The Strange Story of "Soulful Strut"

This groovin' Sixties soul instrumental led me down the deepest rabbit hole

Photo by Flickr user Dr Umm and licensed through Creative Commons.

I don’t remember how old I was the first time I heard “Soulful Strut,” the 1969 No. 3 hit by the Chicago-based band Young-Holt Unlimited. It’s quite likely I heard it in utero. I was born in Iowa in the early 1970s, where radio stations are notorious for playing pop songs long past their sell-by date. I know I heard it dozens of times in high school when my radio only varied between two AM oldies stations. (Didn’t like hair metal in the Eighties; still think it’s awful.) It’s long been a favorite song of mine. It’s breezy, sophisticated, and locked up in the groove of death. I’ve always thought that someday I should go vinyl-thrifting to find some Young-Holt albums, and I’ve always wondered why I didn’t know any other songs by them.

Later in life I began to dig around and learned the story of the song, a story that is infinitely stranger than it ought to be.

Let me start with the premise: “Soulful Strut” is almost perfectly identical to “Am I the Same Girl?,” a minor 1969 hit for the Chicago soul singer Barbara Acklin. And by “almost perfectly identical” I mean “they erased Barbara Acklin’s vocals, replaced them with a piano player playing the very same melody, and passed it off as a different song.” The Young-Holt Unlimited single dropped in November 1968. Acklin’s version was released in February 1969. Acklin’s record hit No. 79; like I already mentioned, Young-Holt Unlimited took theirs to No. 3. Yet, no one disputes that Acklin’s version was recorded first.

If you don’t believe me that the two songs are the same, well, give a listen to both versions:

I don’t know how much more obvious it could be.

Reusing backing tracks for different songs was a bit more complicated in the days before digital sampling, but it’s been going on for a while. Jamaican dancehall music is notorious for reusing really good “riddims” (instrumental tracks) for multiple songs, for instance. But the particulars of “Am I the Same Girl?”/”Soulful Strut” seemed a bit troubling to me. Even in 1969, popular music was thought to be a man’s world. There must have been some skullduggery involved in seeing to it that Young-Holt Unlimited (whoever they were) got their version in the public’s ears first before a Black woman’s version got on the radio. In today’s world you’d expect lawsuits and all that, but there’s no sign that Acklin, her record label, or really anyone objected to Young-Holt Unlimited appropriating her record before it could be released.

And there’s a very good reason for that: Acklin and Young-Holt Unlimited were both on the same record label, Chicago’s Brunswick Records. Neither artist wrote the song. It was written by Eugene Record (lead singer of The Chi-Lites)  and Sonny Sanders, who had previously worked for Motown Records. Both records also had the same producer, Carl Davis. But that still doesn’t explain why or how this happened. If this was skullduggery, Brunswick Records sure went to a lot of trouble to shoot itself in the foot. All the more so since Acklin had already had a Top Twenty single, “Love Makes a Woman.” It’s 2024 so we always suspect misogynistic sabotage whenever a female artist of the past appears to have gotten screwed over, but there’s just not enough evidence (that I can find) to say that’s what happened with “Am I the Same Girl?”

But there’s still one question out there.

Who was Young-Holt Unlimited?

That’s hardly a mystery. Young-Holt Unlimited was … a jazz trio. 

Bassist Eldee Young and drummer Isaac “Redd” Holt made their bones in Chicago playing with soul-jazz piano legend Ramsey Lewis. Lewis was long insanely popular among jazz fans but he had a decent crossover pop hit in 1965 with his cover of Dobie Gray’s “The ‘In’ Crowd.” Both Eldee Young and Redd Holt played on that record and, as you can tell, it’s a pretty hot number:

And, as you can also tell, it doesn’t sound a lick like “Soulful Strut.” But hey, it’s not unheard of for musicians to change genres at some point in their careers. I know this; I’m the person who blew Twitter’s mind by pointing out that the same drummer who played on Crazy Town’s “Butterfly” had also played on Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good.”

https://twitter.com/MarkHasty/status/1601008619885322241

And as it turns out, “Soulful Strut” was not Young-Holt Unlimited’s first appearance in the Top 40. Almost immediately after leaving Ramsey Lewis, they hit No. 40 in 1966 with their song “Wack Wack”:

… which, again, doesn’t sound a lick like “Soulful Strut.”  It’s just a garden variety soul-jazz record. A good one, to be sure, but it’s not particularly distinctive. More to the point, when you look at Eldee Young and Redd Holt’s musical pasts, there’s nothing that points you to the slick, sophisticated groove of “Soulful Strut”/”Am I the Same Girl?”. Their music instead calls to mind dim lights and stale cigarette smoke. (I’m not saying that’s a bad thing.)

It’s still perfectly reasonable, though, that Young and Holt -- who, I remind you, were signed to the same record label as Barbara Acklin -- played on the sessions for “Am I the Same Girl?”, decided it was a bop, and asked Carl Davis if their piano player could lay a track in place of the vocals just to see what it would sound like. Remember, they were a trio; their piano player at the time was a guy named Ken Chaney. So Chaney hears the song, says “it’s fine the way it is,” and just plays the melody. With one hand. Because … I don’t hear any two-handed piano on “Soulful Strut.” And jazz pianists seldom play an entire song in the upper registers of the instrument.

The Wikipedia page for “Am I the Same Girl?” says that the pianist on “Soulful Strut” was named Floyd Morris. But that is not the most surprising revelation therein. On the basis of a single citation of an unattributed quote, from an apparently self-published web page (citing which is generally frowned upon by Wikipedia) … not only did Ken Chaney not play on “Soulful Strut,” neither did Eldee Young or Redd Holt.

Now, it was not unusual in the Sixties for a musical group’s contributions to its records to be limited to its vocals. Studio musicians would lay down the instrumental parts because studio time is expensive and they had the expertise. Motown had the Funk Brothers. Los Angeles had the Wrecking Crew, New York had some folks who apparently needed a better PR guy, but somehow so many records were made by the same handful of people. However, I am completely unaware of any other record that was credited to a group that allegedly contributed absolutely nothing to the recording. I’d be skeptical of this story were it not for three things which I rank in order of how convincing I find them:

1. Redd Holt was a swinging, inventive drummer, but the drumming on “Am I the Same Girl?”/”Soulful Strut” sounds nothing like him. It’s stiff and pedestrian at best; 

2. The piano player’s style is also nothing like Ken Chaney’s, and;

3. “Soulful Strut” has an electric bass but every photo I’ve ever seen of Eldee Young shows him with an upright bass, and every other credited recording of his that I’ve heard sure sounds like he’s playing an upright. (I’m only calling this the least credible part because I strongly doubt Eldee Young never played an electric bass.)

Based on this and the aforementioned style differences, I’m very much inclined to believe that not a single member of Young-Holt Unlimited actually played on “Soulful Strut.” That answers one question but raises so many others, like “why did Brunswick Records do this just to launch a piano-jazz trio into the pop music stratosphere?” and “what about a follow up?”

I’m a fan of Todd in the Shadows and especially his series “One Hit Wonderland.” He’s never going to do an episode on “Soulful Strut” because he just doesn’t go back that far in music history very often. But every episode of “One Hit Wonderland” looks at the failed follow up, because there always is one. In that vein, I give you “Young and Holtful”:

Egads. If you asked AI to write the closest thing it could to “Soulful Strut” without actually being “Soulful Strut,” it couldn’t do a better job. I’m almost 100 percent positive, though, that Messrs. Young, Holt, and Chaney actually played on this one. It sounds much more like them and it certainly swings harder.

I’d dig further but honestly I find the mystery more compelling than any possible answers. Did Carl Davis owe a favor to Young and Holt? Did Brunswick figure the instrumental record would sink without a trace, paving the way for Acklin’s vocal version? What conversations did they have when “Soulful Strut” hit No. 3, making it impossible for “Am I the Same Girl?” to find an audience? And why was it inevitable that a white group (Swing Out Sister, whose music  I love) took “Am I the Same Girl?” to No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary charts in 1992?

The answers to most of the questions are lost in time anyway. The principals are all dead, Redd Holt being the last to pass away in the summer of 2023. (Read more about him here.) Regardless of who made it or why or how it was marketed, though, “Soulful Strut” is a dang near perfect record, and I’m glad it exists.