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 110th 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
