Actually Soulster .. when this thread started it was about "Law Of The Land"
"Law of The Land" by THE TEMPTATIONS was released as a 45 in Britain in September 1973 and got to #41 on the UK Charts .. not a huge hit but much better than "Masterpiece" which didn't chart at all.
Over the years there have been a number of threads here on SDF about what could have been the first "Disco" record and what can be considered a "Disco" record. There is even a constant debate about whether "Disco" was a style of music or whether it was just music that was promoted and popularised through being played in Discos!!
Living in Britain I first came across the term "Disco" late in the '60s .. a "Disco" was a nightclub that played music off disc for people to dance to, rather than having live bands. Every large town and city had at least one .. predominantly they played "Black" music .. R&B/Soul/Motown/Stax/Reggae/Rocksteady .. and if it was "Pop" it was the more uptempo and dancable/R&B influenced stuff.
At that time, in Britain, we didn't have any R&B Radio .. we didn't have much music radio at all actually .. and the only public place where you could hear a lot of Soul/R&B being played was in a "Disco". However the term "Disco" related to the venue, not to the music being played there.
It was also "common knowledge" in Britain that in the U.S. nightclubs featured "live bands" and were not "Discos" as such and that to hear Soul/R&B all you had to do was tune into a local Radio Station [[this is probably a sweeping generalisation).
Anyway, the point that I'm trying to make is that in the late '60s/early '70s in the U.S. Soul/R&B was generally promoted and popularised via the Radio, in Britain "Disco" exposure was equally important. This meant that in this period the best selling "Soul/R&B" tunes in Britain tended to be uptempo/midtempo material [[nowadays known as "Northern Soul") .. in the U.S. there was a mix of Uptempo, Ballad and Funk material. Crucially, U.S. record companies, when recording and releasing R&B/Soul would have an eye out for how it sounded on the Radio, not how it sounded in a Nightclub.
I can hardly claim to be an expert on what was going on in the U.S. at that time, living 3000 Miles away, but from my outside perspective .. reading "Blues & Soul" etc. it seems that sometime around 1972/3 "Discos" started to become established in parts of the U.S. and that overwhelmingly they were playing uptempo/midtempo R&B/Soul. So, sales of uptempo R&B/Soul started to pick up and some U.S. record companies [[Roulette, Scepter and P.I.R. come to mind) started to think about how their releases might sound in a nightclub. And some people started calling this music "Disco".
So, I think what actually makes a record a "Disco" record is it being recorded/produced with how it sounds when played in a nightclub being a major consideration.
I'm not sure about the exact first time that I first saw "Disco" in "Blues & Soul" being used to describe a variety of music rather than a venue but it would have had to have been some time late in 1973, especially with new Philadelphia recordings like "The Love I Lost"/"Look Me Up"/"Both Ends Against The Middle" ... certainly by mid 1974 the term was being used very liberally to describe new uptempo R&B/Soul .. "Rock The Boat"/T.S.O.P/"Rock Your Baby" etc. etc.
Back to "The Law Of The Land", it certainly fitted in with this new phenomenon, it was very "up" and dancable. Whether it was recorded/produced with "Disco" play in mind is another matter, there was an instrumental version of the tune released in 1974 which undoubtedly was.
ALFIE KHAN SOUND ORCHESTRA .. "Law Of the Land"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDRme7EKOw
Roger
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