In a way, you can consider this story an extended liner note to “You Worked Your Miracle,” a resplendently singular disco-soul track by Chuck Bynum that BRICK is very proud to release as a limited 7” vinyl pressing, in collaboration with The Sound Council. It’s our first step into physical music releases, brought about by a chain of events that you’re about to hear recounted by the people involved.
I hope you’ll be drawn in, as I was, by hearing Stephen Chin remember the first time he laid his hands on a Chuck Bynum record, at Val Shively’s Aladdin’s cave of a store—R&B Records in Philadelphia. From there, a small group of DJs, archivists and music obsessives, captivated by Bynum’s long-forgotten work, set out to find the man himself. The story they discovered is as remarkable as it is sprawling. It’s a tale of opportunities granted, and lost, of musical virtuosity persisting no matter the circumstances, and ultimately, of a family reunited. Along the way, trails turned cold. Doors closed. People tried, failed, and then tried again.
This oral history is told by the people who carried Chuck Bynum’s music forward, and the people who met it on the other end. If the record is the object, this is the conversation around it—a testament to talent, determination, patience, and the transformative power of a single song.
Part One: “Marathon Lover”
Stephen Chin:It all started at a place called Val Shively’s R&B Records in Philadelphia. It’s just this crazy maze with a ridiculous amount of records. There’s three floors, and the guy has got everything from 45s to disco 12”s. Val is a thin old man who is like the gatekeeper of this kingdom and he doesn’t let people in. People try to get in all the time. They have to walk past the desk Val is sitting at to get to the records, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for, he’ll just say, “get out.” He is a grumpy dude, but my father’s been friends with him forever, and he lets me go in. He is a family friend, and a legend in the record collecting world. His place is truly a national treasure. I would describe his naturally stern demeanor as a mix of “tough cookie” and kind-hearted gentleman all at once. He would always call me a lost soul; he’d shout “Go ahead, Lost Soul!” when he let me in for a look around.
So, I’m digging around in there. You know how we do it—“What’s this? What’s that? This looks interesting. This looks cool.” I happened to come across a record called “Marathon Lover,” by Chuck Bynum. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t think much of it, because it was on a major label and I usually stay away from that stuff. It was on Warner Brothers, but it said “promotional use only” on the label. A lot of times, a promo record will have a different version than is on an album, or it just makes a record more special. It’s more unique.
I added it to the whole stack of records I had picked out throughout that day of digging. Val has a little turntable where you can review the stuff before you pay, and I put “Marathon Lover” on, and it blew my mind. It fell right on the borderlines of Boogie, Soul, and Disco. And that intrigued me. There was a vocoder on it too, on a song from 1980. It was just really unique, and a great song. That started the fire for finding out more about Chuck and his music.
So I was doing my research—you know how it is—you look at the titles, the names, the credits, and track it all back. And going back in time, I realized that Chuck was in different bands, one of which was called TUME, The Ultimate Music Experience, which was a disco funk thing—another dope record. And I found out that he worked with Natalie Cole! Then, I found that he was a guitar player in Marvin Gaye’s band, and has credits on some of his records. I was just like “who is this guy? How can he be on all this stuff, and yet I’ve never heard of him?”
Part Two: “It’s You”
Stephen:Through my research, I discovered there was this folkloric 45 called “It’s You.” No one ever heard it—it was a missing link. The only thing that I could find to prove it existed was an eBay auction that I missed. It’s impossible to find. It wasn’t on YouTube. It wasn’t anywhere. Eventually, I found a one minute clip of the 45 that was on Popsike.com. That was the only remnant, which I downloaded and saved and listened to probably a hundred times. I was so enthusiastic about it. I knew I had to share it with Scotty.
Scotty Coats:Stephen and I have spent two decades going back and forth sending each other songs. We had always talked about setting up a little reissue label or whatnot and had never got around to doing it, but when he finally sent me the clip of “It’s You,” it was like, “this is it.” The music sounded as if Sly, Stevie, and a Brazilian musician had a baby. It was all my favorite feels wrapped into one feel-good, well-written song.
Stephen:He heard that one minute clip and instantly said, “I want to do this.” It’s one of those songs that hits you and just hooks you in. I also loved how much the song spoke to the nature of our friendship.
Scotty:It really did feel like a testament of Stephen and I’s relationship. We’re real friends, and we’ve gone through the ringer. We’ve had many fights, had good times and bad times. But at the end of the day it’s like, “It’s You.” I respect you for who you are. You’re never going to change. I’m never going to change. And we finally settled on this song, after 20 fucking years of talking about doing a reissue together, we were finally going to do it.
Stephen:The only problem was, as I said, the record was seemingly impossible to find. It was never for sale, but on Discogs, the great platform that it is, you can see the people who own a record—or claim to own it—and the people who want it. There were four people on there who said that they had it. So I reached out to all four, and no one answered! Eventually, I get an answer back from some guy named Rob and I explained what we were trying to do; explaining that we would only be doing the reissue if we could get Chuck’s blessing, and make sure that the money from any sales went to him. And he goes, “I’ll have my guy send it to my engineer [to digitise].” It was that easy. But then nothing happened for a month or two, and I’m just like, “Ah, man, this guy’s not going to get back to us.” The next time I saw Scotty, I mentioned this guy Rob, because Scotty knows everybody and connects everything. And yes, he knew him—it was Rob Sevier, from Numero Group.
Rob Sevier:When Scotty mentioned “It’s You” to me as something he was working on as a re-issue, I knew the record very well. I had played it a lot when I was DJing in Japan. In fact, a buddy of mine in Japan has been bugging me about wanting to get the record from me for many years. He’s always trying to find a trade for it. He’s very respectful of course, and I understand, it’s impossible to forget that song.
Scotty:Rob was so gracious and recorded the seven inch, and sent us the .wav file. That’s how we got the audio. It was a straight rip from the seven inch.
Stephen:Hearing the song in full was mind blowing, but because it was a demo that was distributed as a promo, it wasn’t fully arranged or mastered. I talked with Scotty and I was like, “I’d really like to edit this and just make it complete,” and he was all for it. I didn’t add or change anything except the arrangement. It was a true disco edit—as soon as you add anything, it becomes a remix. I wanted to keep it true to form, and be respectful. I’m really happy and proud of the job that I did with that.
Scotty:Right from the opening whistle, I just knew it was right. Hearing that opening piano riff, and then as it got into the lyrics, I cried. I could listen to it a hundred times and not be sick of it. I think it’s one of the greatest songs ever made. It’s fucking brilliant.
Stephen:Scotty and I have a mutual friend named Sam Holborn, who I had also been working with on potential projects to reissue—and Chuck was one of the things that he was feeling, too. Sam is who really began the search—not just for more of his music, but for Chuck Bynum, the person, which seemed really impossible at that point.
Rob:I did actually poke around and try and find Chuck myself, quite a few years ago. I didn’t have much luck. At that time, I had no idea how interesting his story was either.
Stephen:Initially we just wanted to get in touch with him to ask for his permission to reissue “It’s You.” All of our searches resulted in ambiguous information—it didn’t lead anywhere. After looking everywhere online, we eventually landed on archive.org. Here is where Chuck finally appeared, in an insanely amazing music video for a song of his that I hadn’t heard before, called “You Worked Your Miracle.” From reading the description under the video, we learned that it had been made in the ’90s, while Chuck was in prison at the California Institution for Men in Chino.
Part Three: Arts in Corrections
Sam Holborn:Finding that video was amazing. We were so intrigued with how it came to be—what was the context? Why was Chuck in prison? How did he get the gear to record the song and the video? I didn’t even know you could record music in prison—where did that DX-7 synthesizer come from?! I had so many questions.
Stephen:Sam and I just kept doing research. We said, “this music’s so good, man. We got to get in touch with the brother and get his stuff out.”
Sam:As we got more involved, looking into Chuck’s musical background, we realised that his story was super special. And everybody loved the music.
Stephen:We couldn’t fathom it, how did somebody pull that off in jail? It’s so quirky, and it’s so heartfelt. My personal highlight is when he’s moonwalking in Asics wrestling shoes. Somehow in the midst of all this, Sam had reached the director of the prison music program of the time, who had produced the video of Chuck.
Sam:Yeah. I found Tom Skelly. I don’t remember exactly where that thread connected. I was looking for rehabilitation programs at that specific prison, found that there was this art program and that the guy who ran it was still around—so I reached out to him. It was a long time ago, I didn’t even know if he would remember Chuck, I just thought, “Hey, maybe he still has some material.” But he was really excited to get my initial email and to talk about how much the art program helped people. He very much remembered Chuck, and that he was serious about both his music and the program.
Tom Skelly:Chuck was very committed to his music and was somewhat of a loner, in the sense that he pursued his own original vision and always showed up to do his projects alone. He never created any problems, he just always wanted to be as productive as possible during his “visits” to C.I.M. Those videos really bring back some memories from the golden era of the Arts-in-Corrections program, which ran from 1985 to around 1995. We had lots of funding, lots of resources, lots of support from both the inmates and staff. You can see in one of the music videos filmed in my classroom that a Correctional Lieutenant is playing congas with the inmate jazz band. That could never happen today! Looking back, it makes me realize how much good was done from morning ’til night. I am so happy to have been a part of this intensive full-time AIC program. And I know that Chuck was creating not only to “do his time,” but to pave a future outside the system.
Stephen:It sounded like Chuck was a great guy, he was a model inmate, and he was really tuned in to his music. I was developing my understanding of him through his songs, and learning about the sort of person he was from people that knew him in prison. We were trying to piece it all together.
Sam:I spoke to the people around the AIC program and the people that archived the video, trying to find Chuck. I’m calling 10 people a day, trying to track him down. Stephen and I, we both just throw things at the wall until they stick, that’s how we work.
Stephen:Eventually we found him, through one of these detective search engines that comb through public records.
Sam:I think the big breakthrough came when we found out that he was actually still alive. A lot of his music was from 30, 40 years ago. We knew that he had been in prison not that long ago, but you never know. We heard that people had seen him recently, members at his church were telling us that he was there, and that although he maybe wasn’t in particularly good health, he was still around.
Stephen:Yeah, we learned he was living at a church parish in Florida and playing keys in the church band. He got out of jail and he ended up there, and that’s when I finally got in touch with him.
Part Four: The Life and Times of Chuck Bynum
Stephen:He was really tickled that I’d contacted him. He had been in a complete bubble since being in prison and had no clue that anybody even cared about his music. He didn’t know about Discogs, and didn’t know that the “You Worked Your Miracle” video was out there on the internet. But he was picking up on my enthusiasm, and we had a really good rapport.
Chuck Bynum:There are few things that can still surprise this old soul, but meeting Stephen Chin was one such event in my life. On the first encounter with this man, I was not expecting to hear his vision of sharing my story and re-releasing my old songs—but unlike a lot of people, he actually did just what he said he would do.1
Stephen:He was jiving on what I was telling him—that people were collecting his music around the world, and so many people respected “Marathon Lover” as this amazing piece of dance music. That initial conversation set the tone, and then he began to tell me his story. He was running around with Marvin Gaye in ’79 and ’80. He gets in the studio with Natalie Cole, and they record a couple demos together. He ends up getting an advance for $50,000 to make his album—I think he got the Caddy and everything! So he had $50K in his pocket in 1980s LA—that was hot, right? And culturally, drug wise, et cetera—there was a lot of experimentation, I should say. It was the good stuff back then too, as I understand it. And he gets popped in possession of cocaine. That’s it. Reagan Administration, 1980, Clink clink. A life sentence for a nonviolent crime. He lost his deal.
Chuck:I went from playing guitar for various artists like Marvin Gaye, Natalie Cole, D.J. Rogers and numerous others, to scoring my own record deal, then being handed a life sentence for a drug related offense.
Sam:I just went, “wow.” This guy had all the makings of somebody that should have had his own record, his own LP, but that was all taken away.
Stephen:Those 45s were supposed to lead up to an LP, but it was never made. While he was in prison, Chuck helped rehabilitate others through music, and I guess he found “the way,” if you know what I mean. And it’s all expressed in that song, “You Worked Your Miracle.”
Chuck:I spent 18 years behind bars, going from one federal prison to the next. Some were more violent than others, but because of the length of my sentence, I had to be free of any major offenses in order to finally be allowed to go into a medium security facility. It took ten years to achieve that goal, and let me tell you, it was not an easy thing to do. And then, by the Glory of God, I was released by President Barack Obama just before his term was up. I was one of the 5%, among over 35,000 people with similar offenses, who were granted a commutation of sentence—sort of like a pardon, but with other stipulations and probation conditions in place. 1,700 of us got the nod from the president to be released.
Stephen:So he was at the church, and he was happy about all this. Happy about playing again. He was like, “I get to play every day.” It was almost like that was more important than anything really, that he had his freedom to play. Chuck is one of those dudes you’re like, “OK, this guy’s got something special. He operates differently.” It just seemed like he was in a good place, man.
Chuck:God saved me from my own prison, touched Obama’s heart and landed me in Pensacola, Florida, where I became Minister of Music. I played piano, which at the time of my release l could not do well, but I developed a great ability to achieve a wondrous aptitude. The main reason for this gift was the change in my heart, mind and body. Let me be totally honest here; the whole time I spent in California on probation for drug sales and related offenses, I never stayed out more than a few months. Some of you will probably think, “oh here we go…” but after letting go, and letting God, I have been out since 2017. But, this story is still being written.
Stephen:And then Chuck just dropped off the face of the earth again. Putting the record out meant so much to Scotty and I, but we wanted to do it properly, not bootleg it. Even though Chuck had already verbally agreed to it, we just didn’t want to do it without a handshake, at least.
1 Chuck Bynum’s contribution to this oral history has been taken from written correspondence sent to Stephen Chin between the years of 2018 and 2019.
Part Five: The Bynum Family
Stephen:I couldn’t find Chuck. I called the church, left messages, and they said they couldn’t give me any information. I said, “look, this is the story. These are the things that we talked about. I'm a friend of his.” So then they told me he had a stroke, and that was all that they knew. I was calling different hospitals all over Florida, trying to find him. He must’ve been released from hospital by the time I was calling, he was just gone. Then everything stopped. It was Covid. I thought that he had passed away, honestly. We were at a complete loss. We wanted to put the record out, and we were just sitting on the sideline, waiting. We were talking to each other, thinking that it would be wrong to put it out without Chuck’s final signoff, but also thinking that, if he really was no longer with us, it would be so cool if we could do that for him.
Scotty:But then Stephen got in contact with Chuck’s son, who said “Yeah, he is my dad... but I don’t know that person.”
Stephen:I was just doing detective work again, really, but yeah, this guy said, “yep, Chuck Bynum is my father, but I don’t know him. He was barely in my life.” He’s a gospel and R&B producer by the name of Joaquin Bynum, and he was actually on Roc Nation. I played the “You Worked Your Miracle” video for him, and it put tears in his eyes. He was like, “I feel like I’m watching me.” He said, “I got to be honest with you, man, I love the music. But my dad was in and out of prison my whole life.” It wasn’t a positive thing, but it was almost like, just for a second, the beauty of this music outshone that negativity. Joaquin and I remained on friendly terms, and one day he sent me a message: “by the way, I found my dad.” And I was like, “dude, I’ve been looking for him for two years now. What?!” He said that Chuck was in Vegas, and his sister, Latasha Bynum, was taking care of him.
Latasha Bynum:I got a call from a hospital in Florida, saying “your dad had a stroke and he put you on his paperwork.” I’m like, “wow. He put me on his paperwork?” And the nurse was like, “yeah, as his emergency contact.” I was shocked, because I didn’t grow up with my father. I only met him when I was 16. My mother ran into him at a grocery store in Inglewood, California, and asked me if I wanted to meet him. I did, and when I met him, he didn’t pay any attention to me. So I was like, “forget it,” and I didn’t have contact with him anymore. When the hospital called, that was the time the Lord said, “if you want your dad, this is how you’re going to get him.” So they released him to me out of the hospital, and that’s when Stephen reached out.
Stephen:That’s when I reconnected with him, finally. I got him on the phone, but it was really difficult to communicate as the stroke had affected his ability to speak. Latasha was kind of translating; but he would give these shouts of joy. I was telling him that we really wanted to get “It’s You” out as a re-issue with Scotty and Sam, and he was happy about the idea. It all came together on that phone call. He was receptive to and in complete agreement.
Latasha:Stephen explained that he found us through my brother, Joaquin, who I had been looking for all my life. We had never met, but he came over on my birthday a year ago. It took time for him to want to be around my father, we both went through the same things with him. He was like, “Sis, I don’t want to see him. He’s done so much.” I said, “look, you’re not just seeing him. You’re seeing me.” When Joaquin came, he didn’t even know he was his son. He hadn’t seen him since he was 17, so he didn’t even recognize Joaquin. When we told him, he cried with both of us and apologized for not being there. We just all cried together. Joaquin and I talked about what we went through as kids, and he just took it in. He knows he was wrong, and he can’t run from it no more. The Lord has sat my dad down and said “Be still. No more running the streets, no more drugs. Sit down, it’s time to stop doing that fast life.” That’s it. Now, he done gained seven grandkids.
Part Six: “You Worked Your Miracle”
Latasha:I stopped working in 2020 to take care of my father full-time. His right hand is paralyzed. He still tries to play bass with his left, but when he was in Florida, they didn’t really give him the proper therapy, so he’s having to overcome a lot. Stephen and Scotty sent him a bass guitar so he could try and play as part of his rehab.
We also sing together a lot. It’s hard to understand his speech, but when he sings, it comes out better. The tongue rolls a little bit better when there’s music there. I love to sing, and I never knew why. I always wondered why I got this gift, and now I understand it. When my father heard me sing, he’d be like, “dang!” and I would say, “yeah, I guess I get it from your side.” I sing in the choir at church now. I was always scared to sing in front of people, but I don’t care no more.
Stephen:Discovering Chuck’s story, getting to know him and his family, it just confirmed that music is all about personal connection. Seeing Chuck respond when Latasha puts him on the phone, hearing the joy that still comes through, even after everything–that’s been the real reward of this.
Latasha:This whole experience of reconnecting has taught me that even if you don’t grow up with a parent at the beginning, they’re still your parent. Don’t give up on your parents, because once you find them, things can come out for the good at the end. The Lord will bring it all together for a reason at the time when He’s ready.
Epilogue
BRICK, working in collaboration with Stephen, Scotty, and Sam, is releasing Chuck Bynum’s “You Worked Your Miracle” as a very limited 7-inch vinyl pressing. It’s our first ever physical music release, and we couldn’t think of a story more deserving of being brought to life off the page than this one.
Just as Stephen Chin once pulled a record from a shelf at Val Shively’s in Philadelphia and began his discovery of Chuck’s remarkable journey, “You Worked Your Miracle,” a song written and recorded as part of Tom Skelly’s California Arts-In-Corrections Program, will sit in record stores across the US and UK, waiting to tell its redemptive story to a new listener. And, as Chuck himself said, that story is still being written.
To purchase a copy of this record, click here.