The 1960s File Feature
And Get Away
And Get Away: The Esquires Capture a City's Soul SoundMilwaukee Soul and the National StageThe story of American soul music in the 1960s is, to a great exten…
01 The Story
"And Get Away": The Esquires Capture a City's Soul Sound
Milwaukee Soul and the National Stage
The story of American soul music in the 1960s is, to a great extent, the story of cities: Detroit and Motown, Memphis and Stax, Chicago and Chess, Philadelphia with its own developing sound. But soul was also happening in smaller scenes, in cities whose contributions to the genre's history have often been underestimated simply because the major labels and the major media were concentrated elsewhere. Milwaukee produced some genuine soul talent during this period, and The Esquires were the city's most successful export to the national charts, a fact that their December 1967 chart performance makes concrete and undeniable.
The group had been working the Milwaukee scene and recording for some time before breaking through nationally. They had the kind of ensemble coherence that comes from performing together regularly in front of live audiences who know how to demand the best from a band, and when they arrived at the studio to record what would become their breakthrough, that earned tightness was audible in the result.
The Record's Energy
And Get Away moves with the kind of forward momentum that distinguished the best Northern soul recordings from their Southern counterparts. Where Memphis soul tended toward a warmer, more groove-settled feel, the Northern soul sound that was developing in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee pushed harder rhythmically, with a tight, almost punchy production approach that made records work particularly well on dance floors. The Esquires understood that sound instinctively and built their record around it.
The track has a propulsive quality that keeps it feeling urgent from first beat to last, driven by a rhythm section that refuses to let the momentum sag. The vocal performance sits on top of that momentum with the right amount of release and control, projecting enthusiasm without dissolving into chaos.
A Holiday Season Climber
The record debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 25, 1967, entering at number 71. Over the following weeks it climbed through the holiday season with consistency: 55, 45, 34, 29, before reaching its peak position of number 22 on December 30, 1967. The chart run covered eight weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 in total. A top-twenty-five finish at the end of December 1967, competing against the full strength of what was an extraordinary year for pop singles, represents a genuine breakthrough moment for a regional act making its first significant national statement.
The timing of the peak, arriving in the final days of 1967, placed the Esquires among the records that defined that year's end and carried into the new year. Radio listeners ringing in 1968 would have been hearing this record in rotation alongside some of the most celebrated singles in pop history.
A Legacy Built on Momentum
The Esquires did not sustain the level of national chart presence that And Get Away suggested might be possible, but that pattern was common enough for regional soul acts whose breakthrough depended on a specific convergence of song quality, promotion, and timing. The American soul market of the late 1960s was extraordinarily competitive, and even strong records from talented groups frequently found their chart runs cut short by the sheer volume of quality material competing for the same radio slots. What the record proved, regardless of what followed, was that the Milwaukee scene could produce material that competed nationally on equal terms, which was not a small demonstration. The group had done what most regional acts never managed: they had made the Hot 100 on their own terms, with their own sound, without compromising toward any safer or more generic middle ground.
61 million YouTube views represent an audience that has come to the record largely through retrospective interest in the era's overlooked soul gems, collectors and enthusiasts who understand that the American music of the 1960s extended considerably beyond the acts that dominated the pop histories.
Find It and Play It Loud
The kind of tight, driving soul that the Esquires made in 1967 is exactly the music that rewards a good sound system and genuine volume. Press play, turn it up, and understand why December of 1967 brought this record all the way to number 22.
"And Get Away" — The Esquires' singular moment on the 1960s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Motion and Liberation in "And Get Away"
The Impulse to Move
The title And Get Away announces its emotional content immediately: this is a song about leaving, about putting distance between the speaker and whatever is weighing on them, about the specific relief that motion provides when staying in place has become intolerable. In the tradition of soul and rhythm-and-blues, the desire to get away is a recurring and deeply felt theme, one that connects to real experiences of confinement, frustration, and the hunger for something better than what is currently on offer.
The Esquires built their record around a sound that enacts the emotional content of its title. The driving rhythm section does not let the listener settle comfortably into a static groove; it pushes forward, establishing motion as the default state and making stillness feel like the deviation. Form and content align with unusual directness.
Soul Music and the Geography of Freedom
Songs about escaping a situation have a particular resonance in Black American popular music, where the desire for freedom from constraint had roots in experiences both personal and historical. The Great Migration had brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans to Northern cities like Milwaukee in the decades before the Esquires were recording, and the music those communities produced carried both the energy of arrival and the awareness of what had been left behind and what was still being negotiated.
A soul record about getting away is never simply a personal complaint; it participates in a larger cultural conversation about movement, aspiration, and the ongoing negotiation between where you are and where you want to be. The Esquires' record speaks that language with the fluency of musicians who understood the full weight of what they were singing about.
The Dance Floor as Destination
In the immediate, embodied sense, the getting away that soul dance records propose is a getting away that happens on the dance floor. The music provides a temporary release from whatever is constraining daily life by engaging the body in collective, joyful movement. The tight, propulsive production of And Get Away serves that function directly: it is music designed to move people, in both senses.
Northern soul, the style that the Esquires' record exemplifies, was consciously oriented toward the dance floor in a way that some of its Southern counterpart was not. The tempo tends toward the brisk, the rhythm section tends toward the precise, and the overall sound prioritizes the physical response of the dancer. Getting away, in this context, means getting onto the floor and staying there until the music and the movement together have done their restorative work.
A Universal Desire in Local Form
What the Esquires expressed in the specific idiom of 1967 Milwaukee soul taps a desire that requires no cultural translation. Everyone who has ever felt stuck, frustrated, or constrained by circumstances beyond their control understands the appeal of the music's invitation. The specificity of the sound grounds the universality of the feeling, giving the record a particular texture while keeping its emotional core available to any listener willing to meet it on its own terms.
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