Sometimes a cliché isn’t a cliché — it’s stirringly profound, less for what is imparted than for the eloquence with which it is delivered. Even when a listener knows what to expect in theory from a piece of music, the merits of an offhanded artistry can be surprising. Such is the case of “Brotherman.”

This original soundtrack recording was destined for the background of a film with the same name, a would-be blaxploitation epic that was never made. Now, more than three decades later, the music has been rescued from obscurity by the Chicago archival label Numero Group, which releases the album today. As it turned out, the guitarist, arranger, and producer Carl Wolfork had been sitting on the master tapes for three decades, qualifying the 1974 sessions as true lost artifacts of the Chicago soul scene.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Wolfork, who had written hits for such Chitlin’ Circuit greats as Tyrone Davis (“Can I Change My Mind”), hooked up with a quartet called the Final Solution — a mainline local R&B quartet that had formerly performed as the Keldirons before regrouping under the unfortunate new name.

Meanwhile, the film, which was designed to follow in the wake of such genre staples as “Shaft,” “Superfly,” and “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” required music that would amplify its themes, almost like a Greek chorus. Reportedly, Mr. Wolfork even came up with a winning tagline for the production’s Robin Hood-like urban fable: “He was a pusher that became a preacher.”

Along such lines, the songs stick closely to the hopeful message of community actualization in Ghetto Land, U.S.A. “We gotta get it together” is the mantra uttered, in Curtis Mayfield-style upper registers, on the album’s opening title track. And everyone knows they’ve “got to give all you have to give” because, after all, “who’s gonna pay the price?”

The often beautiful vocalizing never masks the fact that “Brotherman” is a knockoff, lifting its concerns and its gritty gospel-funk variations straight out of what Mayfield had wrought as a solo artist and with his group the Impressions, as well as the Motown activism of Marvin Gaye and the newly psychedelic Temptations. But the blend of bitter and sweet, damned and redeemed, that defines the genre is difficult to resist even in hand-me-down form. To hear the vocalists take the simple refrain “I know, I know, I know, I know” and render it as a cascading four-part harmony — a new voice entering on each repetition, taking the lyric down a register, from cherubic falsetto to a stevedore’s baritone — is to be utterly arrested in a moment 34 years gone.

Then the song arrives at its message: “We can work it out.” And it’s true. They just did. There’s nothing left to second-guess. Even less open to doubt is Mr. Wolfork’s guitar, which is the real reason to pick up “Brotherman.” His chicken-scratch rhythms and stubby picking mark the guitarist as a musical soul mate of Jimmy Nolen (the still-underappreciated guitarist for James Brown) and Leo Nocentelli of the Meters. Half the time, it sounds as if Mr. Wolfork is playing some weird banjo; the other half, he sounds like the acid-funk answer to British avant-garde improviser Derek Bailey.

Apparently, a lot of the parts Mr. Wolfork played were intended as filler for the movie until orchestrated strings could be dubbed over the tracks. What irony, then, that the failure of the film’s producers to get it into theaters helped preserve the real genius of this soulful obscurity.