Tobi Legend: The singer who became a northern soul icon against her will
Some artists spend decades trying, in vain, to make their musical dreams come true, while others are made into stars almost overnight. Tobi Legend is a special case, though, made into a cult hero through the unexpected guise of the northern soul explosion.
For the uninitiated, Tobi Legend, born Bessie Gupton, and typically operating under the name Tobi Lark, is the Alabama-born vocalist who lent her incredible talents to the 1968 track ‘Time Will Pass You By’. Although the song wasn’t a hit upon its initial release, it soon became a defining anthem for the northern soul generation, who were always chasing increasingly obscure, underrated, and forgotten American soul records.
A staple of all-nighters at Wigan Casino, ‘Time Will Pass You By’ typified the aspirational optimism inherent in the scene, and its emotive lyricism captured the spirit of the movement. Even today, it remains an irrefutable classic of northern soul, and many of the relationships formed at soul nights have been soundtracked by Tobi Lark’s unmistakable tones. As it turns out, though, the vocalist herself never wanted to release the song in the 1960s.
Like many soul stars of that era, Lark cut her teeth as a gospel singer during her youth, but her talents were quickly spotted. By the time she entered the recording industry in her own right, the Alabama performer had already amassed an impressive record, performing alongside everybody from BB King to Wilson Pickett, Duke Ellington, and the Four Tops, to name only a few. ‘Time Will Pass You By’ was her debut solo release, hitting the airwaves in 1968, but the musical mainstream didn’t immediately take to its poetic content.
By that time, soul music had dominated the American mainstream for years, what with the Motown empire producing a seemingly ever-expanding repertoire of stars, and labels like Stax and Atlantic hot on their heels. As the 1960s approached the tail-end, the soul market became increasingly saturated, and the tiny independent labels that sprang up across the continent simply couldn’t compete with the power of those major ones.
That didn’t stop labels like Mala, a subsidiary of Bell, from putting out some truly groundbreaking records, and one of them was Tobi Lark’s debut single. But the singer wasn’t too happy with ‘Time Will Pass You By’ being her first release. The story goes that Lark recorded the song under the impression that it would only be a demo, as a means of proving her vocal prowess for future releases.
As such, the vocalist resented the widespread release of the single, and those feelings were not helped by the fact that Mala had cited the song as being by Tobi Legend, rather than Tobi Lark. “They released it and had the nerve to change my name on the release to Tobi Legend,” she was once quoted as saying. For the first few years after the release, her anger was completely justified, given that the single failed to move up the charts. However, it was that same recording which later made her a star in the northern soul scene.
Although the exact story of how Tobi Legend made it into the boxes of northern soul DJs is somewhat hazy, the song made a colossal impact on the scene during the 1970s. In fact, it was one of the infamous ‘three before eight’ tracks played at the end of virtually every northern soul all-nighter at Wigan Casino, alongside Dean Parrish’s ‘I’m on My Way’ and ‘Long After Tonight Is All Over’ by Jimmy Radcliffe.
So, even if Tobi Lark initially resented the release of ‘Time Will Pass You By’, it eventually became the song that made her a star among that cult northern soul following. What’s more, it cemented her legacy as an incredible soul performer for multiple decades, even if Mala did get her name wrong.
