Nathan Bartell never found fame and fortune and had become a church minister when his funky soul tune was rediscovered half a century later.

Nathan Bartell was having family problems when his local record label offered him a song with lyrics that resonated with his own experience.

Top Going Down, Bottom Going Up seemed to capture his life perfectly: “My wife didn’t want me and I was deep in love (with her),” he later recalled.

“I felt at that time that I was at the bottom of the pit and I wanted to rise up out of that mess because my wife made me feel that I was a nobody. I was not good enough for her – nobody wants you when you are down and out. She felt that she was on the top and I was on the bottom. This song was a message at that time.” 

It failed to bring Bartell fame and fortune on its release in 1975, though the marriage survived. And that remained the case until a collector and DJ discovered the song some 25 years later – and it was used in a hit Netflix series another 15 years after that.

Today it’s seen – and heard – as a funky soul classic.

Hailing from a small farming town in Georgia, young Nathan played the trumpet in a marching band before moving to Atlanta when he left school, singing in local clubs and watching performers like Gladys Knight and The Tams.

One night the house band was urged by the audience to play Wilson Pickett’s hit Funky Broadway but none of them knew the lyrics so Bartell called out that he knew them and was invited onstage to sing it.

Moving back to his hometown to start a family, Bartell was popular enough locally to tour around the South and record a few sides for local labels, including this one, written by Freddie Wilson. But he never achieved national recognition.

And in 1991 a series of personal, family and health events changed his life – and ended his career as a soul singer.

A collapsed lung prevented him from singing and he responded to the death of his two sons as a wake-up call from God to change his life, vowing never to sing R&B music again.

He kept his word, turning instead to gospel music, with rather more success than his earlier soul career, forming a group called Nathan Bartell & Reality who released seven albums before he became a pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Georgia.

So it must have come as a surprise to the Rev Bartell when, in 20016, his old tune appeared on the soundtrack for an episode of a Marvel Comics series on Netflix about a black superhero called Luke Cage.