Melvin Ragin, the guitarist who performed as Wah Wah Watson through decades of recording and touring – with the Temptations, Michael Jackson, Herbie Hancock, Alicia Keys and dozens of others – died on Oct. 24 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 67.
His death was announced by his wife, Itsuko Aono. She did not specify the cause.
Mr. Ragin took his nickname from the gadget that gave him his trademark sound: the wah-wah pedal, a filter that altered the tone of his guitar to make notes and chords wriggle, moan or seem to say “wah.”
He used it on many hit songs – for crunching syncopations and floating, curling chords in the Temptations’ Papa Was a Rolling Stone; for slinky countermelodies in Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On; for little bluesy sighs and rhythmic nudges in Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.
He was widely admired, and imitated, by guitarists seeking the essence of funk.
Mr. Ragin was born on Dec. 8, 1950, in Richmond, Va., to Robert and Cora (Brown) Ragin. His father was a minister, his mother an evangelist.
His mother bought him his first guitar for US$15, “with a promise from me that I would learn how to play it,” he told an interviewer. As a teenager he worked with a Richmond group, the Montclairs.
In the late 1960s he joined Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, a Canadian soul band signed to Motown Records, and left Richmond for Detroit. When not touring with the Vancouvers, he was a regular member of the house band at the Twenty Grand Club, often backing Motown headliners.
After hearing the wah-wah pedal deployed by Dennis Coffey, who was the Motown studio guitarist on songs such as the Temptations’ 1968 hit Cloud Nine, Mr. Ragin bought a Cry Baby brand wah-wah pedal and rebuilt his guitar style around it.
Norman Whitfield, the Temptations’ producer, brought Mr. Ragin into the Motown studio band that became known as the Funk Brothers; his first major session was in 1970 for Edwin Starr’s Stop the War Now.
Mr. Ragin went on to record and tour with much of the Motown roster – the Jackson 5, the Supremes, the Four Tops, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Mr. Gaye and many others – and by the early 1970s was calling himself Wah Wah Watson. After Motown moved to Los Angeles in 1973, Mr. Ragin also settled there. In his Motown years and afterward, many of his guitar parts earned him songwriting credits.
Neo-soul and hip-hop connected him to a new generation of collaborators in the 1990s, among them Lisa Stansfield, Me’shell Ndegeocello and Alicia Keys. A sample of his guitar appeared this year on After Dark, a track on Drake’s album Scorpion.