R.I.P.: Jerry Butler, Singer Known As 'Iceman'

Jerry Butler (1940-2025)

Jerry Butler’s baritone combined the soaring ecstasy of church, the rumbling rhythms of Chicago and the soul of his native Sunflower, Mississippi. Warm and plush but also cool, it won him the nickname “Iceman.”

The songs of the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer became a soundtrack for the 1950s and 1960s. He achieved fame as a member of The Impressions and later as a solo soul artist. His songs have been sampled by others including Missy Elliott, Snoop Dogg, Method Man and The Game.

The Chicago resident went on to a 32-year political career as a member of the Cook County Board, helped by backing from Mayor Harold Washington.

Butler, whose voice was stilled by Parkinson’s disease, died Thursday night at home, according to The Sun-Times.

“He’s one of the great voices of our time,” said Motown legend Smokey Robinson, who said he’d admired Mr. Butler since Robinson was a young singer and heard The Impressions’ “For Your Precious Love” for the first time. “It sweeped through ‘the hood.’ I have known Jerry Butler way back, since the Miracles and I first got started, around 1958. He’s a great person, and I love him.”

In 1942, when he was 3 years old, his sharecropper parents moved the family from Mississippi for Chicago. His religious mother Arvelia Agnew Butler used to call the radio stations that played the blues “devil stations.” But young Jerry was allowed to watch TV’s “Hit Parade.”

He learned how to write songs by reading Hit Parade magazine, which “printed out the sheet music of the hits performed on the show,” he wrote. “It helped us learn how not only to sight read but how to structure songs.”

In 1953, 13-year-old Jerry visited the Traveling Souls Spiritualist Church of Rev. Annabelle Mayfield. He joined her gospel group, the Northern Jubilee Singers, and met her grandson, someone he wrote had “a great tenor voice.” That was Curtis Mayfield.

Before they climbed the music charts as The Impressions, young Jerry attended Washburne Trade School, studying to be a chef — which gave him skills that made him popular on the road

He and Mayfield went on to form The Impressions, with Butler as lead singer, according to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, into which the group was inducted in 1991. Mr. Butler said their manager suggested the group’s name because they left a good impression.

Their first hit was 1958’s “For Your Precious Love.” Rolling Stone said it was based on a poem Butler wrote in high school. In 2003, the magazine ranked the song No. 335 on its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”

“The Impressions traversed the sounds of the Fifties and Sixties as well as old and new social attitudes,” according to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “Their music was the sound of the Civil Rights Movement.”