Out now on Stone’s Throw sub-label Now Again are two beautifully-researched volumes of rare funk, soul and boogie from the Little Rock, Arkansaw label True Soul. Raided by the likes of DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, True Soul is considered one of those holy grail labels by record collectors. This is Egon Alapatt’s incredible story of how he managed to connect with owner Lee Anthony, and how – after years of making none-too-subtle hints – this wonderful compilation has finally seen the light of day.

In 1999 I was twenty years old and a junior attending Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In my spare time, I mapped out journeys to reasonably distanced cities to hunt for regionally-released funk and soul records. Since these were the rarest of records – many received runs of only a few hundred copies – a quest for a locally-distributed funk 45 often led to a search for the self-starting musician who’d released it.

We’d heard some disturbing rumors before we embarked: that Mr. Anthony had been shot and killed in a robbery; that his record store had been shut down; that the man responsible for some of the finest black music to jump forth from the Southeast had left town without a trace. Upon our arrival in the city, clerks at local record shops seemed to confirm our worst fears. Painstaking hours spent poring through the bins looking for True Soul 45s left us frustrated. We decided to drive Mr. Anthony’s shuttered storefront – at that point, we had nothing to lose.

Everyone in the vicinity of 16th St. and Martin Luther King Blvd. in downtown Little Rock knows Mr Anthony, and it wasn’t long until a gas-station attendant was able to give us detailed directions to his store. We pulled up and glimpsed an oil painting similar to the shotgun-style house on the True Soul label fading in a front windowsill. Next door, at Yancey’s Soul Kitchen, folks moseyed on in for a bite to eat. It was just past lunchtime.

Dejected and about to leave town, I walked into Yancey’s and asked the woman at the counter if she knew where Mr. Anthony could be found. In between spooning large portions of collard greens onto a worn piece of China she motioned me towards the back of the shop. There, I found Mr. Yancey, grilling food close to the door, while heat poured out into the crisp spring air. He looked me up and down and, after a moment of what I took to be purposeful deliberation, he mouthed directions to Mr. Anthony’s house, which was fortuitously close by. He didn’t know exactly which house Mr. Anthony inhabited, but described the general vicinity between three or four houses in both directions.

A half-hour later and there I stood, knocking on closed doors, as my friends – probably a bit apprehensive of my approach (the sensationalist HBO documentary on the Crips and Bloods gangs in Arkansas – Bangin’ In Little Rock – was a subject of much conversation on the drive over) – sat in the car. Finally, a younger dude washing his car pointed out Mr. Anthony’s house. I walked past a gold Mercedes, up a flight of stairs, and found the door cracked open. “Come on in,” a voice said. I opened the door, and glanced to my left. There hung an oil painting, similar to the one I had seen in the record store window – but this one was an exact duplication of the True Soul label. And a pencil outline of the painting hung in the same frame.

“You must be Lee Anthony,” I managed. “And this would be a sketch of your record label?”

“No, that’s the sketch I used for my label,” Mr. Anthony smiled. “That’s the house I grew up in.”

Later that day, Mr. Anthony took us back to his shop and opened the doors for the first time in nearly a year. He pried open an old chest he had been using as a table prop. “This is a treasure chest,” he remarked. “I’ve been saving this one for the right occasion.”

Out poured hundreds of seven inches, many of which were Mr. Anthony’s own. We sorted through them, and listened to our finds. We hadn’t heard of Classic Funk’s “Hard Times,” had never known of Thomas East’s incredible run with the label or known that Mr. Anthony had subsidized other labels throughout the 70s and 80s.

We took pictures and I’m glad we did. Looking at them now, I remember the thrill of discovery I felt that day. (I was young, enthralled with James Brown- style funk and “breaks and beats,” and somehow I was fortunate enough to have had the common sense to buy anything on True Soul or any of Mr. Anthony’s affiliated labels that fateful day.) I was also happy to see the look on Mr. Anthony’s face. He didn’t know us, yet he walked us back into the store where he’d nearly lost his life (that rumor, it turns out, was terribly true) and allowed us the chance to embrace the sounds that sustained him through thick and thin, through marriage and divorce, through the heady days of the 70s – when an entrepreneur such as he could sell 200,000 copies of a single through the right licensing deal (as “Funky Music,” first on Lion and then on MGM, did) – to the soul-wasteland of the 80s – when he couldn’t even get Fred Williamson to pay for the license of the same tune to a b-grade flick which has since fallen into the cracks of history even as East’s song has maintained a fiery vibrancy that shows no sign of waning.

It was later the next week, back in Nashville and done with the week’s schoolwork, that I was able to delve fully into the 45s and LPs with which I’d returned. It was in that short spell, as I listened to Thomas East’s sublime “Follow The Rainbow” next to The Conspiracy’s “Real Thing” (with the knowledge that the band had gone on, in part, to form the Gap Band; without the knowledge that they’d previously been James Brown’s oft-mentioned but never recorded New Dapps, and the Cincinnati Show Band), that this compilation became, in my mind at least, a necessity for the annals of American soul and funk music. Not as a definitive document – as it would take hours of disc space and too many inches of wax for a small company like this to offer up – but as a survey of the lofty achievements that Mr. Anthony and his musician friends proffered in this unseemly metropolis.

But Mr. Anthony isn’t like any label owner I’ve ever met, before or after that memorable spring day. Though more than encouraging of my mission to document the enormity of the Little Rock scene that True Soul bred (He introduced me to one-time Soul Brother’s Records employee Joe Coleman, whose stash of records provided the first glimpse of many of the records contained within this anthology; he opened York Wilborn’s, Ren Smith’s and Thomas East’s doors as I wrote a piece on his label for the now-defunct Big Daddy ‘zine.), he told me over and over again that his relationship with his musicians was too important to skewer over what seemed to be a good idea on paper. He’d seen too many of those. He needed to be in control of the project every step of the way… or he needed to know that the person to whom he farmed out the work was capable of handling the task at hand.

I can’t count how many times over the past ten years that I showed up in Little Rock and gave Mr. Anthony a call. Sometimes I found myself in dark rooms in the tornado-damaged corridors of the Soul Brother’s Records building, sifting through water-damaged vinyl in hopes of finding one of the missing matrix numbers in the True Soul discography. I’ll never forget the time Mr. Anthony mentioned, almost off-handedly, “Be careful where you’re stepping now; that’s the lathe Mr. Phillips used to cut Elvis’s first record.” (Sure enough, I looked down and realized I’d been stepping on a dingy lathe. On its surface sat a 10” acetate with a Sam Phillip’s Recordings logo. It turned out to be the full version of York Wilborn and the Psychedelic Six’s “Psychedelic Hot Pants.”) Nor will I forget when, in a temporary studio space, as Mr. Anthony allowed me to photograph him spooling, splicing and editing reel-to-reel tapes, I found one of the 45s missing from the True Soul discography – “Everybody’s Bumping” by Pine Bluff based guitarist, singer and songwriter O.T. Watson and the Regiments of Sound – on another acetate inscribed simply in wax pencil “Part One.” It has, until now, never seen release.

I tried, over and over again, to offer Mr. Anthony a deal that might work. Sometimes our conversations took place over a meal of catfish and hush puppies at Mr. Anthony’s favorite joint, The Crooked Hook, in Jacksonville. This quest continued during the years when I was quite distracted helping Stones Throw Records grow in the early ‘00s. Mr. Anthony had met Stones Throw founder Peanut Butter Wolf at a show I threw in Nashville in 2000, and he’d approved of my choice of employer. I thought, after we released The Funky 16 Corners in 2001, that Mr. Anthony would surely acquiesce and grant me the rights to issue a True Soul anthology. He demurred. After I learned more about the business (and was able to boast to Mr. Anthony about two six-figure sample clearances I’d brokered for Now-Again artists), I was sure I’d have success. Mr. Anthony – always politely, always in a way that encouraged, rather than dashed, my hopes – declined yet again.

I really can’t tell you why Mr. Anthony decided that this was the time for the album you now hold. Perhaps he’d seen enough of Now-Again’s releases (I always made it a point of sending him our latest) to realize that I was as serious a contender for “keeper- of-the-True-Soul flame” as he was likely to find. Perhaps he realized, like many of Mr. Anthony’s ilk do, that the only way to keep his dream alive was to see the music of he and his compatriots – at least some of it – available for legitimate purchase. Or perhaps he thought back to that first day that we met, remembered the way that we approached him, and craved an injection of that enthusiasm into the True Soul bloodline once again. I’d like to think that it was a combination of all three.

I used to loathe offering first person testimonials in liner notes, but, twelve years into this project, I am so personally attached to Mr. Anthony, True Soul, and all of True Soul’s artists, that I find it impossible not to do so. Mr. Anthony’s story is an inspiring one. His is quintessentially American: he pulled himself from abject poverty – one step removed from indentured servitude – and created a business that not only fostered a great creative spurt, capturing part of the high water moment of the funk and soul movement in America, but functioned ethically with its signings. He treated his musicians as partners. Many times in the past ten years, I’ve thought back to lessons Mr. Anthony taught me. I’ve thought of the long-running relationships he shared with the musicians who called True Soul home, and have strove for the same goal with the label I helm.

Over the past twelve years I’ve found that different parts of the True Soul discography continue to enthrall me. I remember when I first realized that Thomas East’s “Slipping Around/Just A Trip” 7” wasn’t so much about the funky b-side as it was about the heartbreak of East’s mournful ballad. And could there be a more modern-day funk anthem than the Leaders’ “It’s A Rat Race,” now a nearly-forty year old song that would have never hit wax had Mr. Anthony not given a young disc jockey access to his studio, horn arrangers, production skills and encouragement? Could psych-funk, a sub-genre just recently classified, get better than the tunes offered by York Wilborn’s aptly named ensemble?

I write this in awe and respect for that which Mr. Anthony and his community offered for our enjoyment, for our spiritual and musical edification, for our inspiration. I am sad that I write this with the knowledge that the city of Little Rock bulldozed the Soul Brother’s Records building when, after a long fought battle, Mr. Anthony’s building was cited and destroyed for alleged structural damages. I wish that musicians such as Teroy Betton, Robert Tresvant and Larry Davis were alive to know that their music was getting a second chance at recognition. But I’m happy and honored to be part of the lineage that brings this music to you: to someone who has waited – unknowingly – for this beautiful music to enter your life and, hopefully, excite, shock and fulfill in the same way it has done for Mr. Anthony, his musicians, and for myself.

(Eothen Alapatt, September 2010)

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Download Thomas East “Slipping Around” (1969)