Maurice & Mac

Maurice & Mac emerged when Maurice McAlister and McLauren Green splintered from the Radiants in 1966. McAlister was a founding member, lead singer, and songwriter for the group; Green replaced first tenor Charles Washington before the Radiants started recording for Chess Records. The Radiants, composed of members from the Greater Harvest Baptist Church Youth Choir (located in Chicago, IL), formed in 1960 to record some stellar but poorly promoted singles for Chess Records. On their biggest record, "Voice Was Choice" (1964), the members were McAlister, Wallace Sampson, and Leonard Caston. The Army snatched Green, and Caston, an organist at Greater Harvest, had recently returned from the service. "Voice Your Choice" went to number 51 pop and number 16 R&B, but deserved better; its successor, "Ain't No Big Thing," scraped into Billboard's pop 100 at number 91, but did better on the R&B chart (number 14). Later editions of the Radiants consisted of different members and a different sound. The group was initially a quintet, then a quartet, a trio, then back to a quartet before disappearing. The first Maurice & Mac single surfaced around 1967 or 1968 on Checker Records, a subsidiary of Chess. But "Try Me" b/w "So Much Love" went unnoticed by everyone except the parties involved with the recording. Their second release brought some acclaim, but no fame, and no fortune. "You Left the Water Running," released in 1968, and written by Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, is one of the best Southern soul recordings, period. Yet, it never made Billboards' pop or R&B charts; Cashbox's survey listed it for three weeks, but it never rose from the bottom rungs. Recorded at the Fame Studios in Muscles Shoals, AL, the production is so tight that the vocals and the instrumentation literally...