Jujubee gives me a BUZZ

In the small print on this page (right) I mention the spirit of ‘all back to mine’ meaning that this blog is true to that spirit of sitting down with some friends at home, lifting the lid on the turntable, and sharing some sounds that do it for you and you hope do it for others too. Listening to music is a very personal pleasure but at the same time you sometimes want to shout to the world “I love this, you must hear this”.

“All back to mine” evenings feature more in one’s youth I think and now I’m getting a bit long in the tooth they are certainly a rare event in my life, so this blog is serving as a good alternative method of essentially achieving the same thing. Really just doing a bit of research, putting up these records I love, and maybe getting a little feedback is enough for me. I don’t live for the comments but when they appear I can’t deny it gives me a little buzz. But I hope all of you who do converse from time to time will understand when I tell you that one particular comment I received recently really gave me a big BUZZ and underlined for me that the efforts I put into serving up this little blog affair are worthwhile.

Going all the way back to May 2006 I posted a couple of tracks from Judy White under the title “Southern Soul floats my boat”. Judy released a few singles on Buddah and T-Neck in the late sixties and…. well you can read more about Judy and her more famous father, Josh, in the aforementioned post. If you read the comments on that post you will also see that, a few weeks ago, Judy herself (!) dropped by to say hi and said:

HI Darcy, this is amazing, flattering and TIMELY that we would find one another..black history month!! If you dont know who this is..Its Me Judy White Goard..i am now married for 34 years and have four musically inclined children. 2 girls and 2 boys. Your research is phenomenal and on point..except for a couple of minor things. I was born in 1947 and in that picture is my sister Beverly with my brother and father. After T-Neck i began to travel with a gospel group the patterson singers going overseas for several years. My last singing engagment was in Vegas in 72'. I now sing in my church located in GA and have passed on my singing legacy to my oldest daughter Kelli Goard Ellis. Her album has just been realeased and is entitled KELLI a heart of worship. You are more than welcome to see her myspace page which is.. www.kjpraize.com. I am now teaching and encouraging other young talented musical protigy's . Once again thank you so much and PLEASE keep in touch. My love and thanks to you Ms. Darcy.

Judy may have got my sex wrong, or it may simply have been a slip of the keyboard, but who cares - this comment gave me a big BUZZ. I think I ended my previous post with the words ‘you can have your cake and eat it’. Well getting this comment from Judy is the icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned.

As you can see Judy put me right on a couple of points. At the time of composing the original post I had struggled to find any pictures of Judy but thought I had found one that featured her with her father and brother, but as it turns out it was her elder sister Beverly in the picture.

Anyway Judy’s note prompted me to do another Internet trawl to see if I could find anything more about her, maybe a picture.Two years is a long time in the life of the Internet, in the intervening time from my original post I found that there is now a comprehensive Wiki entry for Judy’s father Josh White. Buried in the links on that page I found the following YouTube clip from a 1967 Swedish TV appearance (that I had touched on in my original post) and featuring Josh and, I believe, Judy!



As you can see in Judy’s note she says keep in touch. Unfortunately other than through this blog I have no means of doing that as I don’t have a contact email address. So Judy (or from your skeletal blogspot do I detect you are also know as Jujubee?), if you should happen to read this: yes I would love to keep in touch. I have gone as far as emailing your daughter to say as much, but I’m not going to press the point as I maybe mistaken as some sort of stalker!

Again, Judy, if you’re reading this I hope you don’t mind but on my original post I have re-uped one of your spine tingling, gospel drenched, slices of Southern Soul.

Parish Notices #4

Life can be dull if it is one great big amalgam of the routine. On the other hand I find it’s a comfort to have some routine in your life, it sort of acts as a rock. (Of course something you do that you enjoy you will tend to do regularly if you can so then it can be classified as a routine – ha! going round in circles now!). Anyway, when a pleasurable routine gets upset I end up feeling a little bit unhinged, uncomfortable, restless. Dapping around the music blogs qualifies as one of my enjoyable routines and it has been upset in recent days leaving me feeling distracted. The musical offerings at DavyH’s The Ghost Of Electricity, my new discovery Derek’s Daily 45, and the Scholar’s Souled On zShare links are now all a closed book (or is that unplugged headphones in this case?). It seems that the file hosting sites (zShare, Mediafire, Badongo) their music files can be found on are now inaccessible by me, and I’m not sure why. Doing some research on this – which has become the major distraction to my routine – has led me to some self-help/experience sharing style forums. I don’t normally inhabit these but have found them to be useful in the past. The problem I find with these forums, though, is that usually half the people don’t really know what they’re talking about and the other half are full blown techies who are undoubtedly on the right track but who I struggle to keep up with. A lot of them also seem bordering paranoid. And their paranoia is rubbing off on me. For example I now know more about: the fact that UK ISPs are being actively encouraged to put a lid on “illegal” downloading; the nasty sounding phorm; and that the ISPs are also finding all sorts of ways to not deliver us their headline download speeds (that has been evident on my connection for a long time now). As well as all that I spent almost all of last weekend ridding my son’s PC of a variety of viruses and spyware, and attempting, unsuccessfully, to configure a friends new wireless router. Soon it won’t be worth turning the computer on.

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In light of some of the above I now feel my practice of hosting music files on my ISP is looking a bit reckless. So from now on I am going to put them elsewhere. The music you will find below is on Filecrunch – let me know if have problems accessing it. I was going to use zShare but of course now I can’t and you may find you can’t access Filecrunch – ho hum.

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I featured the B side of Joni Wilson’s sole, and elusive, Volt 45 here recently and again asked for any information on her or the record. Red Kelly has kindly taken up the case over at Burning Questions. Red’s comment regarding the fact that the “Loser’s Seat” song title was a take off of a Hertz ad from back in the day blew me away! It will be interesting to see what can be unearthed.

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In wishing Candi Staton a happy birthday in my last post I featured a track from her 1974 “Candi” album. I hadn’t played it for years having it logged as being rather tame in comparison to her earlier output. I suspect that lasting impression was something to do with my changing tastes in music at the time I “shelved” it, and then my subsequent temporary loss of interest in music generally. Well it’s time to correct that impression. I’ve played this album a couple of times in the last few days and my early memories of it are now returning - it’s consistently great! Although released on Warner Brothers all the tracks were recorded with Rick Hall’s gang at Fame, and I think represent the last of Candi’s recordings there. I believe the tracks were recorded earlier than 1974 but lay unreleased as Rick Hall was having distribution problems with his Fame label. Candi is on fine form throughout this album.

By way of an apology regarding my somewhat dismissive remark concerning the “Candi” album, and to give the Roman Empress another Candi track to listen to as she has probably listened to “Little Taste Of Love” a 100 times by now, here is another track from “Candi”. The choice was extremely difficult, but I finally plumped for one of the three Phillip Mitchell compositions, it has an intro to die for, and then to top it of course Candi sings! Proof that you can have your cake and eat it.


Candi Staton – Can’t Stop Being Your Fool (mp3) 1974

Sweet Dreams

I don’t often dream, or possibly to be more precise, I suppose, once awake I do not often recall dreams. But every now and then I am left with a dream vividly imprinted in my mind for some minutes, or even hours. So it was recently.

Candi Staton performed a new song for me. In my dreams! Well, yes.

I guess Candi would have been in my thoughts as I mulled over forthcoming posts here. Using this as a seed my sub-conscious, beautifully, made up the rest. The woman in the dream was younger than Candi is now, she was walking along a seafront and then onto a pier wearing a long coat (which, incidentally, was occasionally partially opened by the wind to reveal a rather nice expanse of leg - analyse that dream merchants!). I was not aware of a clear view of her face but the voice singing to me was unmistakably Candi’s. The song was called “Bad Girl” and for an all too brief waking moment I could recall the lyrics, but not for long enough to write them down. The melody, however, stuck with me longer but as I can’t write music I had no possibility to preserve that either. Then real life kicked in, I heard another song on the radio, and the melody also was gone, erased. So it is with dreams.

Casting around on the interweb some time ago I found what appeared to be some orphaned pages on the Fame Records site. One contained what I assume was a complete list of Candi’s recorded material at the hallowed studio. Included were these track names with no record catalog number against them:

ARE YOU JUST BUILDING ME UP
DO RIGHT WOMAN
I GAVE A LITTLE AND LOST A LOT
I'LL BE HERE
JOLENE
LOVIN' THE EASY WAY
ONE MORE HURT
SLIPPING AWAY
WE HAD IT ALL
CAN'T STAND THE PAIN
THAT OLD TIME FEELING
WHERE WERE YOU
SPREAD YOUR LOVE ON ME

Were they ever recorded? A Candi Staton lost album? Are these still in the can somewhere, or like my dream are they now erased and lost forever?

“Feel It” is two years old today. The imaginary birthday cake has two candles, so as I blow them out I will be greedy and make two wishes. The first is for these lost songs to surface (come on Honest Jon’s, or Ace Records maybe, see what you can find in the vaults). The second is for Candi to step out of my dream and make that performance for real.

And now in keeping with tradition here at “Feel It” on the 13th March it’s time to hand best wishes out – Happy Birthday Candi.

Candi Staton – A Little Taste Of Love 1974

(From the 1974 Warner Bros. Album “Candi”. Not available on CD as far as I know but the original album is not that hard to find).

(You can sing to me anytime you like Candi!).

Louisa Marks 10 out of 10

UPDATE: 18/10/2009 - RIP Louisa Mark.


Short and sweet today, and something to suit the Sunday mood.

Lovers Rock as a style of Reggae emerged in the latter half of the 70s and was prominent on the British Reggae scene, especially London. It borrowed heavily from soul music, especially the sweet and smooth Philly arrangements, the laid back feel of Willie Mitchell’s Hi output, and also many of the songs.

It was essentially a romantic and innocent sound and on Reggae’s scales provided a balance to the more confrontational vibe of the, equally prominent at the time, Roots style.

Talking of contrasts the Wiki entry for Lovers Rock made me chuckle. This is currently evidently a fledgling entry and the here you will find somebody’s simple, and I daresay accurate, description of the essentially warm and fuzzy subject of Lovers Rock has run headlong into Wikipedia’s editors cold and complex pursuit of accuracy. An antithesis if ever there was one. If you want a loving and eloquent summary of Lovers Rock you should go here. This is I am assuming the liner notes to Trojan’s Lovers Rock box set. You used to be able to pick these box sets up for a fiver in the shops not so long ago, but I’m not sure how available they are nowadays.

It is now generally thought that Louisa Mark’s “Caught You In A Lie” was the first Lovers Rock record, at least to make a big impression. It was only recently that I realised that this is in fact a cover of a Robert Parker soul original from 1966.

Louisa’s version has been getting a fair few plays on my deck recently. It was, I believe, originally released in 1975 on Safari (of course just before this in true micro-independent Reggae label tradition it may have appeared on another label). In any event this would have just predated the introduction of 12” singles. My copy featured here – on Voyage International – dates from 1979. Being a 12” it has of course a dub version tacked on at the end. It is incorrectly credited to Louisa Marks. So 10 out of 10 for the tune, 0 out of 10 for the spelling!


Louisa Mark – Caught You In A Lie 1975

Parish Notices #3 - and some other numbers

Here at Feel It two milestones are just around the corner. For one this blog is nearly two years old. More of that soon, and if you have been around from the beginning you will know what to expect.

Also, by my reckoning this is post #99. So just to be different I will mark this fact rather than #100. It’s only a number after all. This means you can have a picture of a 99. You can read about this very British ice cream here. No one really knows for sure where the name 99 came from. (One suggestion is that the flake bar was 99mm long. But of course their introduction predated metrication in the UK by seventy years or so. However, putting this together with the fact that many ice cream sellers were Italian and I am now starting to conjure up this image that ice cream vans around the country were in fact Metric infiltrators, insidiously undermining the great Imperial system! I read somewhere else that another possible source of the name came from the fact that the flake bars came in boxes of 99. That’s the most likely theory I think, it sort of adds up – excuse the pun!)

Off the top of my head I can also suggest a couple of other famous British numbers – 10 and 42 – that The 99 can fairly share win place or show with. In the British icon stakes they are all up there with the London Routemaster bus, Marmite….. (drifts off into nostalgic reverie).

I was going to make a case for this being post #99 ½ as my first ever post was a sort of test/precursor/introduction and didn’t feature any music. Then, being clever, I thought I could feature Wilson Pickett singing 99 ½ Won’t Do. Then I found this. The Brown Eyed Handsome Man has beaten me to this idea. I can’t remember reading Rob’s post at the time, but maybe I did and it sort of lodged in my sub-conscious.

So “99 ½ Won’t Do”, er, won’t do! I need to clear memory and think of something else. Stay with me now.

I picked up Claudia Lennear’s album “Phew!” the other day. I had recently been alerted to its existence by the guys over at Lost-In-Tyme (If you scan the comments on that post you will see that I had my anorak on and zipped up tight under the chin when I made mine!). What’s in the grooves of “Phew!”is OK but nothing to get the heart racing, the cover on the other hand…... (drifts off into… phew… that’s private!).

It is said that Claudia inspired David Bowie to write “Lady Grinning Soul” after he met her for the first time, and also that she was the subject of the Rolling Stones “Brown Sugar”. But as far as “Brown Sugar” is concerned the smart money appears to be on Marsha Hunt. Wait a minute – quick, press the equals button – two little ducks - Marsha Hunt’s 22.



Marsha Hunt’s 22 – Oh, No! Not The Beast Day 1973