Denise LaSalle (July 16, 1934 – January 8, 2018) - Move Your Body (1977)

The great singer/songwriter LaSalle wrote and produced this disco-funk masterpiece for The Bitch Is Bad!, her second album on ABC Records.

Watch full video on Twitter.

View most updated version of this post on Substack.

Legendary singer/songwriter/producer Denise LaSalle released thirty albums over her nearly five decade-long career. Many of her songs were staples on R&B charts during the 1970s, and she also enjoyed success in the 80s and 90s when she recorded several critically acclaimed blues LPs for Malaco Records.

Born in rural Mississippi, Ora Denise Allen moved with her family to the town of Belzoni, MS in 1957, when she was 13. Two years earlier, it had been the scene of a brutal murder when civil rights and voter registration activist Rev. George W. Lee was assassinated in broad daylight while driving through the town. He was killed by three shotgun blasts from an unidentified shooter who pulled alongside his car, but the town’s white supremacist Sheriff claimed it was a traffic accident and the buckshot found in Lee’s face were merely dental fillings torn out by the crash.

As she recalled in her memoir Always the Queen: The Denise LaSalle Story, which was published in 2020, two years after her death, the rigid segregation and ever-present specter of racist violence Allen encountered in Belzoni made her realize she had to leave the Jim Crow-era South:

“I knew I couldn’t take what a lot of people took. I would have to be sassy and fight back. Probably end up getting killed. So, I just said, ‘I want out. I can’t stay in this part of the country, or I will be dead.’”

She got out in 1962 when she was 18, by moving to Chicago to live with her older brother. Over the next few years she went from barmaid to recording artist, and released her first single in 1966. The excellent upbeat jam “A Love Reputation” was credited to her stage name Denise LaSalle.

See our post from January on LaSalle for more on her life and early career.

After releasing three albums on Detroit-based Westbound Records in the early seventies, LaSalle and her first husband Bill Jones divorced in 1974.  Two years later she married James E. "Super Wolfe" Wolfe Jr., a Chicago DJ.  They moved from Chicago to Jackson, Tennessee, and she signed a deal with ABC Records.  That same year in 1976, she recorded and released Second Breath, her first album on ABC.

For her second album on the new label, The Bitch Is Bad! (1977), she and Wolfe co-wrote the superb closing cut “Love Addict.” She solely wrote and produced the rest of the LP, including the epic disco-funk jam “Move Your Body.”

The album’s stellar backing band included Rufus Thomas’ son Marvell Thomas on keyboards; LaSalle’s longtime lead guitarist Kenny Ray Knight; onetime member of the Bar-Kays and Isaac Hayes’ band Michael Toles also on lead guitar; Ray Griffin on bass; and Blair Cunningham and Terry Johnson on drums. Strings were provided by the Memphis Symphony and backing vocals came courtesy of Hayes’ backup singers Hot Buttered Soul.

Further info:

“Denise LaSalle earned her crown in southern soul—and wears it in the blues,” by Bill Dahl, Chicago Reader, June 7, 2017.

“Mississippi’s Finest: Denise LaSalle and the Legacy of the Blues Woman,” by Constance Bailey, Mississippi Folklife, July 28, 2018.

“Late R&B Legend Denise LaSalle Always Called Her Own Shots,” by Jacqueline Zeisloft, Nashville Scene, December 23, 2020.

#soul #funk #disco #DeniseLaSalle