Su-POLL-stition: It's the ~~~ 70s SOUL/FUNK/DISCO TRACKS POLL ~~~ voting & campaigning thread

Hey everybody! Come and vote for your favorite soul, funk and disco tracks from the 1970s!

You can submit a ballot of up to 100 tracks, no minimum. Please copy/paste directly from the nominations list, as this makes counting votes much easier.

Send your ballot to ilm70s✧✧✧@gm✧✧✧.c✧✧

Voting ends Sunday, April 9, 11:59 PM (wherever in the world you are).

There are 1051 tracks to vote for, so please use this thread to share your favorite deep cuts and new discoveries. YouTubes are very welcome. Happy voting!

~~~ NOMINATIONS LIST ~~~

The email address to use is ilm70soul @ gmail . com

Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/miketd/playlist/4fbHM5lddc22EYO7JT1a8D
YouTubes of tracks that aren't on UK Spotify: https://troubled-diva.com/ilm-soulfunkdisco-poll-nominations-tracks-not-on-uk-spotify/

Big thanks to Mike-t-Diva for maintaining these lists!

Ashford and Simpson are unique and beautiful and I hope this poll acknowledges that better than the last one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5b2eSi5VVU

The Spotify playlist and the YouTube page (now up to a whopping TWO visits!) are now both fully updated.

(BTW, there are 80 tracks embedded on the YouTube page, so ignoring them represents A Major Dereliction Of Duty.)

How will you be counting these up? Is there a tie option for say the bottom 50?

I'd like to keep it simple, so that the top track on a ballot gets 100 points, down to 1 point for the 100th track. But if there are many people who want unranked ballots, I'll allow them.

This is my campaigning pick: Martha Velez - Aggravation. It's not at all well known, but it should be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqqt3axe9PA

Hoping all "Smiling Faces Sometimes" votes go to the Undisputed Truth rather than the Temptations.

word

I didn't include either version on my preliminary "only the essentials" ballot, which came out at 68 tracks, but there's still room for it to sneak in depending on how much good stuff I discover from the playlists. But yeah, I'd go for the Undisputed Truth version as well.

I wanted to rep hard for Sister Sledge's "Don't You Miss Him Now," but it ain't on YouTube anymore.
Spotify, then: https://open.spotify.com/track/2HdbDK0CsPerQGKAGRbDoF

Me too on Truth vs Tempts. The latter does drag on a bit.

Ordering the full 100 for this thing is the opposite of simple. Just wanted to point that out.

If you pick a hundred songs, you've got 5,050 points total (50.5 x 100).

I'm going to do this:

Rank my 25 favorite, #1 - 25; that equals 2,200 points (100 + 99 + 98 ... + 76)

That leaves 2,850 points to split equally among the other 75 songs
2,850/75 = 38 points each for #26 - 100

After about your 25 favorite, which should be relatively easy to pick out, trying to order them is crazy.

Agreed, that's the right approach.

If you're going to rank just the Top 25, does that mean #26-100 will be in alphabetical order? Just curious, as ranking my Top 100 has proved more daunting than I imagined.

They'd all get the same points, so it wouldn't matter how you order #26-100.

I found picking 100 songs really easy--took five minutes. Went to the Pastebin list, downloaded it, copied it into a Word document, then went through and deleted songs that clearly weren't going to be on my list (which usually meant big blocks of songs). Ended up with 105 left, so I still have to knock off five more. Then I'll pick out 25 for the top of the list, order those, and leave the other 75 in alphabetical order.

It helps to be as completely uncurious as I am about learning anything new.

I've been checking some dates, and for what it's worth: there's no way you can call "Grazing in the Grass" a '70s record. "Take a Letter, Maria" is more of a judgement call, but it had already dropped out of the Top 10 at the end of December '69.

You're right about 'Grazing', and it's my fault. It's the first song of the first volume of Soul Hits of the '70s: Didn't It Blow Your Mind!, and I didn't bother to check.

Consider it disqualified.

Are there more people who want to go with top 25 ranked, the rest unranked? This is easier for me to implement in my counting method than individual ranked/unranked ballots.

Jermaine Jackson "Let's Get Serious" is 1980: https://www.discogs.com/master/view/119752

Are there more people who want to go with top 25 ranked, the rest unranked? This is easier for me to implement in my counting method than individual ranked/unranked ballots.

Possibly - I'm still in the process of narrowing my shortlist down to 100. I definitely wouldn't have any objections to doing it this way.

Jermaine Jackson "Let's Get Serious" is 1980

My jam for the summer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9pwDbJKeSE

Forgot to nominate At Your Best You Are Love. Would consider voting for it. The Isleys are otherwise somewhat bland to me.

I forgot a bunch of songs and I'm irritated. Big Brother by Stevie Wonder being the big one.

On the plus side, I've learned that Teddy Pendergrass is fantastic.

Yes! There's an amazing Teddy song for every occasion. Bad Luck, I Don't Love You Anymore, Turn off the Lights, The Whole Town's Laughing At Me. He goes completely over the top and it becomes like a sermon. The best preacher in pop ever imo.

I'm excited to hear more Teddy.

Also, some killer Wilson Pickett 70s songs that I was not aware of. That man knows how to scream.

What Pickett does to the Archies is far sexier and grittier than what the CW is doing currently doing with the Archies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrZluYnMJUY

Teddy Pendergrass "I Don't Love You Anymore" has to be the most joyful break-up song ever! The disconnect between the lyric and the music lifts it to greatness.

It ends up sounding sort of defiant. One of the best break-songs def.

Tried sending in my ballot and it bounced back--do those three symbols after "ilm70s" stand for something?

should be "ilm70s✧✧✧@gm✧✧✧.c✧✧"

Damn what, it did it to me too.. Should be ilm70soul

Yes, I always forget there's this email protection thing on new posts.

From the non-Spotify YouTube playlist I'd really like to big up Ace Spectrum's 'Don't Send Nobody Else'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vuc5Ed-OJBw

"Don't Send Nobody Else" is a Northern Soul classic!

Grrrr! I missed the nominations. Leroy Hutson's "Lucky Fellow" and The Moments "Nine Times" weren't nominated. Those would be my #1 and #2.

I'd like to campaign for I'm So Glad That I'm A Woman by Love Unlimited. It's a classic for the bassline alone.

https://youtu.be/VDvtkKZZ6OI

One of my favourite Noerthern Soul songs is Hot Line by Reggie Garner. This will probably be in my top five.

https://youtu.be/Kr-lOgmEmJU

Noerthern Soul is actually just Northern Soul but with worse spelling.

Records I might have voted for, especially the Intruders one, but forgot to nominate them initially:

Isley Brothers - Voyage To Atlantis
Teddy Pendergrass - Close The Door
Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway - Closer I Get To You
Average White Band - Love Of Your Own
Intruders - I'll Always Love My Mama

Re-sent my list. One thing I don't get: camouflaging e-mail addresses that are specifically set up for polls (and presumably not used once the poll runs). If it's your own personal address, I get that, but if a poll-only address gets deluged with spam from now till the end of time, does it matter?

Just realised that Otis Clay - The Only Way Is Up is, to my astonishment, from 1980. Bah.

People let me tell you. If you have not heard Listen To Me by Baby Huey, please listen before you vote.

Listen To Me by Baby Huey is actually one of my big discoveries of this whole exercise.

I'm almost afraid to listen to new stuff because my cannot-cut-anymore list is at 110 songs. "Peter Brown - Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me" did surprise me today though.

Holy mackerel. Smokey Robinson Just My Soul Responding, where have you been all my life?

Are we getting confirmation mails?

Everyone knows this one, right? Not on Spotify it seems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sBQPVnKO_Y

Oh, and please post more of your discoveries in the coming week!

This is my main wheelhouse. I will vote this week & post a few favorites. Thanks for doing this poll. I'm looking forward to hearing some new jams!

Are there more people here who actually lived through this decade?

Yes. Loved the Dramatics and Spinners and Stylistics and Al Green when I was a Top 40 junkie early in the decade, age 10=12; wasn't as immersed in the radio in the middle and later part of the decade, but still loved certain songs, and, thanks in no small measure to Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Saturday Night Fever, I think, never hated disco, even though I was a small-town white high school kid who listened to Neil Young and Who's Next and lots of Dazed and Confused/Wayne's World-type stuff much worse.

"Ego Tripping Out" was a single in 1979. It was added to later editions of the In Our Lifetime album, which came out in 1981. Look it up - it qualifies!

My apologies. Please put it back in play!

xxp

My family spent the first half of the decade in London and the second half in North America, where I've lived ever since - a couple of years in upstate New York and the rest in Canada. One thing I missed terribly after the move - there were a lot of radio personalities on Radio One and Radio Luxembourg who championed obscure soul 45s (Tony Blackburn and Stuart Henry come to mind) that never made much noise on North American top 40 radio. A perfect example that I nominated was Brenda and The Tabulations' "One Girl Too Late". It didn't have a lot of success chartwise on either side of the Atlantic but it got played a ton on UK radio. There are many, many others. Who in the USA or Canada has ever even heard of Limmie and Family Cookin's "You Can Do Magic", a cute little slice of pop-soul, which was a top 10 hit in the UK because of these DJs?

I noted how less and less soul got programmed on NA top 40 radio as the decade rolled on - there was a little blip due to Saturday Night Fever in 78/79, with some AM stations switching formats to all disco, before the backlash happened and the bottom dropped out. On my occasional trips back to the UK I would scramble to find out what I had been missing.

New week, new campaign. I'd hate to be the only person voting for Martha Reeves - No One There. It's outstandingly good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh3jVWZh4AU

My campaign of the week. Notable enough to have been included on Rhino's Didn't it Blow Your Mind series, albeit in single edit form, but far from their most well known song, I'm guessing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HhV3Slqtvw

Also, how much of an asshole would I be if I included some write-in votes? I know these picks have no shot of making the final results, I'm seriously kicking myself for not nominating any Willie Wright.

Write-ins are no problem. But do let us know which ones you vote for; they might have more fans.

I had two write-ins on my ballot : Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" and Booker T. and the MGs' "Melting Pot".

I added two write-ins to mine: Aretha's "Oh Me Oh My (I'm a Fool for You Baby)" and Bohannon's "Disco Stomp."

Ha, I've been kicking myself for not nominating "Disco Stomp". Another big omission is "Harvest For The World".

Does a write in mean I can sheepishly also say I wish I'd mentioned Willie Wright and three Terry Callier songs (Candyman, Lean on Me and Occasional Rain)?

Have got my shortlist down to 102 tracks, this is tough! Think I'm going to go with the 25 ranked/75 unranked split idea from upthread.

Just a heads-up that the version of Freda Payne's "Bring the Boys Home" on the Spotify playlist is a rerecorded version. It looks as if Payne's original recordings have only recently become available here--I remember being unable to find "Band of Gold" a year or so ago. The original of "Bring the Boys Home" looks like its available now, as well: https://open.spotify.com/track/7byzKDybUpSTMvkpcGJoqJ

Sorted it... original replaces re-recording.

For your consideration: James Brown's Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved. He's got more famous songs on the list, so the temptation may be strong to overlook this one. Please don't. It is a monster.

Bump. Deadline to vote is tomorrow, right?

I'm still finalizing my ballot/binging on the playlist, but for now, my potential write-ins:

Blondie – Heart of Glass
Dan Hartman – Vertigo/Relight My Fire
David Bowie – Young Americans
Machine – There But For The Grace of God Go I
Odyssey – Native New Yorker
Village People – YMCA
Willie Wright – Dressing For the Occasion
Willie Wright – I’m So Happy Now
Willie Wright – In the Beauty of the Night
Willie Wright – Indian Reservation
Willie Wright – Lady of the Year
Willie Wright – Nantucket Island
Willie Wright - Son, Don’t Let Life Pass You By

(I spun that Willie Wright record again yesterday for the first time in a while, and yeah, I'm having a hard time picking just one or two)

2 write-ins:

Stevie Wonder - Big Brother
Al Green - Take Me To The River

I've been very busy with non-musical things this week, but yes, the rollout will be next week. A little more than 48 hours to send your ballots!

Just voted

damn I totally forgot this was happening--will hastily assemble a ballot tonight and tomorrow

damn, did nobody nominate "Outstanding"?

sheeeit

No, because Outstanding was released in 1982.

Dont think i can participate as ive been ill the past 3 weeks (probably gastroenteritis just waiting on results from test) when does voting end?

Get well soon! :(

I'll vote for a lot of P-Funk to make up for it.

No, because Outstanding was released in 1982.

― Ρεμπετολογια, Saturday, April 8, 2017 3:47 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wow, it was. seems very 70s.

voted

Will be voting shortly. Disco largely ignored on my ballot as we've done that poll; hoping others will do the same. Wanna give soul (and non-P-Funk funk) its due. My write-ins below, sorry there are so many. I wanted to pay more attention during the noms process but was too busy.

20th Century Steel Band - Heaven and Hell Is On Earth
Candi Staton - Mr and Mrs Untrue
David Porter - I’m Afraid The Masquerade Is Over
Emotions - Blind Alley
Fatback Band - Put Your Love (In My Tender Care)
Herman Kelly - Dance To the Drummer’s Beat
Incredible Bongo Band - Apache
Isaac Hayes - Joy
Jackson 5 - Hum Along and Dance
Jimmy Castor Bunch - It’s Just Begun
KC & The Sunshine Band - Queen Of Clubs
Pointer Sisters - Pinball Number Count
S.O.U.L. - Burning Spear
Undisputed Truth - Ball Of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today)

oh, and:

Freda Payne - Unhooked Generation

= also a write-in

OK, i have a 100 track ballot ready to go, but I also have 28 more hours of stuff to preview on Spotify (never even got to the YouTube playlist), so I'm sitting on this until tonight when it's due. Even looking over my list right now, I know I forgot some important stuff.

if i vote im doing a write-in for Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes - Don't Leave Me This Way

one of the greatest tracks ever made and this 12" mix is astounding
https://youtu.be/krW3rOc0G3M

Nobody nominated Mandrill - Ape Is High? Best song of the 70s!
https://youtu.be/kr55GRDYpkg

Voted!

Any chance to send out ballot confirmations? I had wrong email the first time and not sure if mine went through

I threw a ballot together but not much thinking behind it. Wish I had been well enough to participate in noms and campaigning as quite a few of my fave songs weren't nominated but ah well.

Gutted that Ape Is High esp wasnt nommed

OK, I am absolutely not going to be able to turn a ballot in time. Please tell me this is going to be like all other ILX polls and the deadline is going to get extended a day or two.

I have my 100 ready to go, but I certainly wouldn't sneeze at having more re/listening time. Plus, I don't like the idea of this poll happening without Eric.

(voted, btw)

I don't think I'll be able to start the results today, so you've got until tomorrow morning (Euro time) to get your ballots in. Eric, please vote!

I just sent out confirmation mails to everyone who voted.

Ballot will be in today!

So far, the best song I've been introduced to from this poll has been BB King's Ain't Nobody Home.

just sent a ballot! hastily assembled, as promised, but it features some of my favorite songs of all time!

17 ballots in, about 10 more hours to vote!

VOTING CLOSED

Stand by for the final results...

Here we go:

Could it be I'm POLLING in love? ~~~ ILM 70s SOUL/FUNK/DISCO TRACKS POLL ~~~ RESULTS THREAD!