Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes – If You Don’t Know Me By Now
12th November 2020 · 1970s, 1973, MusicThis is a quintessential slice of Philly soul – a lush, smooth and sentimental sound so perfectly described by Fred Wesley, the trombone player for James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic, as “putting the bow tie on funk.”
With its stately pace and lavish orchestration, If You Don’t Know Me By Now is not my usual cup of tea (a little too creamy for my taste) but it’s a perfectly crafted soul classic that gave Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes their first hit in early 1973 after two decades of trying. And it came about by accident.
It was written, like all their subsequent hits, by the Philly songwriting machine of Gamble and Huff. But the duo actually composed it for an up and coming group called Labelle, who couldn’t find time to record it – so they gave the song to the Blue Notes instead.
Now I have always assumed (as you would) that the lead singer of Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes was – you guessed – Harold Melvin. Apparently not.
It seems that Mr Melvin, who formed the group waaaaay back in 1954, when they evolved from an even earlier doo wop group called The Charlemagnes, started out as the singer, arranger and choreographer but took a step back after a while, when a chap called John Atkins took over in the Sixties.
By the time this came out, the group was trying out another new front man. Teddy Pendergrass had originally been brought in, aged 20, to play drums in the vocal group’s backing band, but when he started singing along during a performance Melvin noticed his baritone voice’s similarity to Marvin Junior of successful rivals The Dells, and offered him the chance to sing a ballad called I Miss You.
That put them on the map on the RnB circuit and this song took them into the Top Ten in early 1973, ending Melvin’s 20-year wait for a hit. After that Teddy was never going to go back behind the drum kit. The next single, The Love I Lost – often seen as the prototype for disco – was another hit, followed by several more, culminating in Don’t Leave Me This Way.
By then Teddy had left the group. By 1975 their fame had grown so much that he, not unreasonably, asked Harold for a pay rise. He also suggested that, since people (like me) were always assuming he was ‘Harold Melvin’, maybe the band should change its name to something like… ooh, let’s think… Teddy Prendergass & The Blue Notes.
Failing to spot the gift horse staring him in the face, Harold gave Teddy his cards and, in an all too predictable case of karma and hubris, the Blue Notes drifted into obscurity while Teddy went on to become a solo soul heart-throb – despite the best efforts of the mob to control his career, if not end it altogether.
First his manager (and girlfriend) was shot dead on her own doorstep in 1977. Five years later, someone tampered with the brakes of Teddy’s brand new Rolls-Royce. The crash left him paralysed from the chest down. Heroically, he made his comeback at the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia in 1985 and carried on performing until his retirement in 2007, dying in 2010.
As for the Blue Notes, despite Harold Melvin’s death in 1997, there is a version of the group still performing on the vintage soul circuit. Or was when Covid shut everything down. And this song became a staple of Patti Labelle’s concert career.
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