The Soul Singer Who Vanished, Then Heard Herself Sampled

Linda Lyndell, born Linda Rowland in Gainesville, Florida, learned to sing in church. She was white, but she sang in both white and Black congregations, and as a teenager she began performing with R&B groups. In the 1960s she opened shows for James Brown and for Ike & Tina Turner.

In 1967 an Atlanta disc jockey, Dave Crawford, introduced her to Stax Records producers Isaac Hayes and David Porter. They recorded her first single, “Bring Your Love Back to Me”, that December and released it on Volt Records. It was not a hit. A second session in 1968 produced “What a Man”, and this time the song climbed to number 50 on the Billboard R&B chart.

The attention came with a terrible price. After the single appeared, she received threats from white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, and she retired from performing soon afterward. For the next twenty-five years she stayed out of music and lived quietly in Gainesville. In the sixties she had also recorded in Tampa at Fuller Studios with Gene Middleton and the Sole Survivors, a footnote to a career cut short.

Then in 1993 the rap group Salt-n-Pepa sampled “What a Man” for their hit “Whatta Man”, and the song suddenly belonged to a new audience. Lyndell began performing again. In 2003, at the opening of the Stax Museum, she sang “What a Man” live for the first time ever. Looking back in a 2024 interview, she said it turned out to be a wonderful thing that Salt-n-Pepa sampled her, because it brought friendships she would never otherwise have made. Her catalogue is just two singles, yet the story it tells, of a voice silenced by hatred and later recovered by a sample, is one of soul music's more remarkable second acts.