Pitchfork

Bobby Womack had an A-list pedigree, relatively enormous success as a songwriter, and a long string of respectable-or-better r&b hits, and he's still sort of an also-ran. A journeyman soul singer, Womack scored 26 chart singles in the 1968-1976 period documented here, but he rarely seems to turn up on, say, oldies radio. He first recorded in the early 60s as part of the gospel act the Womack Brothers, who promptly followed their mentor Sam Cooke's example and went secular as the Valentinos. Later on, he married Cooke's widow (which supposedly got him blacklisted on radio for a few years), wrote a bunch of hits for Wilson Pickett and others, played guitar on records including Sly Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On and Aretha Franklin's Lady Soul, and returned to the charts under his own name in 1968.

Weirdly enough, given his songwriting credibility, Womack spent a good chunk of this era funking up the least soulful pop hits he could find: His first solo hit was "Fly Me to the Moon", and he followed that up with "California Dreamin'", "I Left My Heart in San Francisco", and "Fire and Rain"; his "Sweet Caroline" doesn't show up here, but it charted too. Even so, he barely seems to pay attention to those songs themselves: they're all about showing off how impressive his pipes are. (The backing musicians are, unsurprisingly, not credited here either.) He kept dipping back into his older repertoire, too. A 1975 duet with Bill Withers is a remake of the Valentinos-era "It's All Over Now", which the Rolling Stones covered for their first British #1 hit in 1964; there's also a 1973 remake of the Valentinos' other hit, "Lookin' for a Love", from an album called Lookin' for a Love Again. That title says something about the general sense of commercial desperation on display here; the remake went to the top of the r&b charts, which says something about how desperation moves can pay off if they're executed gracefully enough.

The Soul Years is a solid compilation of Womack's hits, sequenced for vibe rather than chronology (although it ignores the fact that his chart career didn't end in 1976; he released three Top 5 r&b albums between 1981 and 1985, and continued to bat at the lower regions of the r&b singles chart for years after that). Put it on at a party and it'll keep everyone happy. But even at his best, Womack was reliable rather than magnificent, a craftsman rather than an innovator. Nearly all of these songs see him skillfully following up on somebody else's bright ideas. Some of those ideas stuck with him for a long time: all over The Soul Years, you can hear little vocal tricks he picked up from Sam Cooke. "Across 110th Street" is Curtis Mayfield-style blaxploitation funk; "You're Welcome, Stop on By" is a trip into Marvin Gaye territory; a couple of recitative-into-song numbers cop their moves from Clarence Carter and Isaac Hayes. The collection's highlight, "The Preacher/More Than I Can Stand", in which he sermonizes onstage on the subject of cheatin' for a few minutes until the band dramatically kicks in, suggests the improvisational force he developed as a touring gospel singer.

What salvages a lot of these songs, and maybe even what buoyed them up the charts, is that Womack's clearly (and deservedly) in love with the grit and honey of his own voice-- he called his autobiography Midnight Mover: The True Story of the Greatest Soul Singer in the World. Virtually all of them are fine examples of the r&b of their era; scarcely any of them offer something that wasn't done better by somebody else.