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Classic Recordings: Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes – Collector’s Item

Eight tracks, and every one of them is a monument. This is the Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes catalogue at the moment Teddy Pendergrass was the greatest singer in America.

Philadelphia International, at full power

Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes had been working since the 1950s without much success when they signed to Gamble and Huff's Philadelphia International in 1972. Two things then happened at once: they got the best writing and production team in American music, and their drummer, Teddy Pendergrass, moved to the front of the stage.

Pendergrass had a voice like nothing else — a huge, rough, gospel-scarred baritone that could sound utterly desolate one moment and physically overwhelming the next. Melvin remained the group's leader and namesake, which became a source of tension, and Pendergrass left in 1976 for a solo career that made him the biggest male soul star of the late 1970s.

A 1982 car accident left Pendergrass paralysed from the chest down. He continued recording and became a significant advocate for people with spinal cord injuries. He died in 2010.

What to listen for

"If You Don't Know Me by Now" is the one everybody knows, and it is one of the great performances in soul music — Pendergrass sounds genuinely exhausted, which is exactly right for the song.

"The Love I Lost" is arguably more important. Gamble and Huff intended it as a ballad, sped it up in the studio, and accidentally produced one of the founding records of disco — that driving hi-hat pattern from MFSB's Earl Young is where the entire genre's rhythm comes from.

"Bad Luck" pushes the same idea further and runs to nearly ten minutes in its full form.

"Wake Up Everybody" is the political one — a plea for collective responsibility that has been covered and quoted endlessly, and it has not dated at all.

"I Miss You" is the one to sit with: eight minutes, largely spoken in places, and the record that made Gamble and Huff realise what they had in Pendergrass.

"Hope That We Can Be Together Soon" features Sharon Paige and is the duet.

Go deeper

Teddy Pendergrass's Life Is a Song Worth Singing (1978) is the essential solo album.

The Philadelphia International catalogue is one of the great bodies of work in American music: The O'Jays, Billy Paul, The Intruders, MFSB and Lou Rawls.

And MFSB — the house band — deserve their own investigation. Earl Young, Norman Harris, Ronnie Baker and Vince Montana played on essentially everything, and their Love Is the Message is one of the most important records in dance music history.

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