Song of the Day 6/6: unknown artist, “Walk on Back”

If you want to encounter soul music you’ve never heard before, the seven-CD set “Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos,” released last summer, represents a treasure trove. Archivist and producer Cheryl Pawelski spent 17 years combing through unlabeled demo tapes to unearth songs that had been recorded by the Memphis label’s songwriters and musicians before its demise in the mid-’70s.

It took her years just to listen to 2,000 hours of tapes between her other Grammy-winning work producing vintage reissues and restoring film soundtrack albums. She eventually found 600 viable songs, but some couldn’t be rescued even with modern studio tools. After lots of remastering Pawelski winnowed the material down to 146 tunes worth releasing. More than half were demos of songs eventually recorded by various artists, but 66 of them had never been heard before.

The poor quality and vast quantity of the old tapes was only half the challenge. To figure out who was singing each song Pawelski had to enlist the help of some of the label’s surviving musicians and songwriters. On most of the tunes they were able to recognize who was singing, but one song, apparently titled “Walk on Back,” stumped them. They theorized that the recording was made by an amateur group that won studio time in a radio station contest. Its gospel-flavored doo-wop is catchier than a lot of the professional efforts in the box set.