Dorothy Ashby Pat Hunt The Gabrells I Want To Be Yours  1965 Copyright Document

Dorothy Ashby Autographed Handwritten Musical Manuscript for the song " Game"

Dorothy and John Ashby together formed their own publishing company called Wiljean Music in the early 1960s. Wiljean Music not only licensed the music and lyrics of Dorothy and John Ashby, but they copyrighted the music of another local Detroit artist named Pat Hunt.

Pat Hunt was a female soul singer who recorded 45 rpm records in the 1960s and 1970s. She was also in an obscure soul group in the early to mid 1960s called The Gambrells.

The Gambrells released a handful of 45s that are extremely rare. One of them was on the early red Carla label. It was called "Pain In My Heart"which was backed with the song "I Want To Be Yours" Both of these songs were written by Pat Hunt, who together with Sharon and Sandra Gambrell formed the Gambrells.

In any case in March of 1965, Pat Hunt, the writer for both of these songs, went to Dorothy Ashby, musician and music business executive, to copyright both "Pain In My Heart" and "I Want To Be Yours" which, as evidenced by this document, Dorothy Ashby did copyright this song under the name of her publishing company, Wiljean Music.

This single piece of musical memorabilia is part of a collection of musical memorabilia formally owned by Dorothy Ashby herself. This comprehensive collection contains various types of music memorabilia that Dorothy Ashby gathered about her own life and career.  This collection has been partially represented at the flickr.com website for the past 15 years in a collection of photographs that called the Dorothy Ashby Legacy Photograph Collection.

Dorothy Ashby and Musical Composition

Musical composition was very important to the the artistic life of Dorothy Ashby. She received her first instructions in the art of musical composition from her father, Wiley Thompson, who was a jazz guitarist and occasionally played the flute as well. Wiley Thompson gave his daughter Dorothy his own notebooks on musical composition when Dorothy was very young.

Starting her career in the 1950s, Dorothy Ashby was a musical composer of such skill and ability that despite the considerable discrimination she encountered as a African-American female, her intelligence and skill were such that she not only played, she composed music for commercials for Fortune 500 companies such as Dodge, Buick, and Frigidaire.

By the mid 1960s Dorothy Ashby’s star had started to rise to the point that her fame had gone beyond just the jazz world into the world at large. As a musical performer, Dorothy’s skill at the harp was such that by this time she had played on the top television variety shows such as The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The Mike Douglas Show, The Arthur Godfrey Show and the Today Show.

Dorothy Ashby wrote many original songs that she recorded over ten record albums as an artist that she released in her lifetime. Dorothy Ashby also composed music for hire throughout her career. She was hired on occasion to write music for radio commercials. Ashby also worked in television and motion pictures. Ashby worked in the music department of the 1982 film, “Human Highway”, starring Neil Young (the singer-songwriter guitarist) and actor Dean Stockwell.  Dorothy Ashby is also reputed to have worked and played on the soundtrack of the 1967 film “Valley of the Dolls” starring Barbara Perkins, Patty Duke and Sharon Tate.

Her earliest recorded works from the 1950s and 1960s on the Savoy, Prestige, Atlantic and Argo record labels draw high praise from jazz aficionados for both her musicianship and her composition. Particular attention is paid by hip hop and funk enthusiasts for the rhythms and beats of the musical compositions she displayed on her recordings on Cadet Records, specifically the 1968 album “Afro-Harping”, the 1969 album “Dorothy’s Harp” and the 1970 record album “The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby”

It is clear from this and other of the earliest artifacts that Dorothy Ashby collected about her own life that Dorothy was a musical prodigy, a genius and that this was clear even in her earliest childhood. Dorothy Ashby's parents gave her musical training and she was the pupil of a Bertha Phillips who was affiliated with a local Detroit church. Besides the jazz piano that Dorothy learned from playing music with her father Dorothy Ashby studied classical music and Christian spirituals as a child.

Similar memorabilia can be viewed at the  Dorothy Ashby Legacy Photograph Collection which has been hosted by the Flickr web site since around 2007.  This is a photographic gathering of images about jazz harpist extraordinaire Dorothy Ashby that is largely photos of many of the various types of memorabilia and media that Dorothy Jeanne Thompson Ashby gathered and collected about herself during her lifetime about her own life.