N.r.hart

They may have looked like a thrown-together cartoon band with their Revolutionary War outfits and various slapstick gimmicks, but Paul Revere & the Raiders were actually a veteran R&B cover band out of the Northwest, and when fame found them working as a house cover band on the teen television show Where the Action Is in the mid-'60s, they were ready to run with the spotlight, and charted several solid singles like "Steppin' Out," "Just Like Me," "Kicks," "Hungry," "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone," and "Good Thing" that were sharp, well sung and played, and full of a kind of sassy, garage punk attitude that eventually rendered the prop uniforms they wore obsolete.

Nina Simone was only 25 years old in 1958 when she entered Beltone Studios in midtown Manhattan for a one-day recording session for her debut album, Little Girl Blue,on Bethlehem Records. The 14 songs she recorded that day reveal just how well developed Simone’s sound — her powerhouse vocals, her classically-trained piano-playing, her inventive, genre-blind arrangements, and her dynamic personality — already was.

The History of Rhythm & Blues Volume Two investigates the transition from race music through sepia to Rhythm & Blues; the growing importance of radio; the rise of the independent record labels, the 45rpm record and the jukebox and looks at the rhythms behind the blues from shuffle and jump through rumba to rock’n’roll and beyond.

Having done complete singles collections on such great 60s singles bands as Jan & Dean, Gary Lewis & the Playboys and Jay & the Americans to rapturous applause from the collector community, we knew which group they were hungry for next it had to be Paul Revere & the Raiders! And, with all due respect to those previous collections, we think this one might the best set yet! Once again, Ed Osborne is your annotator and curator for this triple-disc collection, which features all 62 commercially-released A and B sides the band recorded for Columbia in its various incarnations (as Paul Revere & the Raiders, Paul Revere & the Raiders Featuring Mark Lindsay, the Raiders, etc.), plus their two Special Products tracks Corvair Baby and SS396 and two bonus tracks, commercial jingles for Mattell s Swingy Doll and the Pontiac Judge GTO Breakaway Commercial for GM. As with our previous collections, all singles appear in their original mono taken from original tapes (on the first two discs) and original stereo from original tapes (on the last disc), with invaluable assistance provided by Columbia vault-meister and engineer extaordinaire Bob Irwin. Copious liner notes featuring new, exclusive interviews with Raiders Paul Revere, Mark Lindsay, Phil Fang Volk, Keith Allison, Jim Harpo Valley and manager Roger Hart accompany, festooned with rare photos. It s the definitive collection from one of the great American rock bands, and remember - many of these original single versions have never appeared on CD! 66 tracks!

Former jazz percussionist James Mtume moved into soul and funk in the 1980s, and then changed gears again in the mid- and late '80s. This was one of an album series Mtume called "sophisti-funk" LPs, with a denser, sparser sound than his previous works and devoid of string or horn support. Mtume managed to both get R&B chart hits like "P.O.P." and also make some biting, satirical comments about materialism and commercialism.

This 60th Anniversary 60-CD Deluxe Edition celebrates RCA Victor's signing of Elvis Presley-The King of rock 'n' roll. Features all of the albums Elvis recorded and RCA released in his lifetime: studio, soundtrack, and live. It also includes compilations released that featured unreleased songs or songs new to the LP format.

With few exceptions, greats who established themselves during soul's golden era were not well served by the disco era, when arrangements and material often poorly suited their abilities. Such was the case with the final two albums by Esther Phillips, Here's Esther…Are You Ready (1979) and Good Black Is Hard to Crack (1981), here combined onto one CD with historical liner notes.

This release continues the series of 4-CD sets which comprises selected annual collections of the biggest US country hits of each year, and fills in a gap in the series at the start of the 1960s. This great-value 114-track collection covers the year of 1960, during which time Billboard published a country Top 30 called Hot C&W Sides, and it comprises every record which peaked in the top 25 places in that chart during the year, excluding a few records which are unavailable for copyright reasons.