Red hot gospel soul from 1983. Only ever issued as a test white-label; never before released commercially.
Plus some classic early-eighties soul vibes on the flip, as Helen Hollins — from James Cleveland’s Southern California Community Choir— magnificently busts loose Burt Bacharach, strutting resplendently onto the dancefloor with her dad, husband and two daughters Alicia and Francheasca in glorious cahoots.
Lovely spot-glossed sleeve.
Devilishly limited, all three of our Savoy singles.

Heartfelt hymns and songs of praise, deconstructed and rebuilt. Sometimes reverent, sometimes raging, sometimes playful, always spellbinding. ‘Christ Is Not Cute’ runs the Fahey quote on the sleeve. A beauty.

Jazz, soul and rhythm and blues by this pivotal figure, from the LPs Live At The Flamingo, and Sound Venture, with the cream of UK jazzmen. Swinging Soho does Stax, Latin, Stevie, Louis Jordan, Mose, Oscar Brown…

Seven films shot in Mississippi between 1968 and 1975, about the diverse cultural traditions at the roots of the blues.
Black Delta, Parts I and II; Parchman Penitentiary; Give My Poor Heart Ease — Mississippi Delta Bluesmen; I Ain’t Lyin’ — Folktales from Mississippi; Made in Mississippi — Black Folk Art and Crafts; Two Black Churches.

Stokes, Memphis Minnie, Furry Lewis, Gus Cannon and co. 180g, well-pressed.

A survey of Nashboro Records gospel, by Mike McGonigal of the Detroit Gospel Reissue Project.

Primitive choirs, spacious breaks, congas, old-boy rappers impersonating the devil, cast-recordings, thumping bass, and JB copyists — all with a heavy slathering of gospel gravy.

Storming mixtape, stuffed with scorchers, funk to boogie to testifying and congregational. Great, great soul music, however you take it; killingly blended.
Originally released as fifty CDRs in 2010, and still fresh.

Hank Jacobs was an accomplished West coast keyboard player, who smashed it with So Far Away in 1964.
One of his four releases on Alton Scott’s LA-based Call Me label, the slamming Elijah Rockin’ With Soul is a Northern favourite; whilst the more sophisticated, cool, sunroof-down East Side is a Popcorn and Lowrider go-to.

Superb, mid-eighties, soulful gospel, with popping bass and amazing singing; obscure but musically right up there with the Winans, DJ Rogers, Vanessa Bell Armstrong and co, from the same bountiful vintage.

Bumptious sauce recorded for Paramount in 1929 by different lineups including Leroy Carr, Scrapper Blackwell, Tampa Red and Blind Blake, and Bob Robinson on banjo and clarinet. Archetypal Crumb; 180g.

Utterly transfixing and thrilling, this is blues to the limit, a kind of avant-garde primitivism.
‘With an approach that was drawn from the Mississippi modal tradition, where you change chords only when the spirit moves you, variety was never the aim. Intensity was.’
For lyrics, too, Hooker is in the moment, with roughly amplified reflections about despair, sex and booze, rent and dancing; the places and faces of Detroit. The singing is frank and emotional but sly. He never lets up stomping on a wooden pallet, quarter notes with one foot, eighth notes the other.
Returning to the tapes, Ace has got this unmissable music sounding better than ever. Nineteen previously-unavailable alternative takes never drag, but deepen its mesmeric spell.
Truly crucial stuff.