Say, we can act if we want to, if we don't nobody will, and you can act real rude and totally removed and...I'm (only eight days?) late again....
Funny enough, this is the second time I've written about this week's artists, and as with their first song, I have no recollection as to when I first heard it. Chalk it up to the plethora of great soul songs from the seventies, a true golden age of rhythm and blues....
As noted above, I wrote about the Chi-Lites in Vol. CDCXVII and as there have been zero new information since that bio, I'll stick a pin in it and leave it at that.
"Oh Girl" was the first single from their 1972 album, the rather forlornly entitled A Lonely Man. The single would reach #1 (with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100, while the album would hit #5 on the Billboard 200.
Fun Fact: Both Beyonce and Jay-Z have sampled a Chi-Lites song in their music. Talk about some serious music royalty....
"Oh Girl" has a bit of many different musical touches and it adds up to a wondrous whole. Opening with some lightly strummed guitar from lead vocalist Eugene Record (and what a surname that is for a musician), that leads into some of the most mournful harmonica playing (from the lone surviving member, Marshall Thompson--who nails the harmonica solo not once but twice) you'll ever hear. By the time Record begins telling his lover how lost he'd be without her (with heartbreaking vocals to die for), the tone has been set. There's a nice sprinkle of piano mixed in, and on the periphery almost throughout Thompson, Robert "Squirrel" Lester, and Creadel Red Jones provide some backing "oohs" that are just this side of heaven. In the end, it's another slice of seventies soul to remind us of that decade's monumental influence on rhythm and blues--and how lucky we are that the Chi-Lites have now blessed the annals that are Friday Night Jukebox for a second time.
Lyric Sheet: "Oh girl/I'd be in trouble if you left me now/'Cause I don't know where to look for love/And I just don't know how..."
Enjoy:
Fuck Donald Trump
Peace,
emaycee
