St. Paul and the Broken Bones at Iota back in June. They returned to the club this week.

I checked out St. Paul And The Broken Bones at Iota earlier this week. They’re a relatively new band I’m going to see on Cayamo in February, and they’re from Alabama and channel the whole Muscle Shoals thing. They could use a bigger catalog of original work but their overall chops are definitely Right There, and I thoroughly enjoyed the evening.

It’s rare for me to see a band on a weeknight, in part because it requires me to juggle my schedule and in part because I usually have to go by myself (my wife’s schedule is even more impossible than mine). Also, I don’t like being That Creepy Old Guy At The Concert By Himself, so I exercise a certain discretion when it comes to choosing shows. For example, the last time I went to Iota by myself was to see The Blasters several years ago. I knew that would feature an older crowd by default.

This crowd, though, was different. I was far from the oldest person there — I spotted a couple of old-hippie types who were probably on the far side of 60 — but there was a substantial younger audience. Neo-soul continues to be a flourishing movement and there were plenty of under-30s listening while tweeting and/or holding up their phones to shoot video and block everyone’s sight lines to the stage.

The lead singer is a guy named Paul Janeway, who cultivates a nerdish outward image but when he opens his mouth, there is something in him that has GOT TO GOT TO GOT TO COME OUT. And at the end of the night when he cut into Otis Redding’s “Try A Little Tenderness” — a song that has buried soulful wannabes for generations — he set it on fire all over again.

And that’s when I noticed this development: As the first deceptively mellow notes of the song drifted from the horn section, all of us old farts started nodding. A lot of the younger people didn’t react, which told me they had never heard the song. And I groaned a little at that development, just as my parents probably did when they realized I had never heard “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

But this is how we learn, and by the song’s raveup ending, I guarantee you that some knowledge had been given and received. I’m sure that some people in the crowd are now digging up some Otis and Wilson Pickett and some Sam and Dave and Percy Sledge — names unfamiliar to them until now.

And the music lives on. For the record: I now love “Sing, Sing, Sing.”