Soul singer and trumpeter Joe Quarterman is another unfairly overlooked funkster I’ve just stumbled upon while delving deep into a YouTube wormhole.

This is his first, finest and most successful single from 1973. It’s a hard-driving funk groove in the style of James Brown and Sly Stone with blasts of brass and a socially conscious lyric about everything from pollution to addiction.

It came out under the moniker Sir Joe Quarterman & Free Soul – his “title” being a nickname he acquired at high school as frontman of a band called The Knights..

Before that he sang in church choirs and vocal groups in his native Washington D.C. and recorded a few singles in the early 1960s when he was backed by four female singers as Sir Joe & The Maidens. He went on to play trumpet in a local group called the El Corols (aka The Magnificent Seven) who were hired as a backing band for visiting soul stars, and had a spell as a jazz trumpeter in The Orlando Smith Quintet.

Joe’s solitary success came when he formed a backing group called Free Soul, featuring lead guitarist George ‘Jackie’ Lee, jazz guitarist Willie Parker, fretless bass guitarist Gregory Hammonds, keyboard player Karissa Freeman, drummer Charles Steptoe, sax player Leon Rogers, trombone player Johnny Freeman and himself on trumpet and vocals.

They toured with James Brown, Sly & The Family Stone, The O’Jays and (Detroit) Spinners but only released one album off the back of this single before the band broke up amid financial difficulties and Quarterman went back to college to finish his architecture degree.

The song got a new lease of life when it became an anthem on the UK’s Rare Groove scene in the mid-1980s but by then Quarterman was working as an architect and had lost interest in the music business.

Although this song has been widely sampled by artists including NWA, Guru and Madonna, Joe maintained a dim view of sampling, saying: “I do not think highly of sampled music. Sampling is, to me, a way of illustrating what you are trying to do by example as opposed to by talent.”