Last Friday I had the opportunity to guest host Rita Houston’s Whole Wide World free form radio show on WFUV. As is my habit when I fill in on the WWW, I cooked up a theme that would be enjoyable to explore. Last fall, it was my pleasure to interview Steven Van Zandt and host a session in which he played a pair of songs from his new album Soulfire. Of course THAT

was super cool. One of the songs that he played was Down in Out in New York City originally recorded by James Brown for the Black Caesar soundtrack.

What a dynamite song and a testament to Little Steven’s great taste and eclectic knowledge that he would cover it. In our conversation, he spoke about his love of Blaxploitation film soundtracks and he got me thinking that they may constitute a subgenre unto themselves. Arguably this is true as the artists charged with scoring these films achieved the desired cinematic quality by incorporating more elements associated with jazz, like the vibraphone, than in the R&B that was their bread and butter. The results were sometimes fantastic and I had big fun doing this show. As my knowledge of Blaxploitation is not encyclopedic and as the number of great tunes from them is clearly finite in any case, I mixed in some tunes generally regarded as psychedelic soul and funk that called out across the decades as being worthy companions for the ones from soundtracks.

Here’s the playlist:

Little Steven – Down and Out in New York City

James Brown – People Get Up and Drive Your Funky Soul

Curtis Mayfield – Superfly

Roy Ayers – Coffy is the Color

Bobby Womack – Across 110^th Street

Dennis Coffey – Theme from Black Belt Jones

Lyn Collins – Mama Feelgood

Earth Wind & Fire – Sweet Sweetback’s Theme

Marvin Gaye – Trouble Man

The Undisputed Truth – Smiling Faces Sometimes

Shuggie Otis – Aht Uh Mi Hed

The Isley Brothers – Get Into Something

Isaac Hayes – Theme From Shaft

Swamp Dogg – Total Destruction of Your Mind

Willie Hutch – Theme from Foxy Brown

Funkadelic – One Nation Under a Groove

Jimi Hendrix (Band of Gypsys) – Who Knows

Stevie Wonder – Maybe Your Baby

Sly & The Family Stone – Sing a Simple Song

The Impressions – Three the Hard Way

The Temptations – Ball of Confusion

The Chambers Brothers – Time Has Come Today

Joe Simon – Theme from Cleopatra Jones

The Four Tops – Are You Man Enough?

Herbie Hancock – Actual Proof

Curtis Mayfield – Freddie’s Dead