Otis took Willie John to Cincinnati’s Syd Nathan. It was then still thought of as rhythm and blues. And back in 1953 when he was discovered by Johnny Otis, no one even called the genre soul music. Little Willie John is one of the fifteen or so greatest soul singers of all time. Singers Johnny Torrence, Dee Hawkins and Rudy Jackson sing with the purest hearts of anyone this side of John Fogerty, someone who, twenty years later, did his own version as well.Īll available on The Early King Sessions. But just try to lay hands on the best, the one by The Jewels. Today it is easy to find copies of the inferior versions. On the white national charts, the Fontaine Sisters did a cleaned up Wonder Bread rendition. Otis Williams and the Charms did the same song with a slightly more commercial (harder driving, softer delivery) arrangement, competition from which prevented The Jewels’ original from receiving its share of airplay.
Rudy Jackson, the final member to join The Jewels (so named because Rudy’s sister said they would metaphorically sparkle), wrote the raw jump blues, “Hearts of Stone,” the one song in their catalogue that intertwines the rhythms of R&B with the passionate crooning of country-based Gospel. The five-member Jewels emerged from mixed backgrounds in Gospel-styled music and disc jockeying on R&B radio stations. King’s lead vocal, the swirl sanctifies a moment of anticipated ecstasy, a moment stretched across the clouds in our eyes. Finally, before the chill of dawn calls us home, we cut one last rug to “This Magic Moment.” Written by the masters of sublime, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, driven by baion bass galore encircling Ben E. “Under the Boardwalk” steals the next dance, pitting Johnny Moore’s lead against the translucent Bert Berns production, one which enlists an orchestra’s worth of percussion in search of a summer evening filled with the natter of crickets. Somewhere between AM and FM we link arms with “On Broadway,” another Leiber and Stoller production, this time with a young Phil Spector on guitar, Rudy Lewis singing lead, and that by-now familiar Latin beat. King, far from his normal range, and the Latin rhythm, with its classical undertones, integrates a perfect duality that only intensifies sorrow. Those disobedient strings added by producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller take rhythm and blues into the Milky Way conflux of soul. Moving the red line up the tuner’s face, “There Goes My Baby” greets us. So we spin the dial and rediscover “Money Honey,” a genuine contender for the honor of best song about the complications, frustrations, and fitful bleedings inherent in a prolonged cash flow problem. When the darkness compels across an unseen ocean whose roar and clap assures its presence, when the solitary sounds of a summer’s night are the clopping march of tall heels on gray sidewalks, when the muffled argot of enriched hormones emerge from art deco shadows, and when the pre-dawn sky’s baffling paradox grins and scowls sheets of oblivious tears-at such times the music of The Drifters is certain to be sneaking up from some crevice in the memory. Early soul music, more than anything that came before it, promised that we could have it all: the bustle and the calm, the excitement and the solitude, poverty and riches, pain and bliss.Īll available on All-Time Greatest Hits. During those extended moments, the city itself provides its own refuge, a place where refugees can stare off into eternity just long enough for the pressure to subside.
As we are drawn to the city as the host of civilization and as it is drawn to us, the pressures that accompany the pleasures of social interaction threaten to consume the consumers. “When this old world starts getting me down/And people are just too much for me to bear,” from the Drifters beatific “Up on the Roof,” is the perfect embodiment of that sensibility. The lyrics, phrased, delicate and deliberate, sang of the vulnerability inherent in the new sophistication. Fast or slow, the best melodies left an impression far beyond their duration. Producers rounded off the rough edges of Mississippi Delta explosions and toned down the ferocity of Chicago enthusiasm while redirecting and compacting all that shaved energy into a lulling, harmonic structure-often accentuated by strings-while pushing the vocals far up front. Soul music of the early 1950s urbanized country blues.
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