I had thought he'd vanished from the music scene, then I "rediscovered" him a few months ago via his web site. You can see some live home recordings of new songs, from a dignified older man, still very funky.

He had a fascinating career. He'd been groomed as a pop singer in the early 1960s, controlled by the studio producers of Liberty records and had a string of hits, provided a lot by top writers of the day like Goffin & King (Point Of No Return), and Leiber & Stoller (Another Tear Falls). There is a great YouTube clip of the latter that was part of a pre-Beatles pop film called "It's Trad Dad, Dad". Then he tired of being a pop singer, started writing his own material and became more of a "political" singer in the early Black Consciouness period. He recorded a couple of albums for Atlantic in the late 1960s which still sound good: a combination of proto-funk, acoustic soul, sharp lyrics ahead of their time. In fact, parts of them were sampled extensively decades later, and must have kept him well on the royalties.

I think, in later years, he worked when he wanted to, rather than had to: a bit of production here, a new song there that kept him in royalties. So it's a great pity that he seemed to be coming out of retirement again when he died.