My Main Man Willie Hightower
And now for part two of my favorite new soul obscurities. Earlier this year, Damon Albarn’s Astralwerks-affiliated Honest Jon’s label released an eighteen-song collection of Willie Hightower’s late sixties recordings (three brilliant singles and one incredible album), and it’s simply mahvelous, dahling.
I haven’t actually managed to pick up the CD yet, but I did snag the six-track 12” sampler at my favorite local record store. Why the entire record wasn’t issued on vinyl with full artwork and documentation, rather than a skimpy one-third of its tracks and no liner notes, is beyond me. Someday, perhaps. Still, listening to these tracks, one can hardly complain, and the sampler does serve its purpose, I suppose, only whetting my appetite for the full disc.
Alabama’s own Willie Hightower is one of the forgotten men of Southern Soul, but with any justice this collection should vault him back up where he belongs—with the company of Otis Redding and James Carr, in the pantheon of the masters. It’s certainly no accident that, like much of the great Southern Soul playbook, a number of these tracks were recorded by Rick Hall at the legendary Muscle Shoals’ Fame Studios—they certainly stand alongside anything that ever came out of that studio, and that's saying something. Hightower’s debt to Sam Cooke is an obvious one, and he carried his legacy into a new era that Cooke, sadly, was not around to see.
And now, a feast for yer ears:
Willie Hightower – Walk a Mile in My Shoes
Willie Hightower – Back Road Into Town
Pick this up at Amazon , like yesterday. You NEED this in yr life.
N/P Hala Strana – These Villages
I haven’t actually managed to pick up the CD yet, but I did snag the six-track 12” sampler at my favorite local record store. Why the entire record wasn’t issued on vinyl with full artwork and documentation, rather than a skimpy one-third of its tracks and no liner notes, is beyond me. Someday, perhaps. Still, listening to these tracks, one can hardly complain, and the sampler does serve its purpose, I suppose, only whetting my appetite for the full disc.
Alabama’s own Willie Hightower is one of the forgotten men of Southern Soul, but with any justice this collection should vault him back up where he belongs—with the company of Otis Redding and James Carr, in the pantheon of the masters. It’s certainly no accident that, like much of the great Southern Soul playbook, a number of these tracks were recorded by Rick Hall at the legendary Muscle Shoals’ Fame Studios—they certainly stand alongside anything that ever came out of that studio, and that's saying something. Hightower’s debt to Sam Cooke is an obvious one, and he carried his legacy into a new era that Cooke, sadly, was not around to see.
For any lover of soul music, it is absolutely thrilling, almost dreamlike, to hear such striking echoes of Cooke in a deep soul setting; although he was arguably the most important forebear of the southern soul style, Cooke died before the sound of southern soul solidified, and the question of how his talent might have been applied in the idiom has been left hanging for forty years. Hightower’s music, while absolutely his own, gives some hint on how exhilarating a Muscle Shoals Cooke would have been.Unfortunately, as the sixties became the seventies, Willie was a casualty of the shifting sands of musical styles and largely disappeared from sight. Since then, his lone LP and handful of singles have become collector’s items, worth a pretty penny on the market. But now, finally, his work is available to the masses, and supposedly, due to the success of this collection, Hightower has been sought out and is presently at work on a new album, proving that miracles do happen, and that great music does eventually receive its due.
And now, a feast for yer ears:
Pick this up at Amazon , like yesterday. You NEED this in yr life.
N/P Hala Strana – These Villages
posted by Jonathan Wright at 9:01 AM EMAIL POST
