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Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes Collection

Twelve tracks from a group whose drummer stepped out from behind the kit and turned into one of the greatest voices in soul music.

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Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes

The group was named after Harold Melvin, who led it, but the reason anyone remembers it is Teddy Pendergrass — who joined as the drummer, was moved to lead vocals when Melvin heard him singing, and proceeded to deliver a run of performances that reset what a male soul singer could do.

Signed to Philadelphia International, they became the vehicle for some of Gamble and Huff's most ambitious writing. Pendergrass left in 1976 for a solo career that made him one of the biggest stars in American music until a car accident in 1982 left him paralysed; he continued recording and died in 2010.

The twelve tracks here are essentially the complete case for the group, and there is not a weak one among them.

What to listen for

"If You Don't Know Me by Now" is the most famous and the most restrained — Pendergrass barely raises his voice, which is what makes the performance devastating.

"The Love I Lost" is the historically important one. Its fast, insistent four-on-the-floor rhythm, played by MFSB, is widely credited as one of the templates from which disco was built.

"Wake Up Everybody" is the political record and one of the finest of its kind — a call to teachers, doctors and preachers that has been covered and sampled endlessly.

"Don't Leave Me This Way" is here in the original, which most people have never heard — Thelma Houston's version became the hit, and this one is slower, heavier and better.

"Bad Luck" is the hardest-driving track, and "Be For Real" is the one where Pendergrass sounds most like a preacher.

"Hope That We Can Be Together Soon" with Sharon Paige is the duet, and "I Miss You" is the extended, spoken-word-heavy epic that shows how theatrical this group was willing to be.

Go deeper

Black & Blue (1973) and Wake Up Everybody (1975) are the albums.

Teddy Pendergrass's solo records — particularly Life Is a Song Worth Singing and TP — are the necessary next step, and they are where the quiet-storm format found its defining male voice.

Listening note: the restraint is what makes the famous ballad devastating — he barely raises his voice on it. Then hear the fast one built by the same band and the same singer, and you can pick out the rhythm that a whole genre was about to be constructed from. Twelve tracks, and both halves of the story are on them.

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