Nannie Sharpe always looked forward to calls from her daughter Jayma, especially since she'd left their Woodbridge, Va. home to study abroad in Italy. A call earlier this week, however, proved even more interesting than usual.
Jayma had been out to dinner with a couple of Italian acquaintances. One, named Roberto, was a record collector of some note, specializing in old jazz and soul. During the course of the evening, he relayed the story of how an old demo tape, recorded decades earlier in Columbus, Ohio, had gained a bit of notoriety after its use in the 2010 movie, Blue Valentine. Fans of the dark story of romance between Ryan Gosling and his co-star, Michelle Williams, who'd earned an Oscar nomination for her role, became enamored with the charmingly soulful song that highlighted the film, posting it all over YouTube, drawing hundreds of thousands of hits.
What made the story interesting was that the identity of the group that recorded the song had been lost to time. No one knew who these obscure Columbus singers were. The guest remembered the title of the story in which he'd read about the song: "Lost Soul" (which was The Other Paper's cover story on Jan. 27)
Knowing her mother and her uncles had dabbled briefly in Columbus's soul-music scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jayma called her to tell her about it.
"She said, ‘Let me get on the Internet and look it up and I'll get back with you,'" Sharpe said