Greatest Soul Divas (3cd set)

Soul music emerged in the Fifties from the potent mix of black blues and gospel music, both of which have their roots in the spiritual and secular music of slavery. It’s the suffering that makes the best soul music, whether it’s hard work, emotional torment or spiritual crisis. The finest soul singers are those who can express that anguish in song, and all too often women have had the deepest understanding of suffering. Nobody beats a soul diva when it comes to singing your heart out. The greats are all represented in this outstanding collection – Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Mary Wells. Tina Turner’s very first recording is here, ‘A Fool In Love’, on which she was supported by husband Ike’s backing vocalists, the Ikettes. A year later, the Ikettes were having their own hit with ‘I’m Blue’. The Cookies went the other way, recording a few singles in their own name in the mid Fifties before serving as Ray Charles’ legendary backing singers the Raelettes for six years. In the early Sixties the Cookies were doing session work in the Brill Building where songwriting teams like Gerry Goffin and Carole King were turning out hit after hit. Their supporting performance on Little Eva’s Goffin-King nugget ‘The Loco-Motion’ was enough to relaunch their own recording career with another Goffin-King song, ‘Chains’. That was a hit around the same time as Little Eva’s own Goffin-King follow-up, ‘Keep Your Hands Off My Baby’, a song so catchy the Beatles sometimes covered it in live performance. The Ikettes, the Cookies and others in this collection were part of that first, golden age of girl groups. The Shirelles, Crystals, Ronettes and Chiffons all produced classics of soul-pop. But it was Berry Gordy Jr’s Motown record label that really defined the genre. Diana Ross and the Supremes, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Gladys Knight and the Pips – these are the names we most closely associate with the genre today, and the Marvelettes beat them all to give the label its first Number 1 with ‘Please Mr Postman’. Motown, founded in Detroit in 1959, also made stars out of its solo recording artists; Mable John for example was the first signing to its sister label Tamla, and her first and last Tamla releases are included here. But in its early days it was just one of hundreds of small labels supplying the soul market and launching the careers of the first soul divas. Atlantic Records became known as the House That Ruth Built, such was the sales success of its early signing Ruth Brown with hits like ‘(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean’. Wynona Carr, a pioneer who emerged from the gospel tradition, recorded prolifically for the Specialty label. Sugar Pie DeSanto, whose early releases were for Checker, is a raunchy gallon voice in a half-pint body; little wonder the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, chose her as his warm-up act in Harlem’s Apollo Theatre for two years. She still performs today, a force of nature. Both Carr and DeSanto were also prolific songwriters – DeSanto made more money from sheet music than from performing. Ketty Lester, whose ‘Love Letters’ was originally a B-side but became her biggest hit, carved out careers on TV and film. Barbara Lynn was unusual in also being an instrumentalist – she started on piano, but switched to guitar after seeing Elvis. Esther Phillips could take on almost any style of music, and ‘Release Me’ topped the R&B, pop and country charts. But soul music isn’t always about heartaches and hard times. Sometimes it’s an excuse to get away from day-to-day reality. Dance crazes and novelty songs were popular aspects of the soul scene in the early Sixties, and made hits out of releases like Dee Dee Sharp’s ‘Mashed Potato Time’, laid down the day after she duetted with Chubby Checker on his novelty cash-in ‘Slow Twistin’’. Some divas delivered tongue-in-cheek answer songs, songs that replied to other hits of the day, usually by men. Bluesy Etta James’s 1955 single ‘W-O-M-A-N’ was a direct response to Bo Diddley spelling out ‘M-A-N’ in ‘I’m A Man’, his hit of the same year. Carla Thomas, another Atlantic diva, sang ‘I’ll Bring It Home To You’, written by Sam Cooke in reply to his own hit, ‘Bring It On Home To Me’. When she takes to the stage, each of our divas knows that, at least for the duration of her performance, she is in control of her world. She can talk about it with feeling, she can sing about it with passion. She can share it with you because she knows what she’s singing about. And after the show, as Sugar Pie DeSanto would say, she knows she’s ‘Going Back Where I Belong’.