This song haunted me for years. Not seriously, mind you; there’s no childhood trauma or bad breakup associated with it or anything. “Am I The Same Girl” haunted me in the way long-forgotten advertising jingles do. That distinctive trumpet hook is easy to remember, but for the longest time I couldn’t remember anything else—not the song’s name, not the person or group who recorded it, even what any of the lyrics were, save for a half-remembered “don’t wanna stop and think it over.” Of course, the line’s actually “Why don’t you stop / and look me over.” But at least I got the trumpet hook right.

Some basic history for you: Eugene Record wrote the song with Acklin, as he did most of the songs on Acklin’s second LP, Seven Days Of Night. At the time, Acklin was a up-and-coming soul singer from Chicago with one Billboard hit already under her belt, and “Am I The Same Girl” could’ve been her breakout hit; it reached the lower echelons of the pop and R&B charts in February of 1969. One big reason why the song never charted any higher was because of Young-Holt Unlimited, who took Acklin’s backing tracks, replaced her vocals with a piano, and recorded “Soulful Strut.” The Acklin song came first, but for whatever reason, “Soulful Strut” was released before Acklin’s vocal version. The instrumental version entered the charts in November of 1968, hit the top ten on both the R&B and pop charts, and eventually sold over two million copies.