Your Guide to the Best R&B Singles of 1969
Soul was by no means dead in 1969 -- in some ways it was more popular than ever, what with Sly and the Family Stone having about the most triumphant year a band can have, capped off by a legendary performance at Woodstock. Yet the hippies who made up that cultural revelation were becoming more interested in folk and heavy blues, and R&B was learning to survive by turning in two directions at once: to the pop charts, which was more than ready to accept it if it came with showy horns and sweet strings, and to funk, which was ready to take up the banner of the black revolution, whether white hippies got on board or not.
Here are the greatest R&B hits of 1969, excluding, as always, those which have already made my pop Top 10 list!
"Stand!" / "I Want to Take You Higher," Sly and the Family Stone
No one in the tumultuous civil-rights era of the late '60s was able to cross over between pop rock and R&B like Sly, and 1969 was his arguable apex: most of the songs that made his rep, including "Everyday People," "Sing a Simple Song," and "Hot Fun in the Summertime," hit the airwaves that year. But this double-sided smash was his true mission statement, not only introducing his incredibly influential funk-rock hybrid but blurring the line forever between the protest march and the dance floor.
In Sly and the Fam's hands, social activism felt like a party and dancing felt like social activism, which is why they arguably owned Woodstock around the same time, becoming, for an all-too-brief period, both the heart and the soul of the youth movement. He fell soon after, but the message stuck: as one of his disciples put it, free your mind and your ass will follow.
Listen!
"It's Your Thing," The Isley Brothers
A funk jam as ferocious as the unfettered libido it celebrates, "It's Your Thing" completed the journey of these soul legends from secular-gospel firebrands to masters of the new groove. The best kind of protest song, it asserts sexual freedom as a basic right, a revolution that assumes that saying no to slut-shaming was beneficial for everyone -- and this at a time when even the most lubricious soul men were jealously guarding their right to be natural men.
Ronald Isley's scream of liberation, set off by those ferocious, liberating horns, was the opening fusillade of the next decade's sexual awakening.
Listen!
"Give It Up Or Turnit a Loose," James Brown
The funk that James Brown began birthing in the mid-'60s reached full flower between 1969-1972, and his first single from '69 began to ramp up the process by amping up the beat, sending his polyrhythms to ridiculous levels. This is the moment where Butane James gave into rhythm entirely, each performance becoming less like a song and more like a miraculous voice reacting in the moment. The later album version, which was even faster, also revealed that the Godfather's bands were really jazz outfits with a different beat -- how often do you hear the organist carry a funk song?
Never, you don't.
Listen!
"Reconsider Me," Johnny Adams
One of the biggest and greatest R&B hits of the late '60s was actually a country ballad, but that was par for the course for Johnny Adams, who always had his Southern Soul sense of rustic colorblind blues with him. If anything, the Tan Canary was in even better voice by this time than he was during his classic New Orleans sides of the late '50s, and it had become a fearful instrument, marrying the emotional complexity of C&W with the raw pain of R&B.
Small wonder Elvis picked up on the connection and made it a concert staple, though he could never replicate Johnny's spinetingling falsetto.
Listen!
""Black Pearl," Sonny Charles and the Checkmates Ltd.
Show, don't tell, is the watchword (watchphrase?) of writers everywhere, and producer Phil Spector was a genuine genius at giving a three-minute single the weight of a novel. His last great non-Beatle production, one he came out of his "River Deep, Mountain High" hermit phase to make, possibly could have been sung by anyone. But in shuttling the entire civil rights movement into a white-knight fantasy (no pun intended), this song made a huge cultural shift seem intensely personal, and Phil responds in kind, lending his largesse to lines like "You won't win a beauty pageant...
but you're my Miss America." What would it sound like if the Righteous Brothers weren't trying to save a relationship but humanity itself? This is what that would sound like.
Listen!
"Cissy Strut," The Meters
Funk wasn't invented by any one person any more than rock and roll, or television, for that matter. James Brown may have gotten there first, but funk had already begun mutating by 1969, and New Orleans' finest, who'd already proven their funk cred behind Lee Dorsey, introduced the city's jazz, parade, and Afro-Cuban influences into the groove as well. With Ziggy Modeliste's drums so dry and hard that every rimshot felt like a muscle spasm waiting to happen, the Meters here reconfigured funk for a four-piece with organ, paving the way for its '70s transformation.
Listen!
"Oh Happy Day," Edwin Hawkins Singers
Black gospel had largely been a cult obsession for non-blacks during the decades that blues, jazz, swing and R&B made that long crossover journey, but by the end of the Sixties it had become the logical next step, especially given the Israelite-like saga of their final freedom from bondage. Hawkins, however, met America halfway with this smash, although unselfconsciously: created to sit on a charity album that would raise money for his church, the subtle but pervasive Latin rhythms and soul fire he injected helped bring African-American religion -- and depending on whom you ask, Christianity itself -- into the American conversation for the first time in decades.
Listen!
"Baby, I'm for Real," The Originals
Marvin Gaye practically spent 1969 figuring out a way to extricate himself from the pop iconography Motown insisted on constructing around him, a situation that was not helped by the rapidly unraveling fabric of American society and the sudden and tragic young death of one of his closest friends, duet partner Tammi Terrell. In this hit by the Originals, one which he wrote and produced, you can hear him start to figure out the answer: the smooth, dramatic, and measured soul of this ballad, perfect for jazzy improvisation, is a clear precursor to the '70s Marvin of "Trouble Man" and "Distant Lover." And it also works wonders as what it was built to be: a testament to honesty in the service of fidelity, or vice versa.
Listen!
"We Got More Soul," Dyke and the Blazers
As monumental an achievement as "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" undeniably was, it's bleak landscape practically demanded a response of some kind, indeed, an antidote. The more philosophical, distant tones of "That's the Way Love Is" wasn't the solution, even though it was nearly as sweet in its pain as the original. No, Marvin the singer needed a new girl, and he gets a theoretical one here, except this time the strings are pure sunshine, not rain, and even if the sentiment seemed ripped from a Motown hit of five years earlier (The Temps first waxed it in 1966), Gaye dug deep and found his smile.
It deserved the effort.
Listen!
If founder, lead singer, and bassist Armand "Dyke" Christian hadn't joined The 27 Club by getting in a gunfight on the streets of Phoenix, he might today be enjoying his due as a funk-soul pioneer. As it was, he had a handful of R&B hits, all because he was smart enough to follow James Brown step for step -- 1966's "Funky Broadway" popularized funkiness as a concept, and it became a hit all over again for Wilson Pickett, but this is his real claim to greatness, because by the time 1969 dawned, the Blazers were getting almost as good at being James as James was.
Name-checking soul stars after "Sweet Soul Music" had done so proved he wasn't a visionary, but with that groove, and those gutpunch horns, he didn't need to be.
Listen!
Soul was by no means dead in 1969 -- in some ways it was more popular than ever, what with Sly and the Family Stone having about the most triumphant year a band can have, capped off by a legendary performance at Woodstock. Yet the hippies who made up that cultural revelation were becoming more interested in folk and heavy blues, and R&B was learning to survive by turning in two directions at once: to the pop charts, which was more than ready to accept it if it came with showy horns and sweet strings, and to funk, which was ready to take up the banner of the black revolution, whether white hippies got on board or not.
Here are the greatest R&B hits of 1969, excluding, as always, those which have already made my pop Top 10 list!
"Stand!" / "I Want to Take You Higher," Sly and the Family Stone
No one in the tumultuous civil-rights era of the late '60s was able to cross over between pop rock and R&B like Sly, and 1969 was his arguable apex: most of the songs that made his rep, including "Everyday People," "Sing a Simple Song," and "Hot Fun in the Summertime," hit the airwaves that year. But this double-sided smash was his true mission statement, not only introducing his incredibly influential funk-rock hybrid but blurring the line forever between the protest march and the dance floor.
In Sly and the Fam's hands, social activism felt like a party and dancing felt like social activism, which is why they arguably owned Woodstock around the same time, becoming, for an all-too-brief period, both the heart and the soul of the youth movement. He fell soon after, but the message stuck: as one of his disciples put it, free your mind and your ass will follow.
Listen!
"It's Your Thing," The Isley Brothers
A funk jam as ferocious as the unfettered libido it celebrates, "It's Your Thing" completed the journey of these soul legends from secular-gospel firebrands to masters of the new groove. The best kind of protest song, it asserts sexual freedom as a basic right, a revolution that assumes that saying no to slut-shaming was beneficial for everyone -- and this at a time when even the most lubricious soul men were jealously guarding their right to be natural men.
Ronald Isley's scream of liberation, set off by those ferocious, liberating horns, was the opening fusillade of the next decade's sexual awakening.
Listen!
"Give It Up Or Turnit a Loose," James Brown
The funk that James Brown began birthing in the mid-'60s reached full flower between 1969-1972, and his first single from '69 began to ramp up the process by amping up the beat, sending his polyrhythms to ridiculous levels. This is the moment where Butane James gave into rhythm entirely, each performance becoming less like a song and more like a miraculous voice reacting in the moment. The later album version, which was even faster, also revealed that the Godfather's bands were really jazz outfits with a different beat -- how often do you hear the organist carry a funk song?
Never, you don't.
Listen!
"Reconsider Me," Johnny Adams
One of the biggest and greatest R&B hits of the late '60s was actually a country ballad, but that was par for the course for Johnny Adams, who always had his Southern Soul sense of rustic colorblind blues with him. If anything, the Tan Canary was in even better voice by this time than he was during his classic New Orleans sides of the late '50s, and it had become a fearful instrument, marrying the emotional complexity of C&W with the raw pain of R&B.
Small wonder Elvis picked up on the connection and made it a concert staple, though he could never replicate Johnny's spinetingling falsetto.
Listen!
""Black Pearl," Sonny Charles and the Checkmates Ltd.
Show, don't tell, is the watchword (watchphrase?) of writers everywhere, and producer Phil Spector was a genuine genius at giving a three-minute single the weight of a novel. His last great non-Beatle production, one he came out of his "River Deep, Mountain High" hermit phase to make, possibly could have been sung by anyone. But in shuttling the entire civil rights movement into a white-knight fantasy (no pun intended), this song made a huge cultural shift seem intensely personal, and Phil responds in kind, lending his largesse to lines like "You won't win a beauty pageant...
but you're my Miss America." What would it sound like if the Righteous Brothers weren't trying to save a relationship but humanity itself? This is what that would sound like.
Listen!
"Cissy Strut," The Meters
Funk wasn't invented by any one person any more than rock and roll, or television, for that matter. James Brown may have gotten there first, but funk had already begun mutating by 1969, and New Orleans' finest, who'd already proven their funk cred behind Lee Dorsey, introduced the city's jazz, parade, and Afro-Cuban influences into the groove as well. With Ziggy Modeliste's drums so dry and hard that every rimshot felt like a muscle spasm waiting to happen, the Meters here reconfigured funk for a four-piece with organ, paving the way for its '70s transformation.
Listen!
"Oh Happy Day," Edwin Hawkins Singers
Black gospel had largely been a cult obsession for non-blacks during the decades that blues, jazz, swing and R&B made that long crossover journey, but by the end of the Sixties it had become the logical next step, especially given the Israelite-like saga of their final freedom from bondage. Hawkins, however, met America halfway with this smash, although unselfconsciously: created to sit on a charity album that would raise money for his church, the subtle but pervasive Latin rhythms and soul fire he injected helped bring African-American religion -- and depending on whom you ask, Christianity itself -- into the American conversation for the first time in decades.
Listen!
"Baby, I'm for Real," The Originals
Marvin Gaye practically spent 1969 figuring out a way to extricate himself from the pop iconography Motown insisted on constructing around him, a situation that was not helped by the rapidly unraveling fabric of American society and the sudden and tragic young death of one of his closest friends, duet partner Tammi Terrell. In this hit by the Originals, one which he wrote and produced, you can hear him start to figure out the answer: the smooth, dramatic, and measured soul of this ballad, perfect for jazzy improvisation, is a clear precursor to the '70s Marvin of "Trouble Man" and "Distant Lover." And it also works wonders as what it was built to be: a testament to honesty in the service of fidelity, or vice versa.
Listen!
"We Got More Soul," Dyke and the Blazers
As monumental an achievement as "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" undeniably was, it's bleak landscape practically demanded a response of some kind, indeed, an antidote. The more philosophical, distant tones of "That's the Way Love Is" wasn't the solution, even though it was nearly as sweet in its pain as the original. No, Marvin the singer needed a new girl, and he gets a theoretical one here, except this time the strings are pure sunshine, not rain, and even if the sentiment seemed ripped from a Motown hit of five years earlier (The Temps first waxed it in 1966), Gaye dug deep and found his smile.
It deserved the effort.
Listen!
If founder, lead singer, and bassist Armand "Dyke" Christian hadn't joined The 27 Club by getting in a gunfight on the streets of Phoenix, he might today be enjoying his due as a funk-soul pioneer. As it was, he had a handful of R&B hits, all because he was smart enough to follow James Brown step for step -- 1966's "Funky Broadway" popularized funkiness as a concept, and it became a hit all over again for Wilson Pickett, but this is his real claim to greatness, because by the time 1969 dawned, the Blazers were getting almost as good at being James as James was.
Name-checking soul stars after "Sweet Soul Music" had done so proved he wasn't a visionary, but with that groove, and those gutpunch horns, he didn't need to be.
Listen!