Claudine (Original Soundtrack)

We Say...

Review by Michaelangelo Matos

In 1974, both Curtis Mayfield and Gladys Knight were riding white-hot streaks. The year before, Knight and her backing vocalists, the Pips, had two classic hits on two different labels, saying goodbye to the Motown subsidiary Soul with the No. 2 "Neither One of Us" and saying hello to Buddah with the No. 1 "Midnight Train to Georgia." Mayfield, meanwhile, made his greatest solo album (he’d previously been in the Impressions) with 1972’s trendsetting album of music from the film Super Fly. So it made clear sense for both of them to be tapped for the soundtrack to the John Barry-directed Claudine, starring Diahann Carroll as a mother of six on welfare who finds love with James Earl Jones.

On the Claudine soundtrack, the strings and horns are more florid and the rhythms flatter than on Super Fly, as befits a domestic comedy-drama rather than an action flick. And though Hollywood music is often riddled with schlock, Claudine simply isn’t. Knight’s dark-burgundy, tear-stained voice could make "Happy Birthday" sound emotionally complex, and here she sinks her chops into some of Mayfield’s pointed lyrics: "To Be Invisible" is a clear-eyed look at the limits of black America’s progress circa 1974, while "Mr. Welfare Man" features lines such as, "They keep saying I’m a lazy woman/And I’m mentally unfit/I must divorce the man/Cut off all my ties with him/Because his ways they make me sick." Throw in the slinky funk of "On and On" and the quiet-storm forerunner "Make Yours a Happy Home," and the result is one of the finest half hours in both Knight’s and Mayfield’s catalogs.