Barbara Lynn & Jerry Butler

Chuck Jackson/Maxine Brown

christ thats a hard one.......can't think of a favourite bloke at the moment ....female now thats easy ..the ever gorgeous tammi terrell

Davie

Favourite Male / Female Singer?

Marilyn?

Divine?

Dana International?

Nadia?

Oh, hang on Male/Female SOUL singer...

,,,Not sure i can think of any of them

Godz

Jackie Wilson/Betty Everett

Jackie Wilson (probably) and Patti Austin

Jackie Wilson and Tammi Terrell

Levi Stubs / Betty Lavette

Jackie Wilson (probably) and Patti Austin

link

Chalky would you let us in on where you downloaded the Nurons from? Do tell

Jackie Wilson / Baby Washington

John

Phillip Mitchell/ Betty baker

Or the Girl who was on top and singing(Im coming!) -to your rescue!

Chuck Jackson/Dee Dee Warwick

Benny Troy/Barbara Aklin

Gladys Knight/Otis Redding

Otis Redding / Anita Baker

Once saw rene and renatta at wakefield they were good but........

Bebe and Cece Winnan awesome....... but as for individuals

Jackie wilson / Aretha

Once saw rene and renatta at wakefield they were good  but........

Bebe and Cece Winnan awesome.......  but as for individuals

Jackie wilson / Aretha

link

What do you think of BEBE Winnans- Thankyou- Masters at work mixes

Atlantic Promo- IPlay it in my Spot and it goes down great even though its 90s

Dee Dee Sharp & Ronnie McNeir

Dee Dee Sharp & Ronnie McNeir

link

Jackie Wilson and Aretha Franklin

Marvin Gaye/ Valerie Lamar

non soul wise

Ange Doolittle/Julianne Reagan

Marvin Gaye/ Maxine Brown

Though saying that don't think I've listened to anything by either of these two for ages! Big soft spot for Maxine though as 'Torture' was the first song that anyone actually pointed out to me was Northern Soul

Edited January 24, 200520 yr by rachel

Garland Green/Brenda Holloway

Gladys Knight and of course the one and only Conisborough king of soul 'Tony - Amarillo - Christie'.

You What You What You What You What You What.

Betty Lavette / David Ruffin.

WOOF!

Chalky would you let us in on where you downloaded the Nurons from? Do tell 

link

From the internet

Benny Troy/Barbara Aklin

link

without opening the whole Black / White soul singer debate, Benny Troy is an interesting choice...

Benny in action

Godz

Terry Callier/ Patti Austin

Gladys Knight/Otis Redding

link

======

Aretha/Marvin Gaye

Marvin Jnr (Dells)

Big Maybelle

How I'd love to have heard em duet on "Stay In My corner"

Steve

Barbara Lynn & Jerry Butler

link

Sam Cooke (earliest memory of my ears standing to attention)

Tough decsion on the female but Ill go for Aretha (always subject to change though)

nope to many.

Deon Jackson / Barbara Mcnair

without opening the whole Black / White soul singer debate, Benny Troy is an interesting choice...

Benny in action

Godz

link

Groovy shoes too .........

James Carr & Linda Jones

Couldn't pick between my top 3 male, Jackie, Chuck & Levi.

female I go for Edna Wright (based on Honeycone - If I could fly)

without opening the whole Black / White soul singer debate, Benny Troy is an interesting choice...

Benny in action

Godz

link

Godz

listen to the Eddie Hinton unreleased sessions and it simply ends the debate. there's also interesting anecdotes in the sleeve notes - such as the time Eddie having to join a session to show Womack how to do it.

incidentally,

David Ruffin / Dee Dee Warwick (today)

DEON JACKSON/PATTI AUSTIN

BUT LOTS OF OTHERS

Dee Dee Warwick & Chuck Jackson

Tyrone Davis/Aretha Franklin

What do you think of BEBE Winnans- Thankyou- Masters at work mixes

Atlantic Promo- IPlay it in my Spot and it goes down great even though its 90s

link

Sorry ernie a bit late reading the thread ....Blinding not played it myself but after this I might

Geeeoooordie

Couldn't pick between my top 3 male, Jackie, Chuck & Levi.

female I go for Edna Wright (based on Honeycone - If I could fly)

link

"If I Cant Fly" Fantastic tune that Vinnie! gets loadsa plays round here,

Steve

Couldn't pick between my top 3 male, Jackie, Chuck & Levi.

female I go for Edna Wright (based on Honeycone - If I could fly)

link

"If I Cant Fly" Fantastic tune that Vinnie! gets loadsa plays round here, Another ace track is "The Day I Found Myself" do ya kno that un? cant stop playin both of em at the mo!

Steve

just a bit of fun

Steve Brookstein/Joss Stone

Very hard,

Bobby Womack/ Millie Jackson at the moment

Garv.

Gladys Knight [with 'What good am I?' on 'Feeling Bluesy,' perhaps her finest moment, to my ears?

and

Sam Cooke [Have you heard the 'Live at the Harlem Square Club' album? By the end of your first listen to that LP, he'll have you in the palm of his hand...]

https://clarkkauffman.tripod.com/id37.htm

And I quote [from the above url]:

It's Saturday night, and the Harlem Square Club in North Miami is packed. Only hours earlier the club has appeared to be mired in a permanent state of disarray with tables overturned and the debris of last weekend's festivities in abundant evidence, but now the ashtrays have been cleaned out, the law-wattage colored lights wink brightly, a banner has been hung announcing someone's birthday, and tinsel decorations bravely proclaim the festive mood, transforming the cavernous warehouselike structure, however briefly, into a fairy-tale domain.

This week's headliner, Sam Cooke, has not yet arrived, but the band (a mix of Sam Cooke's regular accompanists guitarist Cliff White and drummer Albert 'June" Gardner along with King Curtis and some local musicians) have changed into their uniforms in the men's room upstairs, and the RCA engineers are set up with eight mikes plugged into a three-track, twelve-position mixer in the little office that overlooks the dance floor. A couple of times assistant engineer Tony Salvatore struggles through the crowd to check a lead or change a mike placement, barely able to find his way in the absence of any illumination except that provided by the cheap colored lights.

At last the headliner arrives in a swirl of activity. changes swiftly into an open-necked shirt, greets the RCA crew with a "Hiya, fellas" and a casual wave, and starts down the stairs -- where he encounters a six-inch scorpion. Not even breaking stride, he stomps on it and makes his way to the stage just as the MC finishes his introduction. "Right now, ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to get ready to introduce the star of our show, the young man you've all been waiting for; Mister Soul! So what d'you say let's all get together and welcome him to the stand with a great big hand? How 'bout it for Sam Cooke."

It's another night on the chitlin circuit.

It's rare that an album can cause us to radically reassess a major artist, particularly one who has been dead for 20 years. This is such an album.

Everyone has his or her own image of Sam Cooke. Hailed with Ray Charles as the father of gospel-based soul music, Cooke has always been perceived as the mellifluous side of the equation: smooth, urbane, possessed of one of the most liltingly graceful and swinging voices in the history of American pop music, the progenitor of "sweet" soul.

He was, says Jerry Wexler, who sought in vain to sign him to the Atlantic label, "the best singer who ever lived, no contest. When I listen to him, I still can't believe the things that he did. It's always fresh and amazing to me; he has control, he could play with his voice like an instrument, his melisma, which was his personal brand -- I mean, nobody else could do it -- everything about him was perfection. A perfect case." His influence on a whole generation of singers -- from Solomon Burke to Wilson Pickett to Bobby Womack, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, Teddy Pendergrass, AI Green and Aretha Franklin, to Rod Stewart and Steve Perry -- has been universally acknowledged. His one previously released live recording, "Sam Cooke at the Copa" (done about a year and a half after the Harlem Square Club date), has stood as a classic of sophisticated soul for over two decades now, and he was certainly among the most popular artists in the world at the time of his death in 1964.

What can this album add to our appreciation of Sam Cooke, then?

It's a different Sam Cooke.

The Sam Cooke who appears on this record, presenting his R& B hits of the last few years to a crowd that knows and loves his music, is not the same Sam Cooke who appeared on the Tonight Show, who presented himself as a kind of urbane "swinger." The Sam Cooke who sang to this club audience made up of working men and women is a harder, grittier version of the Sam Cooke that we have known from his records, a singer closer to the ecstatic gospel music with which he started out, the very entertainer that black audiences could see every night of the week in Charlotte, Roanoke, Raleigh, Baton Rouge, criss-crossing the South with one of Henry Wynn's SuperSonic Attractions package tours, battling it out with Jackie Wilson at clubs like the Harlem Square in nightly Battles of the Blues.

"That's Sam," says Rowena Harris, veteran black music promotion person who first heard Sam with the Soul Stirrers in her native Birmingham, Alabama. "That's the real Sam Cooke. That's what he was like."

"When he was really in his bag," says J.W. Alexander, Cooke's long-time friend and associate, "you know, when he was really having fun, he could work, he could like drive the women into a frenzy. It was almost like a sex act, like he was beating up on them to get an orgasm."

That is what you get on this record, too, an audience that is as frenzied a part of the show as the show itself, a sense on the part of the entertainer that he can do what he wants with them, that he is home free.

The first set, a "teen-age matinee," serves as a sound check, giving the band a chance to acclimate itself and the engineers one last opportunity to get their mike placement right. By the time the second set starts they wouldn't be able to change anything if they wanted to, because the club is jammed to more than its 2,000 capacity, the floor so crowded around the bandstand you can no longer squeeze your way through.

The program is identical each set. All of the songs are familiar, none dating back more than a couple of years with the exception of "You Send Me," a No.1 pop hit in 1957, and the familiar pop standard, "(1 Love you] For Sentimental Reasons, " which Cooke also recorded for Keen before signing with RCA.

At the same time, none of the songs bear more than a passing resemblance to the antiseptic treatment they have gotten in the hit versions. "You Send Me," for example, perhaps Cooke's most evanescent celebration of romantic love on record, is transformed here into a white-hot interlude of almost savage intensity that serves as an intro to "Bring It On Home to Me," one of his most explicitly gospel-derived numbers. The segment from "You Send Me" on is, in fact, the conclusion to the 15-minute set that Sam presents on the package shows, a sharp flickering of feeling in which perfect musicality is sacrificed to a less-controlled sensibility, in which the voice is frayed but the emotion true.

By the third set aII pretense of subtlety is lost, the mask of the genial host is abandoned for the chuckle of complicity, and there is something irremediably nasty in it al" something evil, something soul-stirring, something beautiful. It is as Ray Charles says: "When I do a song, I must be able to make it stink in my own way." Except for the lyrics, this is a performance that could have been lifted from a Soul Stirrers show, when Sam Cooke was the No. 1 attraction in gospel music.

Sam Cooke was born without the "e" in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1931 and grew up in Chicago, singing gospel with the Highway QCs, a kind of junior division of the Soul Stirrers, the most celebrated gospel quartet of the day. That was how J. W. Alexander, 30-year-old tenor singer and manager of the Pilgrim Travelers, a group almost equally renowned, first laid eyes on Cooke at the age of 15 or 16.

"He didn't really have the delivery," says Alexander, a dignified, well-spoken man with a shock of white hair and a warm infectious charm of his own. "People just liked the guy. I thought to myself, 'This guy's a jewel.'"

Art Rupe, President of Specialty Records (to which the Soul Stirrers were signed), remembered first meeting the teen-age singer after Stirrers lead vocalist (and Cooke's chief stylistic influence) R.H. Harris quit the group in December of 1950. "Sam was just a boy when he came here with manager Roy Crain; they were afraid I wouldn't accept him because we were accustomed to Rebert Harris. We took a chance and he made a hit right away."

Despite a certain stiffness at the beginning, Cooke soon demonstrated his special charisma and rapidly took on a kind of matinee-idol status within the world of gospel. Disarmingly handsome, almost breathtakingly at ease with himself and his charm, he possessed the rare ability to suggest swinging without effort, passion without strain, a sense of clarity and simplicity that gave him a direct line to his audience while preserving his star insouciance.

By 1955-1956 his records with the Soul Stirrers had achieved a unique limpidity and grace, and indeed along with this album and a handful of the pop sides they continue to stand as the essential Sam Cooke, the definition of feeling that soul is supposed to be all about. When, after the success of Ray Charles, all kinds of singers began crossing over from gospel to pop, translating the old gospel standards, as Charles had done, into unashamedly secular settings, Cooke was torn, put out one record under the pseudonym of Dale Cook, and eventually declared himself a pop singer. His first successful release on the little Keen label (produced by Bumps Blackwell) was "You Send Me."

He had hits over the years both with standards and, more often, with original compositions that conformed to his own definition that "a song should have a lilting melody and be easily remembered. I use phrases people say every day. A repetitious phrase helps put the story across."

In late 1959, J. W. persuaded Sam to join him in a publishing company (Kags) and a brand-new record label (SAR), which, as critic Joe McEwen has pointed out, subsequently served as an outlet for a side of him that did not find expression on the RCA material. The Sims Twins, for example, forerunners of Sam and Dave, recorded "That's Where It's At" over a year before Sam did, and -- J. W. says -- with a good deal more success.

Johnnie "Two Voice" Morisette did the same thing with "Meet Me at the Twistin' Place," and Johnnie Taylor cut a beautiful early version of "Rome Wasn't Built in a Day." Overall the sides that were cut for SAR were harsher, more down-to-earth, less "pale" than the more pop-oriented RCA arrangements, despite the presence of much the same personnel and the contributions of long-time arranger Rene Hall on both sets of sessions. It was only during the last two years of his life-with a new manager, Allen Klein, and a renegotiated contract that guaranteed him artistic control-that Cooke began recording some of this material himself. In fact his greatest composition, "A Change Is Gonna Come," a self-proclaimed "civil rights song" originally called "My Brother," was released on an album ("Ain't That Good News") in early 1964 but came out only posthumously as a single-and then with one overly explicit verse excised. His death in December 1964 (he was shot by the night manager of a $3-a-night Hollywood motel) came to symbolize the impossible contradictions between black aspirations and reality. As sordid and senseless as his demise may have looked, it took on a mythology of its own, a mythology in which Sam Cooke was cut down for his independence, for his overweening ambition, for his "uppity" nature. Over 200,000 people viewed his body on display in Chicago and Los Angeles, and at the funeral Ray Charles sang "Angels Keep Watching Over Me."

Removed by 20 years, what do we hear on this record? We hear a voice that's at once both familiar and fresh, but one that's never before been spied in this setting. We see a disguise lifted off, a reality finally acknowledged. This is the real world of Sam Cooke -- and every other black R&B singer, this is the secret of race, this is the unbuttoned reality. When you hear Sam Cooke sing of going to the bus station with a cardboard suitcase in his hand and then ask, "Can you imagine me carrying one of them suitcases?," for the first time we can. We can, and we can't. There's both venomousness and warmth, identification and incredulity in the formulation of the question.

"Let me tell you what I'm doing, baby," the singer teases his audience with warm-hearted good humor as he plays with one of the oldest lines from the blues, then declares, "I'm standing here wondering, will a cotton-picking matchbox hold my clothes!"

Try not singing along with "Bring It On Home to Me." Try not to be swept up by "Nothing Can Change This Love," as in the midst of a Reaganesque picture of romantic love ("You're the apple of my eye / You're cherry pie / You're cake and ice cream"), he declares with an urgency that belies the lyrics, "Let me hear that middle part one more time; Give me that middle part one more time." And in the end put yourself in the same position as the audience at the Harlem Square Club, imagine yourself going out into the Miami night with Sam's final admonition still ringing in your ears: "Keep on having that party. No matter where you're at, keep on having that party."

As soul DJ, The Magnificent Montague, recited to his radio audience at the conclusion of a bantering interview with Cooke on the subjects of soul, survival, philosophy and poetics: "And when the humming's over / And time finds its soul / AlII can say to you, darlings / Sam Cooke's yours / He'll never grow old."

Gene Chandler/Barbara Lynn

Gene Chandler/Barbara Lynn

link

Dont forget the great Pinky and Perky!

Benny Troy/Barbara Aklin

link

odd ever seen picture of benny?you might change your mind?as he done any other good soul tunes?anybody?mabe benny & jos stone.yours backdoor 100club.

Otis Redding/Aretha Franklin. Del x

Linda Jones/Marvin Gaye