The Iceman Delivered

One of my all-time favorites, Jerry Butler, former lead singer of the Impressions and a highly successful solo artist in the 1960s and ‘70s, passed away last week. He was dubbed the “Iceman” by Georgie Woods, one of the all-time great Philly DJs. Supposedly the moniker had something to do with a performance Butler gave at a concert in Philly, and it definitely suits this man of style and grace, public service and souldfoul performance. The “Iceman” was always “cool” in a crisis, and somehow that levelheaded-ness found its way to Vietnam…and back.

And saved a life in the process.

Like so many of the accomplished singers of the era, Jerry cut his teeth performing in a church choir. Before long, he and one of his fellow choir boys, a guitar player named Curtis Mayfield, put together a gospel quartet called the Northern Jubilee Gospel Singers. Inspired by Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, and others, the Buter-Mayfield group became the Roosters and then morphed into the Impressions, with Butler as lead singer.

Before long, Jerry left the Impressions and embarked on a highly successful solo career. As he continued to perform, he served for more than 30 years as a Cook County Board Commissioner. I had a phone conversation with him years ago when he was hosting PBS TV music specials about Doo Wop, Soul, and R&B. He was cheerful, gracious, and oh so humble. He laughed when I told him of the popularity of one of his 1960s hits, “Only the Strong Survive,” among Vietnam veterans, and told me that he got letters from GIs in Vietnam thanking him for that song and its message.

“Oh there’s gonna be…/A whole lot of trouble in your life/Ah so listen to me, get up off your knees/’Cause only the strong survive.”

Those lyrics really hit me years later when my co-author Craig Werner and I were interviewing Vietnam veterans for our book, We Gotta Get out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War. Among them was Ben Kollmansberger from tiny Kekoskee, Wisconsin. Ben told me that the day he arrived at his unit in I Corps in Vietnam, he was greeted by a banner that proclaimed, “only the strong survive.” It was Ben’s new outfit’s slogan, and you better believe everyone there abided by that Jerry Butler dictum.

Sadly, Ben’s post-Vietnam years were marked by marriage, divorce, college, remarriage, graduate school, and lots of self-medication.

“I was living at home, drinking too much, usually partying late into the night, often with a bunch of ‘Nam vets I’d brought home with me from the bar,” he explained “One night I was standing outside, singing Jerry Butler’s ‘Only the Strong Survive’ at the top of my lungs, bellowing the lines ‘Oh, but you gotta be a man/You gotta take a stand,’ and it woke my parents. I can remember my dad coming over to me, looking me straight in the eye, almost boring a hole into my forehead. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked me. I couldn’t answer.”

Ben paused, caught his breath, wiped a tear, and said, “that moment turned my life around.” And his has been a successful and rewarding life ever since.

The Iceman would’ve been pleased. Check that, the Iceman is pleased…because the strong do survive.

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Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley is the author of Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America, co-author with Craig Werner of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, which was named best music book of 2015 by Rolling Stone magazine, and DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle, now available as an audiobook. His music-based memoir, The Tracks of My Years, will be released by Legacy Book Press in 2025.