My Best Grass

Tom Jones, OBE (born 7 June 1940, Treforest, Pontypridd, Glamorgan, Wales) is a Welsh singer. In 1962, he became the frontman for Tommy Scott & The Senators, a Welsh beat group and recorded 4 demo tracks in the football changing rooms at Pontypridd YMCA, known as the "bathroom session". In 1963, as Tommy Scott & The Playboys, they recorded 7 demos for the producer Joe Meek…

With Green, Green Grass of Home, Tom Jones began to abandon his teenage pop audience to concentrate on a more mature, middle of the road group of listeners. Although he did include uptempo R&B numbers like "Kansas City," and the album's strongest moments occurred when he concentrated on standards and country tunes like the title track, "My Mother's Eyes," and "That Old Black Magic," or when he turned in laidback soul songs like "Any Day Now." The album was still inconsistent, as Jones over-sang several of the tracks, but it was easily the best album he had recorded to date.

Rhino's 1993 collection The Very Best of Wilson Pickett remains the best single-disc anthology of the fiery soul singer's work, choosing 16 of his best tracks for Atlantic and presenting them in excellent remastered sound quality. Pickett never departed all that much from the rough, swaggering vocals that first made his name, but he was utterly electrifying within that style, setting the standard for Southern soul singers behind Otis Redding. All of Pickett's early signature hits – "In the Midnight Hour," "634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.)," "Land of 1,000 Dances," "Mustang Sally," and "Funky Broadway" – lead off the disc in quick succession, capturing the emergence of Southern soul as a viable commercial style. But Pickett is just as charismatic on the rest of the material, nearly all of which made the R&B Top Ten and went under appreciated on the pop charts – he was just too much for white audiences to handle. Pickett did his best to shake up his formula – he cut a near-psychedelic soul tune, "Engine No. 9," with future Philly soul architects Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff; he helped bring Bobby Womack back into the music business by covering his "I'm in Love" and "I'm a Midnight Mover"; and he made some unpredictable cover choices in the Beatles' "Hey Jude," the Archies' bubblegum tune "Sugar Sugar," and Free's "Fire and Water."