by Richie Unterberger Johnson's first album (Dresses Too Short) was fairly innocuous good-time soul, but he'd obviously been doing some thinking about the world around him in the interim between it and his second release. Is It Because I'm Black is characterized by socially conscious songwriting, especially in the seven-and-a-half-minute title track, an elongated, serious statement of black pride with a sad funk-blues groove. It wouldn't be fair to call Johnson a bandwagon jumper; this was before Sly Stone's There's a Riot and Marvin Gaye's What's Going On had made realistic ghetto songs chic, and it was a fairly gutsy move for a minor soul singer such as Syl to put such material to the forefront. While nothing else here matches that lost mini-classic, there are some good cuts along similar lines in which Johnson pleads for tolerance and justice, including covers of jazzman Oscar Brown's "Black Balloons," and Joe South's "Walk a Mile in My Shoes," and, less successfully, the Beatles' "Come Together." The album was reissued in conjunction with 1968's Dresses Too Short on a single disc by Kent in 1997.