Don Bryant, a soul singer who blamed a young woman with a beautiful voice for stealing his spotlight, but who wound up becoming her principal songwriter and marrying her, died on Friday. He was 83.
A verified social media account of his announced the death but did not specify the cause or where he died.
Mr. Bryant and his wife, Ann Peebles, were best known for “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” The song, now a pop standard, was originally sung by Ms. Peebles and co-written by her, Mr. Bryant and Bernard Miller. Its downbeat groove and staccato mimicry of raindrops, produced by an electric timbale, helped make it a Top 40 hit in 1973 and are recognizable features of covers and samples made by many artists, most famously Tina Turner and Missy Elliott.
Mr. Bryant and Ms. Peebles’s collaboration also produced “Trouble, Heartaches & Sadness” (1971), which is sampled on GZA’s 1995 hip-hop track “Shadowboxin’”; “99 Pounds” (1971), the petite Ms. Peebles’s weight at the start of her career; and “Do I Need You” from 1974, the year they married.
In the 1990s, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called Ms. Peebles’s records from this period “among the most memorable of the soul music era,” and The Guardian described her as “one of a handful of female singers whose fusion of country, blues and gospel helped shape the distinctive sound of southern soul.”
In 2019, Mr. Bryant and Ms. Peebles, both longtime residents of Memphis, became the first couple to both be inducted into that city’s Music Hall of Fame.
In the 1960s, Mr. Bryant, then in his 20s, had climbed from a childhood of choir singing into being the main vocal act of Hi Records, one of the South’s main soul labels, along with Stax. He mainly sang cover versions of the era’s hit songs that got people dancing.
Then, one night, a young man and his sister appeared at a Memphis venue, insisting the girl be allowed to sing with the band.
It was Ms. Peebles. Mr. Bryant soon heard what happened next. “She got up there,” he recalled to Blues Blast magazine in 2018, “and tore the house down.”
The very next day, Willie Mitchell, the guiding force of Hi Records, was listening to her in a studio.
“I was the only vocalist when she came in,” Mr. Bryant said to Blues Blast. “When she exploded, that was it.”
At first, Mr. Bryant brooded that he would never have a hit record. Before long, though, he came to share Hi’s assessment. Instead of singing, he shifted his focus to songwriting.
One of the first tracks he wrote for her was “99 Pounds” — “a good song for her to brag on herself,” he later recalled to The Guardian.
After getting to know each other, they discovered they had a lot in common. Ms. Peebles was one of 11 siblings; Mr. Bryant, one of 10. Each of their fathers led major choir groups.
“I felt the love coming but wasn’t in no hurry,” he said in a 2020 interview with the Memphis music writer Robert Gordon.
In 2008, Ms. Peebles told The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, “Don’s gentle nature pulled me in — with him, I had the understanding that I could relax and spill my heart if I really needed to.”
One night in February 1973, he and Ms. Peebles had plans to attend a concert of some friends. Just as they were about to set off, a downpour began. “I can’t stand the rain,” Ms. Peebles declared.
Mr. Bryant, now accustomed to turning overheard phrases into songs, made his way to the piano. He riffed while incorporating new ideas from Ms. Peebles and their friend Bernard Miller, a local D.J. They took the song to Mr. Mitchell, who had just recently acquired an electric timbale.
“I Can’t Stand the Rain” turned out to be the couple’s biggest hit. By the end of the decade, Hi Records had been sold, Mr. Mitchell had quit, Ms. Peebles had given birth to a son, and disco had supplanted soul music. Ms. Peebles retired.
She resumed singing intermittently in the decades to come. In 2012 a stroke damaged her voice.
Against all expectations, Mr. Bryant had barely begun his own rise to musical prominence.
Donald Maurice Bryant was born in Memphis in April 1942. (Sources disagree between April 2 and 4.) His father, Eddie, led the Four Stars of Harmony, an early Black choir group to appear on Memphis radio. His mother, Margie, was a chef and gardener.
By about the age of 10, Don was singing solo in church. He and his brothers soon formed a group of their own. He began working with Mr. Mitchell as a teenager.
A complete list of his survivors was not immediately available.
In the 2010s, Howard Grimes, Hi’s house drummer, was playing with Scott Bomar, who led a retro R&B group called the Bo-Keys. Mr. Bomar asked Mr. Grimes about getting Mr. Bryant to sing with them.
“He’s long overdue,” Mr. Grimes recalled replying in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone.
Mr. Bryant had essentially sung only gospel in half a century. Mr. Grimes, also religiously observant, told Rolling Stone, “I had an out-of-body experience, and God told me to give a testimony to Don” about the need for him to return to R&B.
Mr. Bryant read the testimony. “I saw the joy on his face,” Mr. Grimes said.
His first album since the 1960s, “Don’t Give Up on Love,” came out in 2017. “To many it sounds like the best old-school R&B in recent memory,” The Commercial Appeal reported.
It described Mr. Bryant’s vocals as “pure,” and indeed, live performances showed him to have an almost unbelievably smooth, rich and limber voice.
“I guess it’s my time at last,” he told the paper.
Mr. Bryant performed for NPR’s “Tiny Desk” show. In 2020, he came out with another album, “You Make Me Feel.” The Commercial Appeal named it the newspaper’s album of the year.
“There might have been bigger sellers or more buzzed about records from Memphis artists in 2020,” the paper wrote, “but nothing was as deeply felt and fully-realized as Bryant’s masterwork.”
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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