If truth be told it is a bit difficult to get your teeth into and I would not recommend listening to it all in a oner.
I've a couple of cheap and cheerful compilations of post Atlantic stuff along with his brilliant 2002 covers album Don't Give Up On Me on Fat Possum and his Country Soul album Nashville where his voice is deeper and richer
I was not that familiar with his earliers stuff.The Cherry Red website states that it celebrates the recordings that Solomon Burke made for the legendary Atlantic Records label between 1960 and 1968. Solomon is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest soul singers to emerge during the genre’s golden days. He signed to Atlantic before ‘soul music’ became a bona fide sub-genre of African-American music and it was Solomon who helped define this new movement and he was, in fact, one of the first artists to use ‘soul’ to describe his music. He would eventually be known the world over as ‘The King of Rock and Soul’.
There are some fillers and some bog standard tunes but a few crackers as well. You could go for quality over quantity and have an excellent single album on your hands.
Your final lines are my thoughts too on this compilation. Too many rather poor tracks. I found it a bit of a chore getting through all 79 tracks, and that was in chunks of about 15 at a time.
ReplyDeleteDon’t Give Up on Me and the few songs that show up on the giant Atlantic Rhythm and Blues box seem to be enough to scratch my Burke itch. Sometimes less is more.
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