jackson 5’s “Dancing Machine” and Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

“Most grooves, especially for dance music, are very simple,” Gadson told Modern Drummer. “Even so, to learn them, you have to slow them down. A lot of times we do all these rudimental things to see how fast we can play. I think you have to slow it all down and simplify it. Then you can kind of feel whether it’s danceable or not.”

His skill made him an in-demand session drummer whose CV reads more like a “greatest artists of all-time” list than a discography. Gadson recorded with the Temptations, Bobby Womack, Barbra Streisand, Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle, Herbie Hancock, Freddie King, B.B. King, Albert King, Ray Charles, Leonard Cohen, Paul McCartney, D’Angelo, Beck, Kelly Clarkson, Justin Timberlake, and Harry Styles, among many, many others.

“Some drummers are soulful,” Questlove wrote on Instagram. “Some drummers are funky. Some drummer are a-rockin’. Some drummers are swinging — but NO drummer, has impacted the art of breakbeat drummer (danceable drums) like James Gadson.”

“We played together over 50 years,” Ray Parker Jr. commented. “He changed the world.”

But the way Gadson, who was born June 17, 1939 in Kansas City, Missouri, told it, he learned everything on the job. “At first, during the time I didn’t really know how to play R&B, it was awful,” he recalled in Modern Drummer of his first sessions with Dyke & the Blazers and Wright’s band. “I wouldn’t even charge them it was so bad. I felt bad about wasting their studio time. I couldn’t keep a steady pattern because I was coming from a free-jazz mindset.” But Gadson was born into music. His father was a drummer who initially attempted to dissuade Gadson from entering into the music industry.

Nevertheless, Gadson’s father, Harold, bought him and his brother, Thomas, cornets to play in their school’s drum and bugle corps, Gadson recalled in author Jim Payne’s The Great Drummers of R&B, Funk & Soul. As a teenager, though, he was more interested in singing, performing doo-wop with a group called the Carpets at 13. His mother kept him from going on the road. He discovered funk music while stationed in Louisiana with the Air Force and joined his brother’s band, learning piano to play keys and singing, after he left the service. He also taught himself the drums.

“When I first started playing drums, I practiced all day and all night — 18 to 20 hours a day,” he said in The Great Drummers. “I did my homework.”

After switching to drums in his brother’s band, Gadson found work as a backing drummer for artists touring through Kansas City. He backed Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, Jimmy Reed, Sam Cooke, and Otis Redding at various dates. Eventually, he linked up with Dyke & the Blazers and Charles Wright, whom he recorded with playing drums and singing.

After resettling in Los Angeles, Motown producer Hal Davis started recruiting him for sessions. “I remember the first Motown session I did, which was the Jacksons’ ‘Dancing Machine,’” he told Modern Drummer. “We were out there creating, and I put that 8th-note hop in, and they said, ‘Hey, do that again.’ They liked what I was doing, and they said, ‘Let’s keep him because he has good time.’ And then the song became a hit.”

When a contractor spotted him and asked him if he could read charts, Gadson lied and said he could, teaching himself how to read music at night. Those L.A. sessions, when he recorded one gold record after another, is when he felt like he found his footing as a drummer, leading him to become a go-to drummer for artists of all genres.

Gadson released very little work under his own name. In the early Seventies, he released a couple of funky 45s, “Got to Find My Baby” and “Good Vibrations” (not the Beach Boys song), and later, the disco single, “Go By What’s in Your Heart.” In 2018, he shared a credit on Chicken Burrito with Raphael Wressnig and Alex Schultz. Additionally, he appeared as a band member in the 2009 movie, Funny People.

“I’ve been blessed,” he reflected in The Great Drummers. “I’m still doing this for a living. I wanted to hear myself on the radio someday, but I never dreamed I’d be on so many records.”