So in the end (at midnight!) the hire car turned up and I went to CZ and worked and came back and.... that was nearly a week ago now and I have been neglecting you. Truth is I haven’t felt like blogging this week. Six days away, including a working weekend, left me needing to catch up on other things and, well, just put my feet up too. (On top of that I think a bit of writer’s block has set in again).
Some advance warning too that posts may continue to be a bit quiet here for the next week or two. This is due to the impending reorganisation of the room that is home to my blogging activities. The reorganisation includes re-siting the hi-fi, and retiring the desktop PC for a new laptop that should arrive in the next few days. This will also require the introduction of new gizmo to connect the laptop to the hi-fi, and you know those sort of things often turn out to be much more difficult to achieve than they should be. With this in mind I thought I had better put up a couple of tracks today to keep things going.
Erma Franklin, elder sister to Aretha and Carolyn, was a great singer in her own right. Too often given the wrong material or standards to cover, she also did not seem to be blessed with the greatest of good fortune in her recording career which was a bit of a stop start affair throughout the Sixties and didn’t last into the Seventies. In the end she wasn’t dealt a good hand healthwise either, and she sadly succumbed to throat cancer in 2002.
Ermas’s greatest work was released on the Shout label in 1967 and she also had some strong sides released on Brunswick in 1969.
“Open Up Your Soul” was the follow up to her most well know song “Piece Of My Heart” and is a wonderful slab of uplifting churchy soul.
In 1969 she scored another Top 50 R&B hit on Brunswick with “Gotta Find Me A Lover”. The B side of this release - “Change My Thoughts From You” - was every bit as good as the A side, if not better, and should be better known on the dancefloors.
A top drawer soul voice that left a shockingly small back catalogue.
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