Joe Simon - Nine Pound Steel: The Best Of Joe Simon
Joe Simon - Nine Pound Steel: The Best Of Joe Simon
Although he never quite attracted the same exalted level of critical acclaim that some of his peers have retroactively embraced, make no mistake: Joe Simon was one of soul music’s top stars during the 1960s and ‘70s. “The Mouth of the South,” as he was sometimes sub-billed, racked up a major, highly consistent string of R&B hits from 1965 to 1981, performing steadily until he voluntarily walked away from the secular arena in 1988 to devote his time to preaching the word of God.
Recasting himself as Bishop Joe Simon, the veteran singer founded his own ministries and never looked back for an instant. He wouldn’t even consider performing the secular hits that distinguish this generous compilation for the last 33 years of his life, although he didn’t mind discussing them one bit. Simon’s vocal delivery was as distinctive as anyone’s in the R&B field, yet he claimed he didn’t take the songs seriously that he had such success with.
“I never wanted to sing rhythm and blues,” insisted the late Simon. “My heart was never in it, but yet I could sing rhythm and blues.”
Simon was already an up-and-coming soul performer when he signed in 1966 with top-rated WLAC deejay John Richbourg, the Nashville radio legend who moonlighted as a producer for Sound Stage 7 Records. That’s when Joe’s career really took flight, and that’s the period of his career covered on this compilation. Under Richbourg’s astute supervision, Simon cut hit after hit in Memphis, Nashville, and Muscle Shoals, his pleading brand of Southern soul often exhibiting a pronounced country influence.
Simon was born in Simmesport, Louisiana, though the precise date remains a little vague. September 2, 1943 was usually cited as his birthday until his recent passing; obituaries then claimed his birthdate as September 7, 1936, which meant he was 85 at the time of his death.
By his own admission, Simon did everything he could to avoid work as a youth, totally determined to avoid backbreaking labor in the fields despite his folks doing their best to get him out there to earn a few cents.
“One of the reasons that I sang rhythm and blues was because I didn’t want to pick cotton,” he said. “The reason I was such a good sinner is because many people always told me when I was a youngster that I would never be anything.” Sanctified music, however, did interest him. “When I was a kid, I was a gospel singer,” Simon said. “I was raised up in church. And I heard about the Lord, but I never knew Him. What church did for me was it gave me good moral values. But as I was singing in church when I was a youngster, I was never saved.”
Looking for a better future, Simon accepted an offer of a ride out to northern California. He moved in with his aunt and uncle when he got there and fell right back into singing gospel, first with the Vallejo Gospel Singers and then the Richmond Golden West Gospel Singers. The latter aggregation’s bass singer, Bill Johnson, happened to manage a doo-wop group from Richmond, the Golden Tones. Joe joined them.
“When I got to Oakland, California, I was still singing in church, and in choirs,” he said. “But when I got to California and was starving to death, I discovered that people would pay to hear me sing. I didn’t know that at first. I started singing with a little group called the Golden Tones. We started singing on talent shows, winning little stuff. The Golden Tones and me, we stayed together for a while. And we made a little record.” Joe later claimed that he authored “Doreetha” in the chicken coop where he bunked for quite some time (he was dirt-poor when he arrived in the Golden State). Johnson shipped a tape off to Garrie Thompson, Jr.’s Sunnyvale, California-based Hush logo. After Thompson heard them sing inside an abandoned storefront in Berkeley, the Golden Tones were officially Hush artists.
With Johnny Talbot on guitar and Carroll Vories on piano, the vocal group waxed “Doreetha” as their 1959 debut platter. Keeping it all in the family, Thompson’s father, Garrie Sr., and his wife Clara signed on as their managers. But the group only had one more Hush 45 on the shelves (“You Left Me Here To Cry Alone,” written by the single’s bandleader, blues guitarist Johnny Heartsman) before they imploded.
“We broke up because of jealousy,” explained Simon. “We had a little record, and a disc jockey, when it came out, he played the record and he said that the guy singing lead on this particular record, by the way, his name is Joe Simon. And when I got to rehearsal that night, the group was there before I got there. They was having a meeting concerning that statement that the disc jockey had made. And they told me, they said, ‘Joe Simon, who authorized that disc jockey to call your name?’ I said, ‘I don’t know who said that, but I know I didn’t.’ They said, ‘Well, we’re not gonna be Joe Simon and the Golden Tones. We’re not gonna be like that, like Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.’ That was their words. ‘We’re not gonna do that.’ That was the first time that I discovered that they was jealous. And I said, ‘Well, if these guys are jealous, then I need to make a decision about myself now.’ And that’s when I started singing by myself.”
The Golden Tones thus committed themselves to oblivion at the same instant that Simon launched his solo career. The Thompsons remained in charge of his career, and Vories settled in as Simon’s musical accompanist. Heartsman stuck around to lead the band on Joe’s ‘60 solo Hush debut, “It’s A Miracle.” Hush pressed up more Simon platters in 1961—“Call My Name” was followed by “It’s All Over,” which was penned by Mel Larson and Jerry Marcellino (later house songscribes for Motown’s L.A. operation), and “I See Your Face.”
“During that time, I was trying to find myself,” he said. “But I couldn’t find myself, because still, that something within me kept on telling me that even though I’m getting ready to start out a rhythm and blues career, that this is something that I don’t want to do. But I had all these things against me. So it kept me confused, so I could never find myself.”
Simon was snaring some gigs, traveling to Texas to perform at Big Bo Thomas’ Empire Room in Dallas and the Missile Club in Fort Worth. But when he returned to California, he still slept in the chicken coop. “We weren’t making any money,” he said. “We was selling about 1400 records a year.” Heartsman wrote his ‘62 Hush platter “I Keep Remembering.”
While dining with the Thompsons one evening, Joe was introduced to Irral Berger, a lady in her sixties who called herself Swingin’ Granny. She happened to be a songwriter. “She told Garrie Thompson’s father one day, ‘You know, I like that young man’s voice! I sure would like to write him a song.’ So I said, ‘Man, that old lady can’t write no songs!’ So my manager said to me after talking to me several weeks, he said, ‘Well, listen, Joe—man, you’re starving to death!’” said Simon. “He said to me, ‘Joe Simon, you’re starving to death. Why don’t you sing the lady’s song?’ So I sat down and I listened to the old lady’s song.”
Not only did Berger write Simon’s only release of 1963, “Just Like Yesterday” (issued on the Irral label, a vanity imprint set up by Thompson, though the platter was soon picked up by Dot for national consumption), she was in possession of another theme that intrigued Joe.
“She had a title called ‘My Adorable One,’ but I didn’t like the words,” said Simon. “She gave me $1100 to go to the studio and record her songs. So I sat at the piano--which I could not play a piano, but I could make enough noise to write a song. I sat at the piano with a friend of mine named Carroll Vories. He would play the piano, but I would do a lot of noise. I wrote this song out called ‘My Adorable One,’ and I used that old lady’s name.”
Paired with “Say (That Your Love Is True),” scribed by Berger and Clara Thompson and out on another Thompson-backed logo, Gee Bee Records, the devotional ballad “My Adorable One,” with Milton Hopkins and Eugene Blacknell on guitars, became Joe’s first regional hit in 1964. “That song set my style across the country. That’s the style that I used, because it was me. I had found myself,” said Simon. “That was recorded in San Francisco. It was a nice record, a hit record. The first hit record I had. And Vee-Jay Records picked it up, and then it became a national hit.”
Garrie Jr. magnanimously allowed Joe to exit his label for far more powerful Vee-Jay, with offices in both Los Angeles and Chicago, though Garrie Sr. and Clara would continue as his managers. Vee-Jay paired the singer with Chicago producer Richard Parker for his first follow-up, “When I’m Gone,” paired with the gospel-soaked raveup “When You’re Near.” Then someone in charge had the bright idea to dispatch Simon to Rick Hall’s FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, where he waxed Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham’s spine-chilling ballad “Let’s Do It Over.” It vaulted to #13 on Billboard’s R&B listings during the late summer of 1965.
Joe had finally broken through. But trouble nonetheless loomed on the horizon. “During that time, Vee-Jay was in bankruptcy,” said Simon. “They went bankrupt after that.”
Riding to the rescue was legendary Nashville deejay John Richbourg, whose nightly broadcasts over 50,000-watt WLAC blasted across the South as he spun the latest soul hits separated by commercial offers including baby chicks that arrived on your doorstep via the U.S. mail. John R’s legion of fans thought he was African-American just like most of them were, but he wasn’t. The veteran jock knew talent when he heard it, and he was interested in Simon because Richbourg moonlighted as a free-lance producer for Sound Stage 7 Records, a Nashville label tied in with Fred Foster’s Monument imprint (home to Roy Orbison and Boots Randolph).
“Vee-Jay was in bankruptcy court, and they couldn’t press it. So that’s how I got with John Richbourg. John Richbourg was on WLAC. John Richbourg and myself, we did a shake-hand agreement. He told me, ‘Well, son, whatcha doin’? Well, I’ll see if I can help you. Why don’t me and you get together?’ And we did a shake-hand agreement. And John Richbourg, being a disc jockey, played ‘Let’s Do It Over’ for two years to keep my name alive.”
Richbourg amassed a very impressive talent roster for Sound Stage 7: Roscoe Shelton, Sam Baker, Jimmy Church, and Sir Lattimore Brown were already aboard when Joe arrived, and Roscoe Robinson and Ella Washington would get there soon. But Simon quickly emerged as SS7’s flagship act. “Teenager’s Prayer,” Joe’s first single for the firm in the spring of 1966, was an oddity, a Nashville-cut remake of a decade-old vocal group ballad originated by Chicago’s Moroccos as “What Is A Teen-Ager’s Prayer.” Cliff Parman sketched out the lush, violin-enriched backdrop for Simon’s revival, which climbed to #11 R&B.
“That was kind of a doo-wop tune. We put it together. But even though I had my style of singing, I still was searching for myself as a human being. Even though I had all these songs, my soul was never happy,” said Joe, wryly adding, “For some reason, I still had them prayers in there, didn’t I?” Staff songsmith Allen Orange’s throbbing “Long Hot Summer” sat on the flip.
From the beginning, Richbourg chose a fair amount of country-derived material for Simon to wrap his distinctive pipes around. Country singer Freddie Hart, still a long way from his 1971 C&W blockbuster “Easy Lovin’,” was responsible for Joe’s SS7 encore, “Too Many Teardrops.” Orange, a New Orleans transplant who had waxed a handful of early ‘60s singles for Minit with Allen Toussaint at the helm, co-wrote the opposite side, the up-tempo “What Makes A Man Feel Good,” with Nashville pianist and frequent SS7 sideman Bob Wilson.
Once again recording in Nashville with Parman arranging, Simon’s goosebump-inducing treatment of the ballad “My Special Prayer,” waxed in 1963 by crooner Arthur Prysock, sailed to #17 R&B in early ‘67, its stately mood contrasting with Joe’s own pulsating “Travelin’ Man” on the flip, punctuated by harmonica and slathered in punchy horns. No slouch when handed a soul-soaked ballad himself, Percy Sledge covered “My Special Prayer” on his album The Percy Sledge Way.
Few SS7 artists had even one album on the imprint, but Joe unleashed a steady stream. The first one, Simon Pure Soul, contained an extremely varied array of covers; Sledge’s across-the-board ‘66 chart-topper “When A Man Loves A Woman” was a natural choice, and Joe’s readings of Brenda Lee’s 1965 pop hit “Too Many Rivers” and Dee Clark’s ‘58 Windy City R&B charmer “Nobody But You” fit his persona well. Richbourg reached way back for “That’s All I Want (From You),” a mid-‘50s hit for Jaye P. Morgan on the pop side and Dinah Washington in the R&B milieu, and the Cats and the Fiddle’s 1939 classic “I Miss You So” (the “I” disappeared when Joe redid the nostalgic ballad in a soft, tremulous tenor).
Richbourg moved the recording action over to Chips Moman’s American Studios in Memphis when Simon waxed his own hard-driving “Put Your Trust In Me (Depend On Me),” a #47 R&B seller in the summer of 1967. Joe teamed with Clara Thompson and Swingin’ Granny to create the mid-tempo horn-driven B-side “Just A Dream.”
You couldn’t find a more emotionally gripping Joe Simon recording than his prison lament “Nine Pound Steel,” cut at Hi Records’ Royal Studios because American was in the midst of an equipment upgrade (its dramatic hammered anvil effect was actually keyboardist Bobby Emmons striking a Coke bottle with a stick). Joe’s stirring performance wasn’t the result of an intense round of homework, however.
“‘Nine Pound Steel’ was a song that I went to the studio and stood up and looked at the paper and sang it,” he revealed. “Never did know it. I never knew a song out of 20-something years. And I always hated to go to the studio to sing.” Written by Dan Penn and Wayne Carson Thompson (Penn and Moman shared arranging credit), “Nine Pound Steel” was a #19 R&B/#70 pop hit that fall.
“Joe Simon came in and actually made the song for us,” said Penn. “We’d written the song, but we didn’t quite know how it went. And old Joe, he’s a talented cat. He came in and kind of took it and put it together for us. It came out great. He’s a heck of a singer, that man.” Allen Orange and Bob Wilson devised the torrid B-side, “The Girl’s Alright With Me.”
Otis Redding had become a good friend of Simon’s as the two played the same clubs and theaters on the chitlin’ circuit. Joe was driving out to San Francisco to meet up with Otis when he received the crushing news that his friend and most of Redding’s young backing band, the Bar-Kays, had perished in a December 10, 1967 plane crash in Madison, Wisconsin (Joe had nixed an offer to fly with them in Otis’ small private aircraft). The Redding family chose Simon to sing “Jesus Keep Me Near The Cross” at Otis’ funeral (Joe had to call his sister Gertrude back in Simmesport for the lyrics—he didn’t know the song).
American Studios songsmith Darryl Carter originally handed the unstoppable “No Sad Songs” to powerful southern soul singer Oscar Toney, Jr. (his solid treatment was featured on his 1967 debut album). “They did get it out before Joe’s version,” said Toney. “I think how people sent your stuff to listen to demos and everything, and when Joe was playing it, or whoever it was that A&R’d for him, heard that song off of my LP, Joe decided he wanted to cut it.”
Naturally, American’s house band (usually consisting of keyboardists Emmons and Bobby Wood, guitarist Reggie Young, bassist Tommy Cogbill, and drummer Gene Chrisman) cooked up a potent groove for Simon’s pounding version too, which went to #22 R&B and #49 pop in early ‘68. Joe got together with Wilson and Orange to author its crisply funky plattermate “Come On And Get It,” done at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals.
Even if he allegedly didn’t put any concentrated aforethought into what he was laying on tape, Simon sounded thoroughly into the country material that John R dug up for him. Buddy Mize and Ira Allen’s “(You Keep Me) Hangin’ On” had been a C&W charter for the Gosdin Brothers as well as the duo of Leon Ashley & Margie Singleton in 1967, but Joe brought it into the soul lexicon with his stunning cover, which apparently possessed universal appeal: the ballad jumped to #25 pop and #11 R&B in the spring of 1968.
“Most of my records was country songs,” said Joe. “I took ‘em out of country and put ‘em in rhythm and blues. That’s when the country folks began to hear about me. See, when I first started singing, when I first started getting my national hits, a lot of people thought I was going to be a country singer, with songs like ‘My Special Prayer.’ They was trying to hook me up to be someone like Charley Pride, because I was in Nashville. But they didn’t know I wasn’t going to be no country singer. Plus they didn’t know that I wasn't gonna continue singing rhythm and blues forever.”
The atmospheric south-of-the-border saga “Message From Maria,” written by New Orleans singer Al Reed and arranged by Moman (saxist Charles Chalmers directed the majestic strings), was Simon’s next SS7 hit during the fall of 1968 (unfortunately, it isn’t available for inclusion on this collection). Happily, its B-side, the smoky ballad “I Worry About You,” is here. Likely cut in Nashville, it was another number previously associated with Arthur Prysock, whose version debuted in 1959. Its composer, Norman Mapp, was a jazz singer and protégé of Dinah Washington. Joe crooned Mapp’s mellow creation much like deep-voiced Arthur did. Simon promoted “Message From Maria” by lip-synching it on Dick Clark’s Saturday morning ABC-TV program American Bandstand. It was by no means his first taste of national television exposure—he’d appeared several times on WLAC deejay Bill “Hoss” Allen’s syndicated R&B show The!!!!Beat, taped in Dallas, in 1966.
No Sad Songs, Simon’s second SS7 album, was like its predecessor dominated by recent singles. But there were a couple of exceptional ballads exclusive to the set; Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham’s “In The Same Old Way” was a popular commodity on the southern soul front, having also been cut by Arthur Conley in 1966 and Mighty Sam the next year (Bobby Bare and Jimmy Dean waxed separate versions for the country crowd). Saxidst Charles Chalmers, who worked some of Joe’s SS7 sessions, wrote and produced the spellbinding “Can’t Find No Happiness” on Barbara Brown in ‘67 before Simon got around to torching it for the LP.
Joe and producer Richbourg were working in perfect synchronicity—or so it seemed. “John R, to me, was one of the best men in radio,” said Simon. “And he was a very good person. John R, I don’t know anybody know him like I know him, other than his family. To me, he was awful nice. And he always was humble and nice to people.
“Now the only guy John R used to argue with was me. And you know what we’d be arguing about? These songs. ‘Man, how come you don’t know this song?’ I’d say, ‘Man, I don’t know this song!’ And I’d get up and read it off the paper and sing it. But that’s what we’d be arguin’ about. And he didn’t argue with anybody but Joe Simon. But he would sit up there sometimes and he’d just talk to me sometimes for a whole hour in the studio. ‘Man, Joe, how come you don’t know the song, man?’ And that’s when the arguments started, because he didn’t know I was fightin’ that something inside of me that didn't want to sing those songs. See, he didn't know that, because I never discussed it with him. And that’s when we’d start arguin’.”
In addition to Prysock, Simon (or Richbourg) also dug another suave baritone, Nat King Cole. Joe jumped on Cole’s 1958 hit ballad, “Looking Back” (penned by fellow baritone Brook Benton and his frequent cohorts Clyde Otis and Belford Hendricks), with Bergen White updating the arrangement just enough at an American Studio session to make it a #42 R&B hit all over again during the first weeks of 1969. The gospel-tinged flip side “Standing In The Safety Zone” was a house favorite—its composer, Roscoe Robinson, would have his own SS7 version on the shelves only a few months later.
1968’s Simon Sings, Joe’s third SS7 album, was cut at American and Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis and Nashville’s Music City Recorders and displayed his versatility as persuasively as any of his LPs for the label. He convincingly belted the after-hours blues “It’s Too Late,” transformed Johnny Burnette’s fluffy 1960 teen smash “Dreamin’” into an impossibly infectious R&B outing, and seamlessly melded country and soul by tackling Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away,” Jean Chapel’s “In Reach Of Your Arms” (she briefly recorded rockabilly during the mid-‘50s), Bob Montgomery’s “Misty Blue” (a C&W hit for Wilma Burgess in 1966), and “She Went A Little Bit Farther,” the work of Mack Vickery and Merle Kilgore (the Statler Brothers’ Lew DeWitt and Faron Young beat Joe to it). A yearning “I’m Going Home” and Memphis guitarist Larry Lee’s touching “Twinkle” rounded out the set.
Joe’s country/soul synthesis culminated in his first number one R&B smash in the spring of 1969. He refashioned Harlan Howard’s regretful “The Chokin’ Kind,” already a C&W hit for Waylon Jennings in 1967, into something fresh and extremely compelling at Music City in Nashville, with Bergen White sketching out a punchy horn line, Scotty Moore engineering, and a tight rhythm section (likely keyboardist Bob Wilson, guitarist Mac Gayden, bassist Wayne Moss, and drummer Kenny Buttrey) providing a churning rhythmic thrust. Joe’s tense, eminently believable vocal rendered the finished product a masterpiece. Simon didn’t like it at all, doing his level best to convince Richbourg not to issue the track.
“I got it from a guy named Harlan Howard,” said Simon. “It was a country song. I took it from a country song, and made a rhythm and blues out of it. Even though I was trying to find myself and still proving to people that I was going to make it, just as I got disgusted with the whole thing, even though I had nice records, I found this record called ‘The Chokin’ Kind.’ They put it on my desk. And we listened to it, and went in the studio. This record enlightened me again, because I was disgusted at that time.
“Most of my friends around me was getting gold records, and all of these type of things. And I was disgusted, because I didn’t have one. I wasn’t doing it like they was doing it, in a sense. And during that particular time, I had became a national promotion man. And I went on to be a national promotion man for about 17 years. That record cost me a lot of money, because I was determined to make it then.”
Richbourg’s intuition won out—SS7 pressed up “The Chokin’ Kind.” The end result was Simon’s first R&B chart-topper in May of ‘69 and a #13 pop smash. What’s more, the platter won Simon a Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance. Joe went right back to Howard, (whose hit-loaded compositional catalog also included “Busted,” “Heartaches By The Number,” and with Hank Cochran, “I Fall To Pieces,” for his first follow-up, “Baby, Don’t Be Looking In My Mind.” Waxed at Music City, it gave Simon a #16 R&B entry that summer. Joe teamed with Orange to brainstorm the ebullient B-side, “Don’t Let Me Lose The Feeling.”
Cut at Music City with Moore engineering and the rhythm section including Wilson on keys, Gayden on guitar, bassist Tim Drummond and Charlie McCoy, Simon’s The Chokin’ Kind album paid more attention to recent chart fare than was customary for Simon’s long-players. He paid tribute to fallen friend Redding with a heartfelt rendition of his posthumous smash “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay” and offered personalized versions of O.C. Smith’s hit “Little Green Apples” and Glen Campbell’s Jimmy Webb-penned blockbuster “Wichita Lineman.”
Jay & the Techniques and James & Bobby Purify had both recently taken their best shot at the pulsing “Help Yourself (To All My Lovin’),” while the insistent R&B driver “Lonely Man” was the work of Delmar Donnell, who went by his first name alone when waxing the kiddie rocker “Lizzie Mae” for New York’s Fury logo in 1960. Written by Clyde Otis and Belford Hendricks, the stately “I’m Too Far Gone (To Turn Around)” was introduced by Bobby Bland in 1965 when Otis was his producer. Joe closed the set with a lovely reimagination of the Five Satins’ immortal ‘56 doo-wop anthem “In The Still Of The Night (I’ll Remember).”
You can almost feel the spray coming off the bay as you luxuriate in Joe’s intimate reading of Nashville songscribe Ben Peters’ “San Francisco Is A Lonely Town” (Peters also penned Freddy Fender’s “Before The Next Teardrop Falls” and Charley Pride’s “Kiss An Angel Good Morning”). It proved a #29 R&B entry in the autumn of 1969, splitting airplay with its hard-driving #26 R&B plattermate, Simon and Orange’s “It’s Hard To Get Along,” boasting marvelous interplay between Joe and an uncredited vocal group. The Music City Four received label credit as Simon’s backing band, and arranger Bergen White was named as well.
Although he initially resisted the idea of a Jamaican tour when persistent promoters first pitched it to him backstage at the Apollo Theatre, Simon eventually relented. There he found the inspiration for a very uncharacteristic dance floor workout (by his own admission, Joe’s feet were less than fleet).
“When I got to Jamaica, I seen everybody stumblin’ and goin’,” he recalled. “So I said, ‘Man, whatcha all doin’?’’ Everybody was acting silly, and nobody’s drinkin’. So I said, ‘Man, whatcha all doin’ over here?’ So they told me, ‘Man, we’re smokin’ ganja!’ I said, ‘What?’ I had never heard of no drugs. That’s how silly I was. I was a very silly person. I didn’t know that drug route. I didn’t have no idea, man. And when I said that, they began to explain that they were smokin’ ganja, and they was doin’ a dance. They were doin’ a dance called the Moon Walk. So I came back and wrote a song called ‘You got me doin’ the Moon Walk.’ But I couldn't do the thing. So when I came to the studio and put it out, it hit.”
It didn’t hurt the record’s chances any that Neil Armstrong had taken his historic stroll on the lunar surface only a few months prior to SS7 unleashing Joe’s two-part “Moon Walk” in late 1969. Part 1 floated to #11 R&B and #54 pop early the next year. Whether Michael Jackson took note right then or not is unknown, but Simon and the Jackson 5 were well acquainted—they’d shared a bill at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre that past June along with the Five Stairsteps.
Taj Mahal’s “Farther On Down The Road” was an inspired cover choice for a Simon single, with White scribing the horn arrangement. Its simmering groove earned Joe a #7 R&B chart placement in Billboard in the spring of 1970. The heartrending “Wounded Man,” written by Bob Wilson and Mac Gayden, was situated on the B-side.
Harlan Howard remained a reliable source for hit material—his charming “Yours Love” had first appeared on Simon’s The Chokin’ Kind album (Waylon Jennings had scored big with it on the C&W hit parade in 1969, as did the rhinestone-studded duo of Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton). SS7 thought enough of Joe’s rendition to issue it as a single; it cracked the R&B Top Ten in the late summer of ‘70 with the minor-key swinger “I Got A Whole Lot Of Lovin’” occupying the flip (Joe woodshedded it with his longtime keyboardist Vories and Orange).
Jackey Beavers had first emerged in 1959 as half of a duo with Johnny Bristol; their original ‘61 version of “Someday We’ll Be Together” for Gwen Gordy and Harvey Fuqua’s Tri Phi Records in Detroit didn’t hit, but the song would serve Diana Ross and the Supremes very well near decade’s end. Beavers later made solo 45s for Checker, Revilot, and several other lesser concerns before ending up on SS7 in 1969 with “Hey Girl (I Can’t Stand To See You Go),” which first came out on the Jaber logo out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Beavers wrote the driving “That’s The Way I Want Our Love” for Simon, the number climbing to #27 R&B in late 1970. Wilson and Gayden again supplied the opposite side, an uplifting “When.”
1969’s …Better Than Ever, Joe’s fifth SS7 album, was another gem done at Music City with a house rhythm section consisting of Wilson, Gayden, Drummond, and drummer Kenneth Buttrey. Country songwriters were now sending Simon fresh material; “Silver Spoons And Coffee Cups,” “Time And Space,” and “Straight Down To Heaven” hadn’t been hits for other singers prior to Joe grabbing hold of them.
Mac Davis’ “In The Ghetto” was Elvis’ comeback smash, signaling new vistas for Presley, while Muscle Shoals soul man Arthur Alexander did a mesmerizing job with “Rainbow Road,” the work of Dan Penn, Donnie Fritts, and Rick Hall, three years after Joe nailed it here, Simon incorporating a banjo melody line for good measure. “After The Lights Go Down Low” was the set’s lone throwback to a previous era, a 1956 pop hit for blind crooner Al Hibbler. Simon picked up its pace, navigating its swinging backdrop like a suave jazz singer.
Despite the hits flowing non-stop on SS7, Joe was ready to bust a move. “When I was with Sound Stage 7, it was costing me so much money to sustain my career,” he explained. “The company that was distributing Sound Stage 7, Monument, they didn’t want to pay me to promote records, and they didn’t want to pay my telephone bills. They always said to me that they had someone to promote records, that I didn’t have to promote Joe Simon.
“But I didn’t never trust nobody, and I didn’t wait on anyone. And after that, my contract was running out. And I told John Richbourg, because John Richbourg and myself, we had an agreement. See, John Richbourg and Joe Simon, we owned Joe Simon, and we leased Joe Simon to Monument. That’s how it was. And I told John Richbourg that I was leaving. He said, ‘Man, what?’ I said, ‘I’m leavin’, man, because these people won't support me.’ He said, ‘What’cha gonna do?’” Simon outlined his future plans.
“So John Richbourg went to New York and found the people who owned Spring Records through some lawyer. We began to sit down and discuss the deal.”
“The deal” included 25 percent of the label itself, underscoring how much Simon had learned about the business. Spring opened its doors at the beginning of 1968 with little tangible success, so Joe’s arrival was just what the doctor ordered for the New York imprint. That’s where this compilation closes, although disc three contains a few SS7 tracks that squeaked out later: the Wayne Carson Thompson-penned “Who’s Julie” was a 1969 C&W hit for Mel Tillis, while Merle Haggard’s “Today I Started Loving You Again” turned out to be a ‘76 R&B entry for Bobby Bland. Elzie Bynem’s “Someone To Lean On” was a delicious country/soul hybrid framed by a splendidly lavish arrangement. Joe gave his road band a chance to shine on the two-part 1969 single “Oon-Guela (High Life),” as funky as anything on the market back then.
Simon segued over to his new recording home at Spring with no interruption in his chart fortunes. He and Richbourg shared production credit for his first Spring smash at the end of 1970, “Your Time To Cry,” but Joe’s momentum really skyrocketed when he traveled to Philadelphia to work with writer/producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. They concocted the bone-chilling “Drowning In The Sea Of Love” for Simon, a #3 R&B hit in late ‘71/early ‘72 that barely avoided the pop Top Ten. The album was a masterpiece of swirling Philly soul.
“Drowning In The Sea Of Love is the only record that I sang that I didn’t do anything but sing,” noted Simon. “I didn’t write it, I didn’t write the music. That was the only record I did not involve myself in. Just went in and sang to the track.” Joe shared writers’ credit with Gamble and Huff on his brawny Spring follow-up “Power Of Love.” It soared all the way to the peak of the R&B hit parade in the summer of ‘72, topping out at #11 pop.
“It was very nice working with Gamble and Huff, and we had a great time,” said Joe. “But they had their own thing going, and we couldn’t stay together. After ‘Drowning In The Sea Of Love’ and doing an album with them, they went their way and I went my way.”
Blaxploitation films were a growing fad. Simon had a chance to score Cleopatra Jones, starring the statuesque Tamara Dobson, in 1973. “They needed a singer, somebody to sing the song, so I had a contract to sing this song to whoever writes the music,” said Joe. “They all went to see the movie, all the bigtime producers and writers. They went to see it, and nobody could come up with some words and music for their movie. So when I went to see it, I sat there and I looked at it, ‘cause you go in a little old room and look at it. I told the guy, ‘Man, I’ve got some music for this movie!’
“Then we began to negotiate, because my contract was only to sing, not to write. So the guy told me, ‘Well, go ahead on and put the music down, if you got it.’ Because they had a deadline, and nobody was coming up with anything. So I went in and began to write. And when we began to write the music and put it down in the studio, then we began to argue a little bit. I said, ‘Listen, man.’ I'm talking to the producer. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’m talking to Warner Brothers. That’s who the movie was with. I said, ‘I got a hit record, and what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna go to the studio’--because they wanted me to make a demo—‘I’m gonna go and pay for it, and if y’all like it, y’all buy it.’ So I went in and laid down the music, and they liked it. Now I ended up with a contract for singing, writing, and producing!” And another major hit, we might add, with “Theme From Cleopatra Jones.”
When disco came roaring in, Simon answered the challenge in 1975 with the R&B chart-topper “Get Down, Get Down (Get On The Floor).” “I wrote and produced those songs,” he said. “It was nice. I didn’t know about disco, and they claimed I helped to open the disco market. But I was not a disco artist, because I was known as a ballad singer. When I came out with the record ‘Get Down, Get Down (Get On The Floor),’ everybody was in a way surprised that I could sing a record that fast. With a fast style like that, people could dance.” It wasn’t a fluke; Simon came right back with another irresistible hit disco anthem, “Music In My Bones.”
Simon’s long and highly profitable tenure as a rhythm and blues star came to an abrupt end in 1988. “When the Lord called me to the ministry, I rebelled three years, because I didn’t see any need in preaching. I had full pockets of money and a carload of women in every town. And I was still unhappy,” he said. “I could not serve the Lord and serve Satan. I was a good sinner. I could not negotiate with him during my rebelling. He kept on telling me what I should and what I must do.
“I retired in a city called New Orleans, Louisiana. I was in the auditorium. I’d been singing ‘The Chokin’ Kind’ and ‘Drowning In A Sea Of Love,’ all of these rhythm and blues songs, for many years. I had made an announcement to the public that Joe Simon was going to retire. And people was wondering what I was going to do, because I was not telling people that the Lord was dealing with me.
“When they came to the auditorium, there was thousands there. And when I walked out on the stage, I couldn’t sing the songs anymore, because I couldn’t remember the words. So we told them to come get their money back. And I told them that I'm sorry, but I can’t sing these songs anymore, and that I had to go to church. They began to cry.
“As they walked out of the auditorium, a lot of them said, ‘If Joe Simon’s going to church, I’m not ever going to another nightclub!’ Well, that kind of made me feel good, but it put something on my mind: that if people loved me that much, then if I am a Christian, that I should not mislead them. After that, I preached my first sermon,” said Simon. “Then I began to travel across the country, preaching and singing the word of God.”
That’s precisely what Bishop Joe Simon did for the rest of his days, right up until his December 13, 2021 passing. He made fresh recordings, exclusively religious in nature, and when he sang in public, it was strictly in service of his Lord. He also worked to register voters down South in his one-time soul-singing strongholds as an enthusiastic backer of President Barack Obama. The Bishop sent out regular press releases detailing whatever noble cause he was involved with through his ministries, based in Chicago’s south suburbs.
He may have been less than enthralled with the secular recordings he made at the height of his heyday as an R&B luminary, but Joe Simon’s legion of fans never knew it. They heard nothing but unshakable conviction in his warm yet edgy pipes, the very definition of riveting Southern soul. You’ll feel the exact same way as you listen to this glorious collection.
--Bill Dahl
SOURCES
The Autobiography of Joe Simon: Don’t Give Up, You Can Make It If You Try, You Can Win, by Joe Simon (Carol Stream, IL: Spickum Pub. Co., 2013)
Discogs website: www.discogs.com
45cat website: www45cat.com
Joel Whitburn’s Top Country Singles 1944-1988, by Joel Whitburn (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 1989)
Joel Whitburn’s Top R&B Singles 1942-1988, by Joel Whitburn (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 1988)
Memphis Boys: The Story of American Studios, by Roben Jones (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010)
The Reggie Young Discography Project featuring Bobby Emmons website: http://souldetective.com/reggie1967.html
Soul Detective blogspot: HYPERLINK "http://souldetective.blogspot.com/2007/07/case-five-allen-orange.html" http://souldetective.blogspot.com/2007/07/case-five-allen-orange.html
Wikipedia website: HYPERLINK "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Simon_(musician)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Simon_(musician)
You Tube website: www.youtube.com