In the 1970s, what most Blaxploitation films had in common were their scorching soundtracks that sounded great in the grindhouse blaring through ancient speakers. As the rhythms from the soundtrack washed over the audience, sometimes the cinematic adventures became secondary to the driving funk grooves, lush Moog textures, blaring horns, stirring strings highlighting gruff vocals or wah-wah guitars of the music.

While years before there were a few Black jazz composers working in the film industry, most notably Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder, Paris Blues), Benny Carter (A Man Called Adam, Fame Is the Name of the Game) and Quincy Jones (The Pawnbroker, The Anderson Tapes), these new kinds of Black action films required an equally action-packed Black pop soundtrack that was a gritty aural equivalent of the images on screen.

With its finger-snapping logo, Stax Records was one of the funkiest and most popular soul labels of the ‘60s and 70s; as the gritty side of the Motown era, their roster included Otis Redding, Johnnie Taylor, Rufus and Carla Thomas and Booker T. & the MG’s, who was their most popular acts.

Under the visionary guidance of Black record executive Al Bell, who later became Stax’s co-owner, the label was also innovators in the Black soundtrack game, having released the music for the proto-blaxploitation filmUptight (Booker T & the MGs) in 1968. While the revolutionary film was judged too controversial and was pulled from theaters shortly after release, the album did well, with the instrumental single “Time is Tight” becoming a top-ten hit.

Three years later, Stax Records would release two soundtrack projects that proved to be game changers for the industry when 39-year-old Chicago-born, Paris cultured director Melvin Van Peebles got the idea to approach the label about releasing the soundtrack of his ground-breaking Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song with the notion to use the music as a marketing tool to spread the word of the movie. The film was about swaggering hustler Sweetback (Van Peebles) who murdered two white cops (L.A.P.D.) after they brutalized a ghetto rebel named Moo Moo. For the rest of the film, Sweetback was on the run and the driving music took both the protagonist and the audience to the edge.

Inspired by the spirit of the Watts riots, Sweetback was no ordinary movie; many film fans of all races thought it was a mess while others hailed it as a masterpiece. Van Peebles starred, wrote, directed, produced and distributed the picture himself. The film was endorsed by the Black Panthers and placed on their mandatory viewing list.

Hiring a then unknown Earth, Wind and Fire to help create the score, the album was also sold in the foyer of movie theaters and, according to a 1972 Billboard story, sold 100,000 copies. “Marcie (White, the group’s leader) was good friends with Melvin, so he asked us to be involved in the project,” his brother and E,W&F bass player Verdine White told me in2013.

“The score is somewhere between a rather raw free form jazz and the funky riffs that Earth, Wind and Fire would become famous for,” U.K. critic Richard Dyer wrote in In the Space of a Song: The Uses of Song in Film. According to Dyer, the music, “...as well as supporting our sense of Sweetback’s energy and mobility, the formal qualities of Earth, Wind and Fire’s music also support a sense of his persistence, as the music itself persists, endlessly flexible in its reinvention of itself.”


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