1982 · Behind the Songs
Luther Vandross stitched one of his own songs to a Sam Cooke classic — and turned the result into his signature farewell.
Every great live act needs a closing number that sends the crowd home happy, and by 1982 Luther Vandross had built his out of two songs at once. “Bad Boy/Having a Party,” from his second Epic album Forever, for Always, for Love, welds a Vandross original, “Bad Boy,” to Sam Cooke’s 1962 good-timer “Having a Party” — and the seam doesn’t show.
Released as a single in August 1982, the record climbed to number 3 on Billboard’s Hot Black Singles chart and reached number 55 on the Hot 100. Vandross produced it with bassist Marcus Miller, and the writing credit reads Vandross, Miller, and Cooke. The bridge borrows the chorus of Cooke’s “Having a Party” and sets it to new lyrics, so the tribute is woven into the song’s structure, not just its spirit.
The session reads like a roll call of New York’s finest: Nat Adderley Jr. on keyboards, Miller on bass, Yogi Horton on drums, Doc Powell and Georg Wadenius on guitars, Ralph MacDonald on percussion, and Ed Walsh on synthesizer programming, all recorded at Mediasound in New York. The background vocals came from Brenda White, Paulette McWilliams, Fonzi Thornton, and Phillip Ballou — the kind of choir that could make a party sound like a congregation.
From the stage to the screen
Vandross closed his concerts with the medley for years, and Hollywood noticed: it plays over the opening credits of the 1990 film House Party, and it turned up again in the 2022 Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody. Few tributes have worked this hard — a salute to Sam Cooke that became, in the end, one of the most joyful signatures in Luther Vandross’s own catalog.