Songwriter, Percussionist Ralph MacDonald Dies

Ralph MacDonald performing onstage.

Echoes/Redferns

Ralph MacDonald, a highly regarded session musician and songwriter who co-wrote hits including "Where Is the Love?" and "Just the Two of Us," died on Sunday of lung cancer in Stamford, Connecticut. He was 67.

Born in New York City to a musical father from Trinidad, MacDonald learned to play steelpan percussion at an early age and performed with Harry Belafonte's band for a decade before striking out on his own. MacDonald's distinctive Afro-Caribbean percussion flavored dozens of popular songs, including David Bowie's "Young Americans" and Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville." Over the years, MacDonald worked with a wide range of artists, from Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon and Aretha Franklin to Luther Vandross and Amy Winehouse.

MacDonald earned two Grammy Awards in 1978 as a producer and performer on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, for which he contributed the track "Calypso Breakdown." "My approach is to work with melody by simply enhancing it," MacDonald told The New York Times in 1977, when the newspaper called him "the ghost behind the million-selling albums."     

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Song Stories

“Is It True”

Brenda Lee | 1964

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."

More Song Stories entries »

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