Sheldon Taylor's Souls of Black Notes

                                                              Picture Pendergrass at dawn, surveying Philly like a modern-day Musa/Moses on a solitary mountaintop. Rolling piano keys and soulful organ chords signal a call to prayer as he nudges society awake from its mental slumber. Recognizing the world is slipping away into Sodom-like sea of war, hatred and poverty, Teddy stresses that there is no time for looking back. The old ways are extinct, and the future is within our grasp…. The aptly named Teddy Pendergrass documentary If You Don’t Know Me arrives just in time to celebrate the late soul singer’s criminally under-recognized legacy. The film is part of a loose trilogy, coming on the heels of a 1997 Behind the Music episode and a more recent Unsung segment that aired in 2010.   If You Don’t Know Me promises to re...

                                                                                                         Songwriting credits in today’s music industry read like names of prestigious law firms. It’s not uncommon to list five or six names as co-writers. Factor in samples/ interpolations and the number grows---a far cry from the days when writing and production teams were crews who worked in twos (and threes).  Ask your typical music aficionado these days to run down their short list of great songwriting tandems and they just might stop at LA and Babyface or Jam and Lewis and overlook the prolific genius predating contemporary R&B.                   ...