Etta James might not have come from the Mississippi Delta – she grew up Los Angeles and came of age in San Francisco – but she was a bona fide blues belter.
The Bee Gees song written for Otis Redding but redone as a hippie country-soul heartbreaker. Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers, give it a country twang replete with pedal steel guitar that was entirely absent from the original.
If there’s one artist I wish I’d seen live more than any other, it’s probably Nina Simone. Especially when she was a regular at Ronnie Scott’s in the 1980s. Except I had probably not heard of her back then.
The second single by The Bee Gees back in 1967 was originally written for their mentor Robert Stigwood and intended for Otis Redding to record.
Garnet Mimms is the guy who sang the original version of Cry Baby, better known (to me, at least) for Janis Joplin’s overwrought version, back in 1963.
Ray Charles is rightly credited with almost single-handedly inventing soul and R&B in the early 1950s. But in the 1960s he surprised his fans, and the whole of the pop world, by turning his hand to country-and-western.
I discovered the genius of Robbie Basho late in my musical explorations. He came to (minor) game alongside his fellow finger-pickers John Fahey and Leo Kottke but was forgotten for years after a premature death until a resurgence of interest in ‘American Primitive’ guitarists.
Lou Reed and John Cale met in the early Sixties and you can hear the germs of the Velvet Underground’s song on their early songwriting collaboration Why Don’t You Smile, released by The All Night Workers.
I’ve heard this song by Marvin, I’ve heard it by Dusty and I’ve heard it by the Stones, but until now I’d never heard it by Barbara til now. In fact I’d never heard of Barbara Randolph at all.
I don’t think I’ve heard this before but someone the other day mentioned it as a highlight of the album The Notorious Byrd Brothers, so I looked it up.
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