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NEW 7” REISSUE 1/19/2026: CHURCH – HOW LONG / DA DA SONG
AYO 0001 / © Silas Star Publishing 1976 / ℗ Silas Washington 2025
AYO Music Group

Liner notes by Nathan Hamelberg 

Church – the brainchild of Joe Washington – were a band both lucky and cursed to be a child of the seventies.

Lucky, because they were one with a wave of community activism, uplifting messages and of a time when music mattered the most.

Cursed, because destiny and perhaps those same times would have it their tight musical output was overlooked. Soul music and funk from the mid sixties to circa 1980 were so ridiculously rich that arguably the vast majority of the best-selling releases of that era have aged like fine wine, but it is also a time from which an uncountable amount of gems are still waiting to resurface.

Church’s only single just did. They happened to drop their simply hypnotic single “How Long” b/w “Da Da Song” in the same year as Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life,
Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, Diana Ross’s eponymous Diana, and when the Black music mainstream shifted gear to jump on the disco bandwagon. Church on the other hand sounded like kindred spirits of Sly & The Family Stone in an alternative timeline, decidedly not so much disco but rather of a time where the music was even more focused and stuck to the nitty gritty, no additives.

“Da Da Song” has so much grits and gravy. Grits – furious yet tight drums. Gravy – the lyrics simultaneously come across as a plea to the DJ to throw their tune into the mix and as an imploration to party on regardless of whether the rest of the world has taken notice of the party. Cooking from the first second to the last, clocking in at two and a
half minutes.

“How Long” is another beast altogether. If there’s something almost skeletal about how stripped down “Da Da Song” is, then “How Long” manages to bring some of the best elements of Black music into the mix in less than three minutes. There are elements of spiritual jazz, the mellow saxophone is reminiscent of Gary Bartz, the bittersweet song echoes both gospel and blues but loose, the music firmly on this side of how flower power influenced black music – from The Undisputed Truth to The Family Stone or the free flowing poetry of Nikki Giovanni, the lyrics perfecting the old Black artform of a paean to love yearned for.

The band Church formed in the Bay Area in the early seventies, a reflection of all the movement, culture, activism and uplifting music at the time. The leader of the group, San Jose-based Joseph Washington, was really never about a music career – the music was always more of a community thing, a way to bring people together. This logically led to a lot of shows in the Bay Area. Before Church, there was his backing band Wash, but he brought Gospel singer Linda Williams (née Stephens) and New York native Joel Como on xylophone into the band to form Church.

They rehearsed in Joe’s garage, their rep spread via word of mouth, and they played any and every gig they could – from Black colleges to warming up for vocal harmony soul legends The Whispers and to house parties in the neighbourhood. Some of the band members were students at Nairobi Junior College in East Palo Alto, a hotbed of Black community activism at the time, with revolution in the air and unavoidable messages in their music.

This single is a message from that time, begging to be sampled for the first time... just like another Joe Washington joint, “Look Me in the Eyes,” was on Drake and J. Cole’s “First Person Shooter.”

These rare and spirited tunes are begging to be flipped and hauled through samplers again and again.