2021 Song Draft- Round 8 Pick 13: Badfinger20 selects: ‘Groove Me’- King Floyd.

The bass in this song… punches you like a heavy weight fighter and will roll you like wholesale carpet…the timing is absolutely perfect. I hear some Otis and Wilson Pickett in this song and it will make you move. I wanted to touch on the seventies R&B/funk side in the draft…I can’t do any better than this one.

Floyd takes almost a full minute to build up to the chorus and it’s well worth the wait when he kicks it in. Also wanted to mention that a musician named Vernie Robbins plays the bass in this song…the bass along with Floyd carries the song…and the horns don’t hurt either. 

This was the B side to a song called What Our Love Needs and DJ’s played a role in making this a hit after spinning this side more. They started to play this song in the New Orleans region and it took off nationally… something that would not happen today.

This was recorded at the same session as Jean Knight’s Mr. Big Stuff. In the 80s I heard this song and was hooked on the first listen. Back then it took me a while to track it down…but track it down I did at Tower Records. I get all misty eyed when thinking of pulling into the parking lot of Tower or Port O’ Call Records.  .

This is a song that has not been worn out…in fact we need it more. I love the dynamics going on in the chorus when it kicks in. The song was released in 1970 and peaked at #6 in the Billboard Hot 100.

On how Floyd wrote this song… He was working at a box factory and noticed a woman there: She’d just watch me and smile at me all day. When I went to the water fountain, she would make it her purpose to come up to the water fountain. But, I was so shy. So, I decided one day that I was gonna write this poem and give it to her and I wrote ‘Groove Me.’ Believe it or not, after I finished it she never came back to work. It blew me away. So, I never gave her the poem. Man, I’d sure like to meet her one day just to thank her!”