The term blue-eyed soul, despite having been coined by influential Philadelphia DJ Georgie Woods, has become problematic for many people. Among them: A guy whose roots in both white and black music got him tagged as one of the genre’s prime purveyors.
“I fucking hate it. It’s a racist term,” Daryl Hall told VH1 in 2015. “It assumes I’m coming from the outside. There’s always been that thing in America, where if you’re a white guy and you’re singing or playing in a black idiom, it’s like: ‘Why is he doing that? Is he from the outside, looking in? Is he copying? What’s the point of it?’ C’mon, it’s music! It’s music.”
Hall, who cut his teeth in the industry singing backup for Thom Bell and Gamble & Huff when they were developing the sound of Philly soul, was as deserving of the label as anyone. He and John Oates had their first Top 10 hit in 1976 with “Sara Smile,” an album track broken big by an R&B station.
That wasn’t an accident. Producer Chris Bond said, “The concept with ‘Sara’ was that it was like an Al Green song. I wanted it to sound like an old Al Green song from Memphis.” Bond thought it would be a hit as soon as he heard the playback. But RCA, who had recently signed the duo when Atlantic dropped them, instead chose two other songs from the duo’s eponymous 1975 LP, known as the Silver Album for its glam-rock cover, as the singles. Neither one charted.
There were no plans for a third until a DJ at a Toledo, Ohio, R&B station started playing the track repeatedly. Word spread — Bond tells a story about the duo’s manager, Tommy Mottola, using a lot of cash to spread it — and a single was cut. It went to No. 4.
The subject of the song was Sara Allen, Hall’s longtime partner and lyricist. He said there was no “first time” he played it for her, because she was usually in the room while he was writing it.
Just don’t call it blue-eyed soul.
