47 Soul

The Ultimate Collection: Northern Soul brings together 5CDs containing 100 tracks that encapsulate the very best from the music and dance movement that emerged in Northern England in the late 1960s from the British mod scene.

Soul Don’t Worry is the most ambitious project to date for NarroWay / Gospel Friend, the Sweden-based gospel reissue operation headed by producer Per Notini.

Back in 1975, Maxine Nightingale became an overnight sensation in the UK when her latest single, ‘Right Back Where We Started From’, stormed into the Top 10. Thereafter, the track’s catchy appeal spread like wildfire across the globe, topping the charts in Canada and the US and was a massive hit in most other countries.

This 3-CD SoulMusic Records’ set 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’.

Washington may have been a journeyman at what he did, but he was at the very top of the journeyman class, and what he did – play a hybrid of blues and soul – is not as overmined a genre as many blues styles are. That means that if you like blues-soul crossover, you will almost certainly like this compilation of late-'60s and early-'70s sides, which represent the peak of Washington as a recording artist. Most of these were done for Fraternity from 1967-1970, and show him comfortable in deep gospel-like Southern soul grooves ("Doggin' Me Around"), quasi-Sam Cooke pop-soul ("A Woman Is a Funny Thing"), and party-tempo blues-soul hybrids that sometimes show a B.B. King influence. The material is more soul than blues; the blues bite is usually supplied by the sharp guitar licks (sometimes played by the great Lonnie Mack), the soul embellished by Washington's cheery, uplifting vocals. The exact tracks featuring Mack are not precisely identified, but his burning, slightly distorted tone is certainly on "Turn on the Bright Lights." Three of the 25 tracks were previously unissued, and in addition to the Fraternity material there are a couple of subsequent singles on Jewel from 1971 and 1973.