Darondo

Darondo, the sweet soul crooner cherished among funk enthusiasts, entered the world as William Pulliam in Berkeley, California. His initial guitar arrived when he turned eight, prompting him to assemble a group of schoolmates as the house band for the local teen club Lucky 13. Oliver Wang’s April/May 2006 Wax Poetics profile notes that Pulliam later qualified as an electrician yet kept his musical goals alive, cutting his first Darondo single, “How I Got Over,” for the fledgling Ocampo label in 1970. The track, which called to mind a more grounded and streetwise Al Green, suffered from distribution shortfalls but still became a regular on KSOL, attracting the interest of Ray Dobard’s Music City imprint. Although he recorded a full album’s worth of material there, the label released only the lush single “Didn’t I.” Darondo also opened for James Brown and maintained a lengthy residency at San Francisco’s storied Bimbo’s, yet after the little-known Af-Fa World release “Legs,” his recording career stalled. He spent the balance of the 1970s working as a pimp, leaving that life in 1981 to host local cable programs such as Darondo’s Penthouse After Dark, Doze Comedy Videos, and the children’s show Tapper the Rabbit. The late eighties took him to the Fiji Islands; upon returning to Berkeley he trained in physical therapy. When the 2005 compilation Gilles Peterson Digs America reintroduced “Didn’t I” to soul collectors worldwide, a search for the singer’s whereabouts began, leading Luv ’N Haight to issue Let My People Go in 2006, which compiled his three classic singles along with previously unreleased tracks from the same sessions.