Song of the Day 3/1: Judy Street, “What”

England’s Northern Soul movement is a fertile field for soul music fans looking for songs they haven’t heard a thousand times. The genre took root around 1970 in northern England, where the taste for Motown’s classic mid-’60s period lingered into the funk era. The term was coined by a London record shop owner who told his employees that Northerners, distinguishable by their distinctive accent, only liked older records, or “northern soul.”

Fans preferred songs with a fast, danceable beat. The Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)” has been held up as an exemplar of the form, but it’s not considered a Northern Soul record – because it was a hit. From the first, devotees prized overlooked singles that DJs at large dance venues “discovered” on trips to the U.S. “What,” voted one the top 25 Northern Soul songs of all time, is a good example.

Judy Street was singing in a hotel lounge act in Phoenix, Ariz., in 1968 when Hollywood actor Conrad Bachmann heard her and decided to play music impresario. He took her to Los Angeles and hooked her up with arranger/producer H.B. Barnum, at the time the musical director for Gladys Knight and the Pips. Barnum recorded Street singing two of his own compositions. “You Turn Me On,” a slow torch song, was the A-side. He had written the uptempo “What” for Melinda Marx, Groucho’s daughter, three years earlier; Street covered it for the B-side. Bachmann knew nothing about promoting a record, though, and the single went nowhere. Only 1,000 copies were pressed.

The song was revived five years later by DJs at the Wigan Casino, a Northern Soul hotbed in Greater Manchester, where it quickly became a crowd favorite. It proved so popular that it was re-released in 1977, then again in 1982 after it was covered by Soft Cell, whose version went to No. 3 on the UK singles chart.

In the best Northern Soul tradition, Judy Street had no idea the song had become popular across the pond. After her recording session she sang with a Disneyfied pop group called the Swinging Society for a couple of years, then returned to the lounge circuit in California before moving to Nashville, where she played drums and sang in local bands and gave music lessons. She once met a couple of Brits who told her about the Soft Cell hit, but it wasn’t until she googled herself on the internet around the turn of the millennium that she learned the full story. It led to a career revival of UK concerts and a couple of albums, the most recent from last year.