He takes a breath before attempting to enumerate some of the greats he’s worked with as a producer (often alongside co-producer Harvey Fuqua) and/or songs he’s written. On Bandstand, Bristol is fresh off of a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist for “Hang On In There, Baby,” his biggest solo record, number eight on the Hot 100s.

Or, as Bristol sings in a funked-out soulful, Bill Withers–esque ballad of Morganton, “It’s just a clean-faced small place in the land of Carolina.” That is, he is dressed worlds apart from the place where we were each born, nearly forty years apart-Morganton, North Carolina, in the Appalachian foothills, a town that is frequently described in relation to other, larger places nearby: a stop off I-40, surrounded by the cerulean haze of the Blue Ridge Mountains a town of state-run schools and institutions and, in Bristol’s day before many of the mills were closed, a factory town where trees got turned into furniture and cotton into lingerie and hosiery, and where music venues and bars still existed only on the sly. Bristol is wearing a slate blue suit tailored to his six-foot-three or four frame and what must rank in the top ten pairs of coolest sunglasses of all time, lightly shaded so that you imagine the world appeared shadowed in a permanent vapor. It is 1976 and Dick Clark is interviewing Johnny Bristol, the r&b and soul singer and Motown songwriter and producer, on American Bandstand.

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