Groovin' on St. Pat's!

Freddie Scott - Am I Grooving You



On Saturday night, your ever-lovin' Stepfather of Soul will be a guest DJ at "Rhythm & Booze," and I'm tickled pink to get my third night behind the "wheels of steel" - among the funky 45s I'll be messing with will be this tasty Shout 45 from Freddie Scott. If you live in the area or will be visiting, get your St. Patrick's Day drink on at El Myr and "Get on Down"!

More "Blues Day" Nashville Music!

Roscoe Shelton - Strain On My Heart

The late Roscoe Shelton's relative lack of chart success is not so unusual considering that Shelton was part of the generally overlooked Nashville soul scene. Shelton had made his start with the Fairfield Four, a gospel group whose long career is worthy of attention in its own right, and his tenure with them and the spinoff group, The Skylarks, provided well over a decade of experience to the singer by the time he started recording R&B in the early '60s. He would eventually make stops at quite a few Nashville concerns, most notably Excello, Sims and Sound Stage Seven, before getting out of the business at the dawn of the '70s. After nearly 25 years away, he hooked up with Nashville soul man Fred James and recorded and toured as a solo and as part of the Excello All-Stars until his death in 2002. In a perfect world, Shelton's bluesy soul sound would've made him a superstar, but at least soul fans can enjoy his magic both on CD and through his appearances on The Beat!!!!, which are now available on DVD. Today's selection, one of his only two hits (the other being "Easy Going Fellow," which has appeared on an earlier episode of the podcast), was a 1965 Sims release, and it shows off his style very well. This is a basic slow blues, but Roscoe really puts it over with his exciting singing, good backup vocals from a femme chorus, and a nice spoken interlude.

(EDITOR'S NOTE - I'm starting to get more feedback about using ZShare, both good and bad. I will try the service for the rest of the week and then I will make a final decision as to whether to stick with it. Keep sending feedback!)

Get on Down With Tony Joe White!

Tony Joe White - Scratch My Back

Today's post is inspired by the great post at Funky 16 Corners about the great Tony Joe White, whose '60s recordings for Monument are a great amalgam of swamp pop and blue-eyed soul. I'll defer to Larry's post for details about White, but I'll jump in with today's selection, which he mentioned in the post but didn't provide a link for. Quite a few artists covered Slim Harpo's "Baby Scratch My Back," ranging from Clifton Chenier's zydeco take ("Just Keep On Scratching," featured in Brainfreeze) to Oliver Sain's early '70s funk version for A-Bet. White's version of the tune ups the swamp quotient and is, in my opinion, the best of the covers. As the wah-wah infused groove pushes along White grunts and groans in a manner to eliminate any doubt that may existed from Harpo's record as to what "back scratching" entails.

(EDITOR'S NOTE - Thanks to the sole commenter on Saturday regarding the use of ZShare for file preview and download. I would like to hear from more of you as to whether you like the change or not - the fact that there have been over 300 downloads in the last three days seems to suggest it's going well!)

This Is a Test!

Gary Toms Empire - 7-6-5-4-3-2-1 (Blow Your Whistle)

Today's post will be brief, as its main purpose is to try out ZShare. As noted in a recent Soul Sides post, it is annoying to have to download a tune before hearing it. One of my dear readers referred me to that post, and so I'm going to try it out to see how it works. Although I do have an annual account with GoDaddy with the online file folder, I'm not afraid to try new stuff. Let me know what you think of this service. Also, if anyone uses Hipcast, which I've seen on a few blogs lately, let me know about it (I like it better because it puts a player on the blog instead of directing you to another webpage). Today's selection follows up on the "blow your whistle" theme I started on Monday.

Final Revilot

The Parliaments - A New Day Begins

Today's selection was the last 45 on the Revilot label, although it had a reprise as an Atco single. "A New Day Begins" features a nice groove and George Clinton's quirky style. Upon the demise of Revilot (and the affiliated Groovesville and Solid Hit concerns) the label's principals and assets moved in varied directions, with Don Davis (a label principal) going to Memphis to start a lucrative tenure at Stax, label principal LeBaron Taylor moving on to Columbia Records (and eventually becomeing an executive at Sony Music), and George Clinton turned the Parliaments into the Parliament/Funkadelic empire. It was a new day for all involved!

Guess Who? Junior Walker, That's Who!

Jr. Walker & The All-Stars - These Eyes

Although Jr. Walker (born Autry Dewalt, Jr.) scored quite a few hits on Motown's Soul imprint, Walker was certainly not a "Motown man." He lacked the sophistication of Marvin Gaye or any other beneficiary of the label's in-house charm school (a veteran performer by the time he and his group hooked up with Motown, he was never even enrolled!) and his band was too raggedy to grace the company's "Snake Pit" studios (the Funk Brothers actually played on the records; the All-Stars were strictly Jr.'s road band). Until 1969, most of Walker's records stuck with Walker's awesome saxophone playing or with Walker providing shouted, rough-hewn vocals for dance records (think "Shotgun," "Do the Boomerang," and "Shake and Fingerpop"), but when Motown reluctantly released the beautiful "What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)" and struck pop and R&B paydirt with it, Jr. Walker the crooner emerged on subsequent records. Walker's next hit, a cover of The Guess Who's "These Eyes," is featured today. Walker's vocals were not as expressive as those on the Guess Who's original, to be sure, but they were charming in a country-funk kind of way and his sax was definitely a nice addition to the great song. The record proved that "What Does It Take" was no fluke, as it was a #3 R&B and #16 pop hit in '69.

A postscript: I saw a 1971 episode of "Soul Train" some years ago that featured Jr. and the band performing live. (In the early years of the show quite a few artists were allowed to appear live; James Brown's appearances were especially noteworthy and have appeared on a few bootleg compilations.) As I mentioned, the All-Stars only backed Jr. on the road, so to hear Walker do his hits, especially "These Eyes" (which he said he got "lots of requests's for"), with such a stripped-down, rough-hewn group was great.

Let Me Hear It - Blow Your Whistle!

K.C. & The Sunshine Band - Blow Your Whistle

It truly stinks to know that on a beautiful sunny Atlanta day I'm sick as a dog with a head cold, but maybe today's selection will bring some sunshine indoors. "Blow Your Whistle" was one of the first K.C. & The Sunshine Band 45s, and although it made it into the R&B Top 30 in 1974, the group's rise to disco superstardom was still a couple of years away. "Blow Your Whistle" is a nice mixture of funk and Latin sounds featuring a very nice groove, fun party chanting and an attractive bass-and-guitar "stop-and-go" vamp. At some point someone says "'Blow Your Whistle' is a baaad record"; whoever it is, they are right! Dance records with whistles would populate the '70s landscape, with Gary Toms' "7-6-5-4-3-2-1 (Blow Your Whistle)" being one of my favorites. Maybe this was the first.

Tuesday Is Nashville Blues Day!

Shy Guy Douglas - Long Gone

Among the many unheralded figures of the Nashville black music scene was the bluesman Thomas "Shy Guy" Douglas, whose long career is evidenced by a dozen singles spanning from 1949 to the early '70s on almost all Nashville labels. "Long Gone" was one of Douglas' four Excello singles, and its easygoing groove makes it a favorite of mine. This one appears on quite a few Excello and Nashville R&B comps, which are worth checking out if you are a fan of swamp blues, Nashville soul or Southern rockabilly.

Get on Down With Steve Cropper!

Steve Cropper - Funky Broadway



Steve Cropper's contributions to American music are pretty awesome: he wrote or co-wrote many hits for Otis Redding, Eddie Floyd, Wilson Pickett and others; he made up one-fourth of the legendary soul instro group Booker T. & The M.G.'s; he appeared as a sideman on numerous soul and rock records; and his guitar skills have taken him to the top of the list of great guitarists. Most of his fame, of course, came from his tenure at Stax Records, where he was involved with the label as a de facto A&R man, session musician, songwriter, producer and artist from the beginning of the '60s until he left the label in 1970 as a victim of the changing attitudes and work methods of the label as the "snapping fingers" era began and Stax began to move away from its Southern soul roots.

Although he was such a valuable figure at Stax, it was either by neglect, a desire not to deemphasize the Booker T. & The M.G.'s act, and/or his own low-key nature (both personally and as a musician) that Cropper only appeared on two LPs as a solo artist, both near the end of his time at the label: the interesting Stax album Jammed Together, on which he joined Pops Staples and Albert King (one of the two 45s pulled from that album features Cropper singing "Water"), and his debut as a leader, the Volt LP With a Little Help From My Friends. Again, for any of the three reasons named earlier, and perhaps a fourth, that the Cropper LP was maybe part of the massive LP release Al Bell engineered to build an instant post-Atlantic Stax album catalogue (can someone confirm this, as I don't have my materials handy?), Cropper's album was not well-promoted, no singles were pulled from it, and the great record vanished with little fanfare. As usual, we soul fans are so fortunate that the CD era has given so many great recordings, including the Cropper LP, a new lease on life. "Funky Broadway," today's selection, finds Cropper working it out on the early funk classic. Cropper's version is a bit closer to Wilson Pickett's than it is to Dyke & The Blazers' original, but Cropper gives the tune a great Stax groove. From the stomping introduction to Cropper's guitar work to the neat breakdown to the soaring finale, said Stax groove is everywhere and the tune really cooks.

Sunday Gospel Time!

Mahalia Jackson - In the Upper Room

As I battle a cold I pause to post and to update links from earlier days. I don't think anyone who reads this blog needs an introduction to the Queenof Gospel singers, so I'll just say this is my favorite of her Columbia recordings. Enjoy!

Eccentric? Awesome? You Decide.

Linda Jones - Stay With Me Forever



Linda Jones' untimely death in 1972 at age 28 robbed soul music of one of its most unique voices. Her recordings for Atco, Blue Cat, Loma, Warner Brothers, Neptune and Turbo show a singer with the most expressive use of melisma (more on that later) of any of her peers and total soul energy that made her recordings, be they Northern Soul groovers like "Hit Me Like TNT" or "Last Minute Miracle" or ballads like "For Your Precious Love," exciting and interesting. She started songs the way most singers would end them - Bill Pollak wrote that her performance of "Not On The Outside" "[made] Tina Turner sound like Judy Collins" - and her latter recordings featured more of that intensity than her better-known recordings, like the 1967 Top 10 R&B hit "Hypnotized" and the follow-up "What've I Done (To Make You Mad)" (which appears on Episode #6 of the podcast). A biography of Jones can be found here, and I'll defer to it for more details about her life and career.

Today's selection was her first 45 for All Plantinum's Turbo label, and what a song it turned out to be. "Stay With Me Forever" in other hands would be a stately, soulful song that would be perfect for wedding singers to perform. Linda Jones, however, turned the song into an emotion-charged (and emotion-draining) tour-de-force. Her melisma is all over the map on this record - check out her reading of the line "summer, fall, winter and spring" at the end of the first verse and how she leads into the second - and by the time she rolls into the final chorus she's singing so strongly that the phrase "stay with me forever" sounds almost more desperate than romantic. My wife dislikes the song, finding it to be just too over-the-top. I think it's great. Listen and decide for yourself what you think.

Get on Down With Sally and Loral!

Eddie Jefferson - Psychedelic Sally



Today's post is dedicated to Loral, a Canadian whom I - by means I have long forgotten - had an online correspondence with back in the late nineties. My first attempts at podcasting (although not called such at the time) was a Real Audio show called "Soul Serenade," and Loral and I would do a supplemental weekly four-song show called "The Sunflower Dance Set" in which I would send her a list of funky tunes (which she hadn't heard, and which I was technologically too unsophisticated to send to her), from which she'd pick four and then I'd record a little show. (She occasionally would record voice over tracks that I would dub into the show, with neat results - she'd use flange and other effects to add a little psychedelia into the presentation). After about six months of these shows I ended up going without a computer for a spell and our correspondence ended. I need to look her up to see what she's up to. At any rate, today's selection was one of her favorites.

Eddie Jefferson was the founder of the "vocalese" movement in jazz singing. Vocalese differs from scat singing in that instead of singing nonsense syllables to imitate instruments, the singer instead sets lyrics to instrumentals (either in total or in imitation of solos). The most famous proponents of vocalese was Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and groups like the Manhattan Transfer would have '70s pop success in that style. Jefferson's 1968 version of Horace Silver's "Psychedelic Sally" is a sho' 'nuff piece of get down, as Eddie spins a tale of longing after the song's subject, from whose bohemian lifestyle he wishes to rescue. There's a great groove on this one, and Jefferson gives the great James Moody a great sax solo. This tune reminds me that I really need to put more soul jazz on here - there are so many great tunes!