JOE TEX

Joe Tex delivered the earliest Southern soul single to register on the pop charts with his 1965 Billboard number-five entry “Hold What You’ve Got.” The raspy-voiced jackleg-preacher manner he perfected also supplied essential building blocks for rap. Among the ’60s soul artists tied to Atlantic Records, he remains arguably the most overlooked, even though his singles crossed over more readily than those of most peers in the field.

Born Joseph Arrington in Rogers, Texas, in 1935, he revealed vocal gifts first through gospel and later in R&B. After claiming victory in a local talent contest, he reached New York by 1954 and cut assorted derivative singles for King—some cast as ballads, others styled after Little Richard—many of which were repackaged repeatedly.

His trajectory shifted once he connected with Nashville publisher Buddy Killen, an alliance that began after Tex supplied James Brown with the 1961 song “Baby You’re Right.” Killen brought him to Muscle Shoals in 1965, still an unfashionable locale, and the resulting “Hold What You’ve Got” proved the nearest approach Tex ever made to a conventional R&B ballad. Numerous follow-ups followed, most charting on the R&B side and several entering the pop Top 40.

Tex distinguished himself by sermonizing atop hard, driving soul grooves, shifting from clowning to sudden crooning. The most rural of the major soul figures, he leaned into that identity with vernacular turns straight from everyday street speech; “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show” offered the clearest model. In 1966 his “I Believe I’m Gonna Make It,” framed as an imagined letter from Vietnam, became the first major hit explicitly linked to the war. His largest success arrived with the live-album track “Skinny Legs and All” in 1967, its rapping delivered as pure hokum over thick funk riffs—an approach that later served as a blueprint for boisterous, ribald hip-hop singles.

After that peak he managed only minor chart entries for five years until “I Gotcha” emerged, a grittier take on the funk then edging toward disco. Too rooted in down-home textures for the polished disco years, he nonetheless adapted the Bump dance craze in 1977 to create the humorous “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman),” his final Top Ten R&B hit and a number-twelve pop crossover.

Tex embraced Islam in the early ’70s and adopted the name Joseph Hazziez in 1972. Much of the period after “Ain’t Gonna Bump” was spent on his Texas farm, though he rejoined Wilson Pickett, Ben E. King, and Don Covay for a revived Soul Clan in 1980. He suffered a fatal heart attack in 1982 at age forty-nine; Killen, King, Covay, Pickett, and songwriter Percy Mayfield served as pallbearers.