The exact moment the seed was planted to share the joys of the Backbeats series elude me but I remember the Soft Rock Kid™ and I were debating the merits of various multi-disc soul series such as Atlantic Rhythm & Blues 1947-1974, the PIR 40th Anniversary box and a few Rhino sets such as this one. Then I asked him if he'd ever heard of Backbeats, expecting to say he had a few discs from the series. He said he had not but I can tell you for a fact he owns a couple volumes from this 42 disc, extremely affordable anthology now. I wrote abut the first volume in the Backbeats series back on September 25, 2013, and then progressed either numerically or thematically (grouping two or more similar themed discs together) but definitely irregularly through today's disc which is #039 for those of you who have been playing along at home. It is the final disc I have to write about and this is my 25th Backbeats post as I have already written about discs 40-42, the final discs issued in the series which ended in 2013.
Crossover To Soul was "conceived and compiled with love by Sean Hampsey" and has 24 tracks dating from the late Sixties up through the mid-Seventies, including a pair of Columbia sides from Aretha Franklin, recorded a couple of years before she emerged as the Queen Of Soul with Atlantic. Without any doubt, my two favorite tracks on this compilation are Esther Phillips and her brutally graphic "Home Is Where The Hatred Is" (1971) and The Soul Children's gritty love song "Midnight Sunshine" (1975). Unfortunately, the majority of the songs on Crossover To Soul, like many found on the previous volumes in the Backbeats series, are rather obscure and unavailable from Spotify's library of 44,555,503 tracks. The playlist above has just eight songs! Fortunately, the album has been shared in its entirety via the YouTube for your listening pleasure.
In fact, there is a whole mess of Backbeats playlists on the YouTube. Click here to view them. For those of you who have been here through all 25 chapters of my Backbeats story, here's my working list of the series, all stained, saturated and faded, that I used to keep track of which ones I had written about. Of course, I used a funky, purple ink BIC disposable ballpoint pen. The last three volumes yet to be crossed off on the list were covered here today and last month.
No comments:
Post a Comment