The Best Soul Albums of the '70s

Berry Gordy thought it uncommercial and sat on the tape for months, and the voices milling about in the opening party chatter include the Detroit Lions' Mel Farr and Lem Barney. Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) floats two Gaye lead vocals against one another, a doubling that began as a studio accident and became the whole record's signature. Spotify's nine-track copy is the original sequence.

Three days after Motown put this out in August 1973, Wonder was in a car wreck in North Carolina that left him unconscious for days. Living for the City runs past seven minutes and stops dead in the middle for a staged street arrest, then returns with synthesiser bass — Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff's TONTO rig — carrying the entire bottom end.

Two years late and far over budget, it entered the Billboard 200 at number one, which almost nothing had managed before. Sir Duke puts its horn line in flat unison and lets it do the job a guitar riff would do on somebody else's record. Spotify folds the bonus four-song EP into a single twenty-one-track sequence instead of keeping it separate.

Willie Mitchell cut it at Royal Studios in Memphis with Al Jackson Jr. on drums and the three Hodges brothers behind him, then slipped two country songs — Hank Williams and Willie Nelson — onto a soul album without anybody blinking. Call Me (Come Back Home) keeps the horn section a half-step behind Green's falsetto and never lets it catch up.

Curtom shipped the soundtrack and it outsold the film, deservedly, because Mayfield's lyrics argue with the movie rather than advertise it. Pusherman is wah guitar, congas and a bassline walking in circles while the falsetto sketches a dealer nobody on screen questions. Spotify files it as Superfly, one word; the plain nine-track copy is the original running order.

Ed Townsend co-wrote and produced the title song, and the finished album runs to just eight tracks. Distant Lover appears here in its studio form — patient, almost sedate — years before the screamed live version everybody quotes at you. Gaye stacks falsetto against baritone the way he had on the protest record, except the subject is now nothing more complicated than wanting somebody.

Braille runs across the top of the original sleeve, a detail nobody at Motown would have signed off five years earlier. Jeff Beck played on Lookin' for Another Pure Love and had been promised Superstition for himself before the label heard it and pulled it as a single. Superstition is one clavinet part overdubbed into a thicket, with Wonder on the drums as well.

Backing him is the old Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band section hired more or less whole — James Gadson on drums, Melvin Dunlap on bass, Benorce Blackmon on guitar. Use Me is Gadson's hi-hat and a clavinet figure and nothing else for four minutes, and it works because Withers sings it like a man enjoying being taken advantage of. Lean on Me went to number one that summer.

His first record after quitting the Impressions, made for Curtom, the label he had co-founded with Eddie Thomas. Move on Up pushes congas and a horn break past eight minutes where the American single cut it to under three. Fair warning: Spotify carries only Curtis (Expanded Edition), which swaps in an extended mix and appends nine extras, six of them demos, so no unpadded original exists there.

Gamble and Huff signed the group to Philadelphia International and handed them MFSB, the house band that made every record on the label sound like the same expensive room. Love Train rides strings and a four-on-the-floor push that disco took wholesale, and it reached number one on the Hot 100 in March 1973. Border case: Philly, but an album rather than a club single.

Twelve songs and a bewildering spread of sources — Nina Simone's title tune, Lennon and McCartney's The Long and Winding Road, Elton John's Border Song — held together by Franklin's own piano. Rock Steady is Bernard Purdie and Chuck Rainey locking down a groove so plain it barely moves, which is exactly the point. It won her another R&B vocal Grammy.

Hathaway opened the last studio album issued in his lifetime with a six-minute orchestral piece he scored himself, which Atlantic cannot have wanted as track one. Someday We'll All Be Free, words by Edward Howard, is the one everybody knows: electric piano, a lyric written at Hathaway rather than about him, and a vocal that stays quiet where it could easily climb.

Peebles wrote the title song with Don Bryant, who later married her, and Bernard Miller, and Willie Mitchell recorded it at Royal in the room that had just made Al Green a star. I Can't Stand the Rain opens on an electric timbale ticking like water off a gutter before the band arrives, and she sings it small and hard rather than big.

Stevie Wonder produced this under the pseudonym El Toro Negro, contract paperwork keeping his name off the sleeve, and played on most of it. Lovin' You ends with Riperton in whistle register over an acoustic guitar and a bed of birdsong, and it reached number one nearly a year after the album had already flopped. Chicago soul with the string section left at home.

Leaving Motown for Atlantic was the best decision this group ever made: Thom Bell produced them in Philadelphia and Philippé Wynne arrived to share the leads. I'll Be Around opens on a guitar-and-conga vamp that keeps circling underneath the vocal instead of building, and Bell holds the strings back until late. Ten tracks, two of them enormous singles. Border case: Philly again, album-side.

Strata-East, a musicians' co-operative label, put this out after the Flying Dutchman deal ended, which is why it stayed hard to find for years. The Bottle sets Brian Jackson's flute over a Latin bassline and a lyric about people drinking themselves to death outside a liquor store. Border case: nearer jazz than Memphis. Spotify appends four live and alternate takes to the original nine.

United Artists released it in 1972 with two unlikely covers parked in the middle — the Beatles' And I Love Her and Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline — and Womack plays both dead straight. Woman's Gotta Have It topped the R&B chart that year, and he half-preaches it, breaking words into pieces to leave room for the bass moving underneath him.