Lost Soul Singles of the ’60s

Jackie Moore‘s “Precious, Precious” is an amazing single – a Southern R&B burner from 1970 that features a spectacular performance, an indelible melody and a rivetingly masochistic lyrical conceit. My reaction the first time I heard it, recently, was both shock that it hadn’t become a big hit, and curiosity if Moore had ever recorded anything else good.

Then I looked into her career a little more, and what I discovered was even more shocking: it actually had been a big hit. “Precious, Precious” went to No. 12 on Billboard’s Soul Singles charts (and No. 30 in pop), and sold a million copies. It was Moore’s first hit, followed by 15 more R&B chart appearances over the next 13 years. I’ve never heard anything by her played on any radio station, and her highest-charting single, 1975′s “Make Me Feel Like a Woman” (No. 6 R&B), isn’t even in print. She made some of the most popular records in America, within my lifetime, and mass culture has all but totally forgotten her.

If you go by oldies radio playlists and movie soundtracks, it’s easy to think that the golden age of American soul music – let’s arbitrarily call it 1965-1975 – was a lot more limited than it actually was. There’s not a lot of room in contemporary radio formats for variety, of course; even “we play everything” stations usually don’t have much more than a thousand songs on their playlists. But any kind of canon reproduces itself, and the classic soul era has become the territory of a few dozen artists who you’d guess had maybe a couple of good tunes apiece. Wilson Pickett? The guy who did “In the Midnight Hour” and “Land of 1,000 Dances,” right? Right – along with 48 other R&B hits. (Try “A Man and a Half” for starters.)

In fact, that era was an incredible, sustained period of innovation, competition and artistic one-upmanship. Beyond the holy trinity of Motown/Stax/Atlantic, classic soul was fueled by independent labels that were small enough and flexible enough to pursue local audiences before national ones, and often willing to work with artists for years until they broke through. The idea of a regional hit has almost vanished (beyond a few sub-strains of hip-hop), but classic R&B was built on relationships between artists, labels, radio stations, clubs and their local audiences. On a national level, ’60s and ’70s soul encompassed a surprising number of straight-up blues hits – B.B. King and Bobby Bland were near-constant presences on the charts. There were hundreds of instrumental hits. There were an awful lot of covers (“I’ll Be Sweeter Tomorrow,” for instance, charted in versions by the O’Jays, Linda Jones and the Escorts). And there were enormous stars who stuck with the indie labels that built their careers, only to fade from sight along with those labels.

Joe Tex was one of them. In the unlikely event that you’ve heard one of his songs on the radio in the last few decades, it’s probably been 1972′s “I Gotcha” or his 1977 disco novelty “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman).” But Tex had been a regular on the R&B charts since 1965, and for his first 12 years ‘worth of hits, he was the anchor act for Dial Records (run by his producer Buddy Killen). His records aren’t quite like anyone else’s: hectoring, messy, ruefully funny. “Men Are Gettin ‘Scarce,” his No. 7 R&B hit from 1968, is a bizarre congeries of deep soul, thumb-popping funk, standup comedy (with laugh track) and proto-rap, held together by Tex’s ridiculously perfect timing. “You Need Me Baby,” from a bit later that year, applies James Brown‘s vamp-until-I-signal strategy to a smoldering but weirdly indignant seduction ballad/rant (with a kick-ass horn section). Tex doesn’t fit easily into contemporary contexts for vintage R&B – he’s too insistent to be comforting, too eccentric to be easily recycled in sample form – but he’s also too much fun to fade into history.

For the last few months, I’ve been poking around the eMusic archives, armed with a reference book of R&B hit singles. I keep discovering artists who made a little splash, or a big one, in their day, and subsequently disappeared from the landscape: Ted Taylor, the gospel-gone-secular blues singer with a high, tremulous tenor who torched “How’s Your Love Life Baby” to the ground in 1971; Barbara Acklin, a Chicago fixture whose 1969 hit “Am I the Same Girl” was sung over Young-Holt Unlimited‘s “Soulful Strut,” an instrumental hit from a few months earlier; Bill Coday, whose two Willie Mitchell-produced 1971 hits (“Get Your Lie Straight” and “When You Find a Fool Bump His Head”) anticipate the sound of the records Mitchell would make with Al Green over the next few years; Patti Drew, whose version of “Hard to Handle” is…maybe not better than Otis Redding‘s, but kind of great anyway. The more of their ilk I hear, the deeper and more special their moment in music sounds. “Chain of Fools” and “Let’s Stay Together” and “Dock of the Bay” are all great records, but it can be hard to remember that they were also all part of a conversation. If you love them, you owe it to yourself to hear the rest of it.