Search - Bar-Kays :: Injoy

If "Move Your Boogie Body" isn't one of the best calls to get your tired behind out of the chair and onto the dance floor, well, we don't know what is.


The Bar-Kays came to prominence, and also nearly to conclusion, as Otis Redding's backup band at Stax. Made up primarily of studio musicians, the Stax/Volt doppelganger for the Funk Brothers was almost entirely wiped out in the plane crash that claimed the life of Otis Redding just as he was having his signature hit, "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay."



Upon regrouping, the Bar-Kays kept a fairly steady profile on the R&B charts as a primarily instrumental soul/funk unit. They accompanied Isaac Hayes on his breakthrough Hot Buttered Soul album, but gradually realized that their horizons would widen only if they branched into vocals. In 1971, they brought in Larry Dodson as their vocalist, and the following year they scored their biggest chart hit since Soul Finger.



Flash forward to 1979: the Bar-Kays have departed their bankrupted label (Stax) for Mercury's greener pastures. Actually, the pastures were lined with gold: all their Seventies Mercury albums (with one exception) went gold or platinum. Injoy leaped onto the R&B album charts explosively, reaching #2 (it hit #35 on the pop charts). Seamlessly amalgamating their earlier funk with the Euro-dance sounds being popularized by the likes of studio wizard Giorgio Moroder, the Bar-Kays set themselves up for half a decade of continued success with this album.