Monday, December 16, 2024

The Feel It Advent-ure 2024: Door 16


Today's 45 is housed in a plain brown paper sleeve. I love brown sleeves, they are proper vintage and I am happy to believe the record and sleeve have been together since release (early 1969 in this case). The record looks like dead stock to me and has probably been lying around in some warehouse or other since its release. This sleeve now sports a Euclid price sticker that is also month/day stamped. The sticker looks fresh and tells me the record had most probably only been out on the floor for about a week before I added it to small buying pile. (This is in contrast to yesterday's O'Jays 45, which had a date on its sticker that was about a year old at least, possibly multiple years). 

This was Jo Armstead's (or "Joshie" as she was known) only release on Tay-Ster, a New York label. It is a bit of a puzzle as to why she had a release on this label in early 1969 as she continued to have releases on her own Chicago based Giant label into 1970.

I have recently been reading old Record World, Cash Box, and Billboard music industry papers on World Radio History (as you do) where, amazingly, they (or I should say a small army of dedicated submitters) have collated scanned copies - all the pages! - of most of these papers going back decades. Quite a feat. This 45 was listed in the "4 **** Singles Reviews" section in the Feb. 8th 1969 issue of Record World: 

"Jo tells it like it is on this R/Beat number. Gal knows her way around a ditty." 

Short and pithy as they tended to be. In what I consider to be an amazing coincidence the 45 that immediately preceded it in the review section was The Johnny Otis Show's Country Girl, which, of course, I also bought on this trip and featured a few days ago behind Door 12. (I have updated that post to include the record World review).      

Jo Armstead - No Better For Ya  1969   

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