A Star In The Ghetto
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Album Summary
A Star In The Ghetto came together in 1977 as one of those beautiful, soulful unions that felt less like a business arrangement and more like a homecoming — the Average White Band, those impossibly funky cats from Scotland, linking up with the legendary Ben E. King for a full collaborative album on Atlantic Records. Produced by the Average White Band's own production team, this record was born out of a moment when AWB had already proven themselves as genuine architects of the American soul and funk sound, not just visitors passing through. Atlantic, that sacred house of soul, provided the perfect home for this transatlantic meeting of minds, and the sessions captured something warm and unhurried — King's rich, seasoned voice draped over AWB's rhythmically immaculate grooves like it was always meant to be that way.
Reception
- The album found its audience primarily among devoted fans of blue-eyed soul and classic Atlantic R&B, performing modestly on the charts without recapturing the crossover commercial heights AWB had touched at their mid-70s peak.
- Critical reception greeted the record with genuine warmth, with reviewers pointing to the natural chemistry between Ben E. King's deeply emotive vocal delivery and AWB's locked-in, groove-first instrumentation as the heart and soul of the project.
- The title track received meaningful rotation on R&B radio, a testament to AWB's hard-earned credibility within Black American musical spaces — no small thing for a band of Scottish boys living inside the tradition.
Significance
- A Star In The Ghetto stands as a soulful and significant document of transatlantic collaboration, one that honored the legacy of classic Atlantic soul while pushing it forward through the contemporary funk-inflected sensibility AWB had helped define in the mid-1970s.
- The album reinforced what AWB's truest believers already knew — that their fluency in African American musical traditions ran deep and sincere, lending the project an authenticity that elevated it well beyond novelty or imitation.
- The record reflected Atlantic's enduring instinct for pairing its legacy artists with the freshest voices in the soul world, keeping artists like Ben E. King not just relevant but vital in a rapidly shifting musical landscape.
Tracklist
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A A Star In The Ghetto —
3:49
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B A Star In The Ghetto —
7:00
Artist Details
Average White Band is a Scottish funk and soul group that formed in Dundee and Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1972, though they quickly relocated to the United States where they found their greatest success. The band, whose self-deprecating name humorously acknowledged their status as white musicians playing Black American-influenced music, developed a tight, rhythmically sophisticated sound rooted in funk, R&B, and jazz fusion. They achieved massive commercial success with their 1974 instrumental hit Pick Up the Pieces, which reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of the defining funk tracks of the decade. Their ability to authentically master a genre largely pioneered by African American artists earned them widespread respect from both critics and peers, including legends like Herbie Hancock and Chaka Khan, who collaborated with them. Average White Band holds a significant place in music history as one of the few non-American acts to be embraced by the Black music community, and their catalog continues to be widely sampled by hip-hop producers and featured in film and television soundtracks.
