Take A Little Trip: Minnie Riperton’s Perfect Angel at 50

“Lovin’ you is easy ‘cause you’re beautiful.” This is the opening line to Minnie Riperton’s #1 hit “Lovin’ You,” which topped the Billboard charts in 1975. It’s also inscribed on her gravestone.

Forty-five years after Riperton’s death from breast cancer, she’s remembered primarily as a one-hit wonder and the mother of actress/comedienne Maya Rudolph. Dive into her catalogue, however, and you’ll find that her career didn’t begin and end there. Where do you start? Perhaps with the album “Lovin’ You” is taken from, 1974’s Perfect Angel. 

By the time she went into the studio to record the album, Minnie Riperton was in her mid-twenties, but she was already a veteran artist. She spent her teens as a session singer for Chess Records, followed by six albums with the psychedelic band Rotary Connection and one 1970 solo album, Come to My Garden. (“Les Fleurs,” the opening track to Come to My Garden, has appeared in TV commercials and the series Atlanta.) 

Perfect Angel marks Riperton’s debut as a songwriter; she penned seven of the album’s nine tracks with her husband, Richard Rudolph. Stevie Wonder co-produced the album with Rudolph and contributed two songs of his own. The album evokes the blissed-out, almost celestial side of 1970s soul. Think Earth, Wind, and Fire or Stevie Wonder at his most uplifting. 

Nonetheless, Riperton begins the album by rocking out on “Reasons.” (After, she had been in a rock band.) “It’s So Nice (To See Old Friends)” is a dreamy slice of country-soul, and she invites the listener to “Sit and laugh, have a smoke by the fire.” (Maya Rudolph has described her parents as hippies, so this line isn’t surprising.)

Riperton, of course, was famous for a multi-octave range that could reach the whistle register. A singer born with such a vocal gift would be tempted to over-sing, to flaunt her voice, even to show off. And there are some singers who do just that. But Riperton wasn’t among them. She’d originally trained as an opera singer, and that discipline shows. 

Thus, by the third track, Stevie Wonder’s “Take a Little Trip,” Riperton approaches the lyrics with a sense of wonder and keeps vocal acrobatics kept to a minimum. On “Seeing You This Way,” she begins by imitating an electric guitar (who says only jazz singers can scat?), adding some “la la las” and the whistle register at the end. “The Edge of a Dream” is a piano ballad with echoes of gospel, and Riperton sings with few embellishments, letting the shimmering melody carry the song.

The less-is-more approach suits the second Wonder composition, “Perfect Angel,” with Riperton’s come-hither delivery setting a cozy but seductive mood. She returns to her rocker past on “Every Time He Comes Around,” blending longing and eroticism in a way that would do Tina Turner proud.  

 

VIDEO: Minnie Riperton “Lovin’ You”

This brings us to “Lovin’ You,” one of the love-it-or-hate-it songs of the 1970s. “Lovin’ You” isn’t one of the stronger tracks on Perfect Angel, and it almost seems like a novelty song today. But it’s worth listening to the song all the way through if you’re a showbiz trivia buff, because toward the end, she sings, “Maya, Maya, Maya, Maya . . .” Yes, she’s singing about that Maya. For final track, “Our Lives,” Riperton is joined by Stevie Wonder on harmonica, and her whistle-register trilling closes the album. 

Riperton would never again reach the commercial heights of Perfect Angel and “Lovin’ You.” Nor would she have the opportunity. In 1976, she was diagnosed with breast cancer; although she had a radical mastectomy, the cancer had spread and was now terminal. 

Despite the diagnosis, Riperton would continue performing and released three more albums during her lifetime. The final one, 1979’s Minnie, is the work of an artist who knew she had little time left. The first song is a quiet storm ballad about lost love, “Memory Lane,” and the lyrics are devastating in hindsight: “I thought I had forgot the past/Now I’m slipping fast.”  

 

The video for “Memory Lane” is even sadder. By that point, Riperton couldn’t move her right arm because of lymphedema. She spends the video in an armchair, cradling a photo album, poring over photographs of herself and her husband, wailing “Save me, save me” as the song fades. In July 1979, two months after Minnie’s release, Riperton passed away. A posthumous album, Love Lives Forever, came out in 1980, consisting vocal tracks Riperton recorded in 1978 with new instrumental backing. 

 

VIDEO: Minnie Riperton “Memory Lane”

Eleven years later, another young singer with a powerful, octave-stretching voice, Mariah Carey, became a sensation with her debut album, complete with four #1 Billboard hits. Carey acknowledged Minnie Riperton as a key influence, whistle register and all.

Listening to Perfect Angel today, a listener can pinpoint songs that could have been as popular as “Lovin’ You,” if not more so. The album proved Minnie Riperton to be a wildly gifted vocalist adept at different styles, willing to stretch herself as an artist. To define her only as the singer of “Lovin’ You” would be like saying Patti Smith was simply the lady who sang “Because the Night.”  Minnie Riperton deserved so much better. 

Fifty years later, she still does.