Joe Simon possessed a plaintive baritone equally at home with R&B phrasing and country inflections, and he fused those styles to remarkable effect throughout the late 1960s by reshaping Nashville songs for a soul audience and scoring repeated successes. He launched his recording career in the Bay Area before relocating first to Muscle Shoals for sessions on Vee-Jay and then to Nashville once he joined disc jockey John Richbourg’s Sound Stage 7 roster in 1966; those moves broadened his national reach. Ready access to country-flavored material soon revealed his strongest direction, yielding substantial hits with “Nine Pound Steel,” “(You Keep Me) Hangin’ On,” and the chart-topping R&B single “The Chokin’ Kind,” written by Music Row songwriter Harlan Howard. After moving to the Spring label in 1970 he continued interpreting country tunes yet achieved even greater results under Philadelphia production team Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who helmed the brooding “Drowning in the Sea of Love” the following year. In 1975 Simon ventured into disco with the dance-floor tracks “Get Down, Get Down (Get on the Floor)” and “Music in My Bones,” two of the more enduring examples from that period. He later stepped away from performing to focus on ministry and, during the 1990s, issued the gospel album This Story Must Be Told. Joe Simon passed away at his Illinois residence on December 13, 2021, at the age of 78.
