The Internationals - Give A Damn [Soul] (1969)

"Give A Damn" is a 1969 song by American Soul group The Internationals. It was one of three releases on the New York City record label D'Ar Recording Co., Inc. The group The Internationals would eventually reform and name themselves The Persuaders. When I uploaded this video, I was under the impession that this was a song by The Whatnauts. This is because it was on the 2003 reissue of "Message From A Black Man" 2 CD Anthlogy set by The Whatnauts. In the liner notes of this reissue (which were presumably re-used from the 1996 original release on Deepbeats), it said that this song is one of 6 demos of the group they found in the vaults of Stang Records. On the Anthlogy, all 6 songs are credited with a writers credit of "Unknown". I think I have a fairly good guess about how this particular song wound up on the compilation. There really was only a handful of artists that recorded for Stang Records in the first place, with the two most prominent being The Whatnauts and The Moments. These two appear to be the only male soul group acts that recorded for the label as well. So when they were finding all these tapes, they said that a lot of them didn't have any accompanying information like credits or even titles on them. They find the one that says "Give A Damn" written on it, play it, and think "well, that doesn't sound like The Moments..." and put it on The Whatnauts Anthology. But what's more interesting to me than that is how did this tape from a label that isn't part of the All-Platinum Records family end up in their vault? Well, I also have a theory for that too. Thanks to the credits on The Internationals "Give A Damn" 45 from 1969, we know that the song was written by Ray Lewis, Richard Poindexter and Robert Poindexter. Both Poindexters would later co-write the song "I Dig Your Act" for The Whatnauts, which would be included on their 1971 album "Reaching For The Stars". It's possible that at this point one or both of the Poindexters chose to store their copy of the song in the Stang Records vaults for safekeeping (for whatever reason) and didn't feel the need to write the name of the artist or anything else on the box when they did so. This box then stayed in the vault until it was unearthed in the mid 1990's by Deepbeats and released on the Anthology. But that brings up more questions: are there more tapes that the Poindexters stored in the All-Platinum vaults? Are any of the demo tracks by The Whatnauts at all? After listening to these demo tracks again with this knowledge, I've noticed that all the recordings seem to lack the lead vocal of Billy Herndon or the tenor vocal of Garnett Jones. All the demos could just be tracks by other artists that were part of the All-Platinum family too. I'll have to do some more reasearch on it. But for now, you can enjoy a master tape rip of this great song by the Internationals. Enjoy! For more information about original The Internationals single, please visit the Discogs page for it: discogs.com/master/2139340-The-Internationals-Give-A-Damn-Push-Button-Love For more information about the "Message From A Black Man" anthology, please visit the Discogs page for it: discogs.com/release/1492169-The-Whatnauts-Message-From-A-Black-Man