New series alert!
I have a good number of compilations from Kent the Soul subsidiary of the mighty Ace Records. Most of them are long overdue a listen and being a considerate man I thought that I would share that pleasure with you.
And where better to start with than Volume 1 of Deep Soul Treasures - Taken From the Vaults a no-compromise compilation of outstanding, classic and rare Deep Soul sides...the ultimate in American Soul music.
The series is compiled by the late great Dave Godin. His is a name that many of you will recognise particularly if you watched the recent TV programme on the first Motown tour of the UK in 1965.
He was the guy who came up with the term Tamla Motown.Until a comment from Marc on my recent Four Tops post I did not realize that this term was not used in the US who settle for the snappier Motown.
None of the superstars from that tour feature here. Rather it is a 25 track CD featuring 24 relatively obscure artists and it is none the worse for that.
I have picked out three for your listening pleasure.
First up is Jean Wells . Not the writer in the field of role-playing games or the quilt artist but the one who has played the Apollo Theatre in Harlem (the mecca of soul music) a total of six times. See here for a more detailed biography
Jean is followed by Henry Lee Sapp who perhaps unsurprisingly goes by the stage name of Timmy Willis. From Columbus,Ohio he seems to have done most of his recording in Detroit
Finally it is the Knight Brothers the only act to appear twice on the album and probably the best known (after Irma Thomas).Why they even have a Wiki page.
If you do not have the albums in the Deep Soul Treasures series there is something seriously missing in your life and you should take steps to rectify that immediately.
Another Kent compilation next Sunday.
Is next week's choice going to the obvious one?
ReplyDeleteNot necessarily
DeleteThe Knight Brothers and Timmy Willis links are the same song
ReplyDeleteOops
ReplyDeleteI'll get that sorted
Bang goes another New Years Resolution
Sorted now. Thanks for the heads up.
DeleteIt's so hard to get the staff these days!
Good stuff! In the US, "Tamla" and "Motown" were separate labels in Berry Gordy's empire (along with "Gordy" and "Soul" and "VIP"). But we refer to the whole company as just "Motown". A lot of record companies had multiple imprints -- like Stax and Volt -- supposedly so DJs could escape the accusations of payola that would have come if they played too many records on the same label. At least, that's the story I heard.
ReplyDeleteMarc
Excellent. I look forward to more from this series, and will be adding these albums to my investigation lists.
ReplyDelete