Jackie Day’s obscure soul single Before It’s Too Late was a flop in 1966 but found a new lease of life as a popular Northern Soul floor filler.

I love looking up the backgrounds of those singers whose solitary single got rediscovered by Northern Soul fans years later. They often led fascinating lives before and after their dreams of stardom died.

Jackie Day worked several jobs – security officer at LAX and the LA County Museum of Art, and later with the LAPD – and released a string of singles between 1965 and 1970.

This one, arranged and produced by Maxwell Davis, who also plays the dirty sax solo, didn’t do much at the time but later became a dancefloor favourite with the Northern Soul crowd.

Jackie (born Jackie Baldain in 1938) grew up in Louisiana and moved to San Francisco with her mother when she was 12.

By the age of 17 she was a single mom herself, with a son called Richard. She launched her music career after meeting and marrying a saxophonist called Big Jay McNeely in 1960.

Jackie’s musical partnership with Maxwell Davis produced plenty of great soul tunes like I Want Your Love / Naughty Boy, Oh What Heartaches / If I’d Lose You and Long as I Got My Baby / What Kind Of Man Are You?

There was also a protest song called Free At Last, inspired by Martin Luther King’s 1963 speech, before Jackie recorded what would be her final single, Guilty / I Can’t Wait.

Her recording career ended with Davis’s sudden death in 1970 and she later divorced Big Jay, changing her family name from McNeely to Edwards.

She died in 2007 and four years later all her recordings were collected in a posthumous compilation called Dig It The Most: The Complete Jackie Day.