Mabuhay Singers Party Line

Breakup albums have their own top shelf in the popular music canon, from Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks to Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak. Staying-together albums, on the other hand, are more rare and more difficult to execute. Maybe that's because overcoming hardship and working through differences require diligence and daily renewals of faith, more subtle and internally directed practices than the emotional release separation allows. On her fourth album (and third with her stalwart band, The Party Line), Nora Jane Struthers walks listeners through the first year of her marriage to her bandmate, multi-instrumentalist Joe Overton. She points to every rock and buried tree root, and shows how mutual care and openness got the couple to the first summit on their path.

Come Go With Me: The Stax Collection presents all of The Staple Singers’ studio albums released on the iconic Stax label, spanning 1968-1974. The final, seventh disc offers rarities, non-album singles, and several live recordings from the legendary 1972 Wattstax music festival. Housed in a slipcase, the collection also includes a deluxe booklet with archival photos and new liner notes from American music specialist and curator Levon Williams (formerly of the Stax Museum and the National Museum of African American Music), and folklorist, ethnomusicologist and writer Dr. Langston Wilkins.

In 1968, six former choral scholars from King’s College, Cambridge established the King’s Singers, later described by The Times as “the superlative vocal sextet”. The group has always comprised two countertenors, a tenor, two baritones and a bass, and over the years it has proved consistently exceptional for vocal distinction and breadth and diversity of repertoire. This celebratory collection of eight CDs focuses on Renaissance composers from Italy, England, France, Spain, Germany and the Low Countries.

The Staple Singers are perhaps best remembered for their period recording for Stax Records in Memphis between 1968 and 1975, where they enjoyed a string of pop, soul and international hits. Here though Jasmine focus on the groups early recordings when they were strictly a religious group steeped in American Gospel traditions. Although the line-up was unusual for the time, male and female groups were not common in Gospel music then, they undoubtedly appealed to the huge number of migrants who had moved to Chicago from the rural south. 'Pops', as he was known, had a guitar style highly reminiscent of the Mississippi blues singers of the 1920s and 30s and the vocal arrangements that he gave the girls were also similar to those of the earliest jubilee style gospel groups of the pre-war years like the Golden Gate Quartet and The Charioteers. Here then are their famous early recordings as released by Vee Jay Records who continued to reissue their repertoire on LP for many years.

The Staple Singers are perhaps best remembered for their period recording for Stax Records in Memphis between 1968 and 1975, where they enjoyed a string of pop, soul and international hits. Here though Jasmine focus on the groups early recordings when they were strictly a religious group steeped in American Gospel traditions. Although the line-up was unusual for the time, male and female groups were not common in Gospel music then, they undoubtedly appealed to the huge number of migrants who had moved to Chicago from the rural south. 'Pops', as he was known, had a guitar style highly reminiscent of the Mississippi blues singers of the 1920s and 30s and the vocal arrangements that he gave the girls were also similar to those of the earliest jubilee style gospel groups of the pre-war years like the Golden Gate Quartet and The Charioteers. Here then are their famous early recordings as released by Vee Jay Records who continued to reissue their repertoire on LP for many years.