Al Smith Midnight Special

Al Smith - Midnight Special (1960) {Prestige-Bluesville OBCCD-583-2 rel 1996}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 209 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 76 Mb
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© 1960, 1996 Prestige/Bluesville Records / Fantasy | OBCCD-583-2
Blues / Regional Blues / Soul-Blues / Urban Blues / West Coast Blues

For many decades, African-American churches have worried about losing their best singers to secular music. And inevitably, many of them will, in fact, explore secular music instead of devoting 100 percent of their time to gospel. Al Smith is a perfect example. The obscure singer's roots were gospel, but he favored a jazz-influenced approach to blues and soul when he recorded two albums for Prestige/Bluesville: Hear My Blues in 1959 and Midnight Special in 1960. Recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's famous New Jersey studio, Midnight Special finds Smith backed by a rock-solid quintet that consists of King Curtis on tenor sax, Robert Banks on organ, Jimmy Lee Robinson on electric guitar, Leonard Gaskin on acoustic bass, and Bobby Donaldson on drums.

Al Smith - Hear My Blues (1959) {Prestige–Bluesville OBCCD-514-2 rel 1993}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 206 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 79 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 18 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1959, 1993 Prestige / Bluesville / Fantasy | OBCCD-514-2
Blues / Jazz / Soul Blues / West Coast Blues

As a rule, people who appreciate the late Jimmy Witherspoon have a very favorable reaction to Al Smith – that is, if they get a chance to hear him. Neither of the two albums that Smith provided for Bluesville (Hear My Blues in 1959 and Midnight Special in 1960) are well-known. While Witherspoon was a big name in the blues world, Smith was a gospel singer who dabbled in secular music. But when Smith did venture outside the gospel realm, his approach was quite comparable to Witherspoon's – like Witherspoon, he favored a jazz-influenced approach to blues and R&B.

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Sounds of the Seventies was a 40-volume series issued by Time-Life during the late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, spotlighting pop music of the 1970s. Much like Time-Life's other series chronicling popular music, volumes in the "Sounds of the Seventies" series covered a specific time period, including individual years in some volumes, and different parts of the decade (for instance, the early 1970s) in others; in addition, some volumes covered specific trends, such as music popular on album-oriented rock stations on the FM band.

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