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

"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

^^^^^^ crucial!

Working my way through the list. Plenty of discoveries just in the Bs: Barbara Mason, Black Ivory, Bloodstone, and Brenda & The Tabulations. Gonna be hard to pare it down to 100.

i know the patti jo song b/c it's in that book that i didn't like much but finished anyway

I just sent out confirmation mails to all 3 voters, so if you didn't get a message please re-submit.

Patti Jo is great! Nice variation on 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone'.

And who knew that Meat Loaf made his debut on Motown? Killer track, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S-6Q5qSbd8

Just noticed, on the noms list, Marvin Gaye's "Ego Tripping Out," which is from 1981.

fabulous song

Voted. I really look forward to the results. It was nice to revisit the soundtrack of my teenage years. I considered adding a few discoveries from the noms, but in the end nostalgia won out, as I was transported back to some dodgy youth club disco in Finchley c. 1973.

Details please.

I can't access the Gmail account at the moment, but I'll send you a confirmation tomorrow. Also, consider the Gaye song disqualified.

Details? A Scout Hall in the park by Highgate Cricket Club off East End Rd. Ages 11 - 15 with some bored 18 year old spinning 45s on a single turntable. Boys shouting between selections for the usual glam stompers - Slade, Geordie, Bowie - and the outnumbered girls asking for the O'Jays and Diana Ross. The DJ played mostly chart soul from Motown and Philadelphia International and for the most part ignored the boys. Some Northern soul tracks would make the cut, the ones that made the charts like Archie Bell and the Drells' "Here I Go Again" or Robert Knight's "Love On A Mountaintop". I can't say I ever really had a good time there, but there was nothing else to do on a Friday night, and I'd go home with those songs in my head and try to tune in Radio Luxembourg on the transistor radio to hear them again.

The hardest part has been weighing tracks I've known for most of my life against new discoveries, especially as I've been on a massive discovery quest in the last year or so. My draft 100 seems to have found a decent balance, though; I first heard 32 of them in The Actual Seventies, and 23 in the last twelve months. Of those 23, 6 are brand new finds, plucked from the nominations list.

Having tons of fun going thru the noms list. new find for me that'll be on my list for sure: Cymande - Dove

Likewise. My find, so far, is War's "Summer," which feels like something that I must have heard before, but I don't remember it.

xxp - Interesting. Are there more people here who actually lived through this decade? I'm almost exactly as old as "I Feel Love" and only started getting into soul a couple of years ago.

new find for me that'll be on my list for sure: Cymande - Dove

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)

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!