Sheldon Taylor's Souls of Black Notes

  With Thom Bell's passing, another major player of the Philadelphia Soul family is gone. Having left an earthly footprint for eternity---I envision Bell ascending to an ancestral plane, reuniting with his departed comrades. His signature strings, French horns, sitars, and oboes trumpet his arrival.    My early memories of the legendary producer/arranger/singer/songwriter were ignited by his peculiar-looking first name--- Thom:  a cross between a West Indian spelling and an antiquated abbreviation of his birth name. (For years I called him  Th- om as in the word “thumb”).  I remember my mother's recollection of my little sister’s infatuation with "Rock and Roll Baby"----a Bell-produced joyful romp about a precocious child prodigy from “Bluefield, West Virginia” in "doodle-white shoes" who "never sang out of tune."   Even as a seven-year-old in 1976, I was keenly aware of Bell's music. As a second grader, I proudly recited (to say I sang it woul...

                                                                                                         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.                   ...