It may not have been the first time I heard it but the first time I took notice of this song was over the opening credits of Jackie Brown in 1997.

Tarantino’s long tracking shot of Pam Grier in her air stewardess uniform arriving for work at the airport is an indelible image whenever I hear it.

I had no idea then that the song’s first incarnation was in another film soundtrack 25 years earlier – a Harlem-set crime caper called Across 110th Street that starred Yaphet Kotto and Anthony Quinn.

Bobby Womack wrote and performed all the songs for that film, complementing JJ Johnson’s brooding funk score with lyrics echoing the poverty and desperation of the residents in that era, when Harlem was virtually a black ghetto.

Across 110th Street, titled after the traditional dividing line between black and white Manhattan where Harlem begins, was written by both of them and credited to Bobby Womack and Peace, who had had a previous US hit with Harry Hippie (which I don’t know at all).

Womack was singing from first-hand experience: he wasn’t from Harlem himself but his family was so poor that he shared a bed with his four brothers in the ghetto of Cleveland, and his parents reputedly had to forage for food by fishing pig snouts out of their local supermarkets’ garbage

The rapper 50 Cent once told NME that this was the first song with which he “fell in love because of how the situtaiton was for black people in America at that time. There were a lot of struggle songs around. It seemed to be something that really moved the people around me. I felt the power of music to raise people up, to make them angry or proud.”

For some reason Bobby Womack never entered my musical universe before Jackie Brown came out. He had started out way back in the Fifties in a doo wop group with his brothers, like so many other young black men at the time, while still at school.

The Womack Brothers got their break thanks to the benevolence of Sam Cooke (then the singer in a gospel group called The Soul Stirrers).

Cooke became their mentor, helping them get on a national tour with the Staple Singers, signing them to his own label, changing their name to The Valentinos, encouraging them to move to Los Angeles, and convincing them to change their sound from gospel to pop.

He also produced their records, including a country-tinged song written by Bobby and his sister Shirley, called It’s All Over Now. It was just starting to rise up the US charts when a new British band called The Rolling Stones heard it on the radio during their first American tour in 1964.

Just nine days they recorded it at Chess Studios in Chicago and it became their first UK No.1 hit single.

Womack once said he had initially opposed the Stones covering it, telling Jagger to get his own song. Cooke persuaded him to change his mind and, when he saw his royalty cheque six months later, Womack told Cooke that Jagger could “have any song he wants.”

Amazingly, he does not appear to have had a single UK hit in his 60-year career.