Your Time To Cry

Your Time To Cry — Joe Simon

A Southern Voice in a Northern Market

The winter of 1970 was a complicated moment for soul music. Stax Records in Memphis was still producing some of the most vital recordings in the genre, but the commercial infrastructure that had sustained it was fracturing. Atlantic, the label that had channeled Southern soul to national audiences, was pivoting. And in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York, producers were exploring new directions in rhythm and arrangement that would lead toward the smooth soul and funk that dominated the early 1970s. Into this uncertain moment came Joe Simon, a Simmesport, Louisiana-born singer with one of the most expressive baritone voices in the genre, delivering a track that honored the tradition while pointing toward what it was becoming.

Joe Simon had been recording since the early 1960s and had built a strong regional following before breaking nationally with chart success in the late 1960s. His voice occupied a specific and powerful register: deep enough to carry weight, supple enough to convey vulnerability, and technically skilled enough to handle the melodic demands that sophisticated soul production placed on its performers. By 1970 he was working within a production context that understood how to deploy those qualities.

The Recording and Its Craft

Your Time To Cry was produced for Spring Records, the New York-based label that would serve as Simon's primary professional home through much of the early 1970s and where he would produce his most commercially successful work. The track demonstrates the Spring approach to Southern soul: respect for the singer's natural gifts, arrangements that support rather than overwhelm the vocal performance, and a production aesthetic that felt contemporary without abandoning the genre's emotional roots.

The recording's arrangement is built on a mid-tempo groove that gives Simon's voice room to work. The song's emotional content, a protagonist confronting someone who has caused hurt and placing the emotional consequences back on the person who deserves to feel them, required a performance that balanced confidence with restraint. Simon's delivery navigates that balance with a sureness that spoke to his experience as a live performer who had developed his instincts in front of demanding audiences long before the studio formalized them.

Thirteen Weeks on the Charts

The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 19, 1970, entering at position 81. It held at 81 the following week before beginning a consistent climb: 67, then 62, then 48 by mid-January. The track peaked at number 40 on February 6, 1971, just as the calendar turned. Its thirteen-week chart run was the mark of a song that had found a committed audience and sustained their attention well past the initial introduction. Thirteen weeks on the Hot 100 was not the performance of a novelty track riding a short promotional push; it was the performance of a song that people kept requesting and returning to.

The timing of the chart peak, February 1971, placed it in a Hot 100 context that included an enormous range of sounds, from the harder edge of early progressive rock crossovers to the lush orchestral pop that was still a major commercial force, to the earliest hints of what would eventually be classified as classic soul's twilight years. Simon's performance held its own across all of those competing currents.

Joe Simon's Commercial High-Water Mark

The early 1970s would prove to be Simon's most commercially productive period. His 1969 hit The Chokin' Kind had shown that his voice could carry a song to genuine mainstream success, and the Spring Records relationship would produce his biggest chart moment with Power of Love in 1972. In that context, Your Time To Cry sits as a solid midpoint: after the breakthrough but before the peak, demonstrating a performer who had found his professional footing and was developing the relationship with his audience that would sustain his commercial viability through the decade.

Simon's position in the soul hierarchy of the early 1970s was that of a first-tier album artist whose singles could compete on the mainstream chart without requiring the kind of pop dilution that some of his contemporaries pursued. He sang uncompromising Southern soul in a production context that never felt embarrassed by its roots, and his audiences rewarded that consistency.

A Voice Worth Seeking Out

Joe Simon's wider reputation has not always reflected the quality of his recorded output. He produced a remarkable body of work across the late 1960s and 1970s, and Your Time To Cry is a representative example of what makes that catalog worth exploring. The voice is genuinely extraordinary, a baritone with range, texture, and emotional intelligence that placed him among the most technically gifted soul vocalists of his generation.

The track's 648,000 YouTube views represent a dedicated community that has already made the discovery. Put it on and you will understand immediately why they keep coming back. The winter of 1970 had a particular quality of transition and uncertainty, and Simon's voice cuts through it with the clarity of someone who knows exactly what he has to say.

"Your Time To Cry" — Joe Simon's singular moment on the 1970s charts.