Show Me

"Show Me": Howard Hewett's Smooth Declaration in 1990

From Shalamar to Solo

The early 1990s R&B landscape rewarded a specific quality above most others: the capacity to deliver intimate, emotionally direct material with a voice that sounded completely natural in that register. Howard Hewett was exceptionally well-positioned to meet that demand. He had spent most of the 1980s as the lead vocalist of Shalamar, the dance-pop group whose records had been staples of R&B and pop radio throughout the decade. Songs like "A Night to Remember" and "Dead Giveaway" had established Hewett as a vocalist with both the technical range to handle demanding material and the warmth to make commercial music feel personal rather than manufactured.

When Shalamar dissolved in the mid-1980s, Hewett moved into a solo career that reflected the changing tastes of Black contemporary music. The harder funk edges of the early 1980s were giving way to smoother, more production-polished material; new jack swing was transforming the rhythmic architecture of R&B; and the market for straightforward, romantic adult contemporary material remained robust and relatively underserved by the newer, more aggressive sounds. Hewett's voice suited this adult contemporary lane perfectly.

The Album and the Single

Show Me appeared on Hewett's It's Time album, released in 1990, a period when the new jack swing movement led by producers like Teddy Riley was pulling much of the R&B world in a more rhythm-forward direction. Hewett's album sat somewhat apart from that current, favoring ballads and mid-tempo material that prioritized vocal performance over rhythmic innovation. This was a deliberate artistic position rather than an oversight: his voice was the instrument, and the production choices were organized around displaying it at its best.

Show Me exemplified this approach. The arrangement had the plush, keyboard-and-string richness that characterized quality R&B ballad production of the period, giving Hewett's vocal a luxurious setting in which to operate. The song itself asked for exactly the kind of committed, sustained delivery that Hewett excelled at: a lyric about wanting proof of love, wanting the emotion to be made visible and tangible, delivered by a voice that sounded completely certain of its own sincerity.

The Chart Run

The record debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on May 26, 1990, entering at position 84. It climbed through the 80s and into the 60s over subsequent weeks, finding its audience through R&B radio play. By June 23, 1990, the single had reached its peak of number 62, spending 7 weeks total on the Hot 100. The pop chart peak at 62 was modest, but the record's performance on the R&B chart, where Hewett's core audience was concentrated, was considerably stronger and provided the more meaningful measure of the song's commercial reach.

Seven weeks on the Hot 100 was enough to confirm that Show Me had found genuine traction at radio, even in a competitive period for R&B and pop. The spring and early summer of 1990 were crowded with strong material, and holding a chart position for that duration required sustained programming support.

The Vocal Tradition Behind the Performance

Howard Hewett's voice sits in a lineage that runs through the great R&B tenors and smooth gospel-trained singers who shaped the genre from the 1960s through the 1990s. The influences are audible without being derivative: the breath control, the precision of pitch, the ability to hold a sustained note and make it emotionally meaningful rather than merely technically accomplished. These are skills developed through years of working across different contexts, and Hewett had accumulated them thoroughly during his Shalamar years.

The solo career never quite generated the same commercial altitude as his group work, but the recordings from this period remain valuable documents of a particular kind of R&B craftsmanship: patient, vocally centered, genuinely romantic in intent.

The Enduring Appeal of Intimate R&B

There is a reason the smooth R&B ballad format has never gone away, even through periods when more aggressive or experimental sounds have dominated the genre's critical narrative. The human desire to hear a magnificent voice deliver an emotionally direct romantic lyric is not a trend that fades. Howard Hewett understood this deeply, and Show Me is one of the more accomplished examples of his ability to serve that desire at a high level. Press play and let the voice do its work.

"Show Me" — Howard Hewett's singular moment on the 1990s charts.