The band – mixed race and gender – surely stood for a kind of utopia that was not out of kilter for the late 60s counterculture aesthetic. Their first album, “A Whole New Thing,” was released in 1967 and went nowhere. After that, Sly wrote more for the radio because CBS records executive, Clive Davis, told him to, giving us “Dance to the Music.” The band wasn’t all that into the song at first, but it was a Top 10 hit and set the blueprint for the soul and R&B sound that was follow in the early 70s. Go listen to “Dance to the Music” and then go listen to War’s “Low Rider” or definitely “Cloud Nine” by The Temptations and listen for yourself.

music history, musicAmy LivelyJune 10, 2025music, music history, 70s music

Episode 53: More than Charley Pride - African Americans in 70s Country

“Country music — it's just about time for it to stop being used as a whipping boy. It's a good music. It's the basic music of America, I believe, combined with all the rest of categories that we have — jazz, blues, you name it. Like jazz has been kicked and blues has been kicked. Then it feeds down into the ethnic groups and you start slicing it up. So all that is happening now is a combination of things starting to jell. It's all one ball of wax to me.” — Charley Pride

Episode 3: Nostalgia, Race, and Rebels in 70s Southern Rock

This [“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”] is a song of pain. There were Virgil Caines of the early 1970s who looked around and they ALSO saw a South that they were starting to find unrecognizable. The landscape and how people lived were shifting. The low hanging fruit here is, of course, to focus on the race. We can’t ignore it. In 1970, we were only six years out from the Civil Rights Act and the end of Jim Crow laws. Whether white southerners like it or not, their past as one of the largest slave societies in world history and as the former Confederacy of the United States will likely never escape them, in part because some people do not want to escape it.