Here’s a confession. I only really knew Kool & The Gang for their party tunes and schmaltzy ballads in the Eighties.

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Terence Wilson, universally known as Astro, was the percussionist and part-time toaster in UB40, the unfairly maligned kings of UK reggae.

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Ernest Tubb once remarked that whenever one of his songs came on a jukebox, men in bars would turn to their girlfriends and say: “Heck, I can sing better than that.” And, agreed Ernest, “They’d be right.”

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Hank Williams once said that when it came to pulling power for the famously devout music fans of the Deep South: “It was Roy Acuff – then God.”

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Hank Williams was the first superstar of country music and the architect of rock’n’roll. This was the last song he recorded, in 1952. (more…)

Jackson Browne was not the first to record Stay, still the shortest single ever to top the charts, but he made it his own when he covered the doo-wop oldie in 1977.

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The exuberant brass motif that drives this swinging soul number sounds instantly familiar, perhaps because of the many lives this song has had since it was written by The Chi-Lites’ lead singer Eugene Record and Sonny Sanders.

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No one would pretend Nick Lowe was a punk – he had almost a decade in music behind him by 1976. But he plays a key role in punk pre-history.

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Here’s another Deep Soul deep cut from back in the Summer of Love, 1967 – the only hit for Helena Ferguson. And here’s a piece of pop trivia – the backing band is The Ohio Players.

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