The key recordings of the greatest Southern Soul singer there ever was, with pristine sound, including twelve previously unissued tracks — completely superseding HJ’s own gallant stop-gap.

An ace, urgent version of Joe South’s stinging denunciation.
Easy to imagine Andy and South — who also wrote Walk A Mile In My Shoes — getting on very well together.

Fab Phang chugger. Barrington kills it; grooving dub.

‘***** beautiful, deeply affecting… hard to beat as the year’s most worthwhile reissue’, The Guardian; ‘magnificent… wonderfully austere’, Time Out.

‘Classic Vinyl’ series.

Headlong, fierce, banked rasta drumming fit to discombobulate any kind of system, with sweet, jazzy trombone riding it down, bubbling bass driving it home, and all of it classically dubwise.
Wareika Hill Sounds is the contemporary roots reggae project of Calvin Cameron — mainstay of the original Light Of Saba line-up, the genius behind Lambs Bread Collie — who to this day lives above the headquarters of the Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari, in the Wareika Hill district of Kingston, Jamaica.
In the great pedagogical traditions of the multi-cultural Light Of Saba, and before that Count Ossie, this new recording runs together two JA musical traditions — a kind of drumming (and drum) brought from the Congo, and the island’s variation of calypso — into a thundering grounation charge. As always, the Skatalite’s trombone-playing is majestic: deadly, gripping, deeply cultivated.
The dub is tremendous, too.
‘From the college where you get your musical knowledge, shower on the hour every hour’ — as I-Roy would say, in a Leninist style and fashion — ‘Knowledge Is Power.’

‘Gram Parsons had been orbiting the idea of Cosmic American Music for some time. In ‘68, he’d parted ways with the Byrds and was looking to take air with a new project. “It’s basically a Southern soul group playing country and gospel-oriented music with a steel guitar” he told Melody Maker, on the subject of The Flying Burrito Brothers. So it was that when A&M’s Burrito Brothers debut The Gilded Palace of Sin made it to shelves in February of 1969, early adherents to the Cosmic American gospel were already echoing its message from areas flanking Gram Parsons’ Southern California hills and canyons. There was F.J. McMahon in coastal Santa Barbara, Mistress Mary further inland in Hacienda Heights, and Plain Jane of Albuquerque, New Mexico…’

JF goes to Nashville — a home from home for her song-writing, its odd allure, sex and sorrow lit up by harp and pedal steel, double bass and piano.

‘Most of the sides contained here were recorded in New Orleans or Los Angeles during the late 50s, providing her entire Modern recordings.’ Rocking and raunchy as ever.

Miss Peaches, 1954-9, rocking the hell out with Richard Berry, Lee Allen, Dave Bartholomew and co.

Rare Chess sides.

The 1970 LP — a neglected, heavy-soul classic — with eleven extras, unmissable deep soul like The Love Of My Man, funk like Tighten Up. Watch out, the title-track and come-again Weepers are pretty devastating.

The classic 1967 Cadet LP. Eight of the twelve bonus tracks are from FAME… orphaned monsters like Aretha’s Do Right Woman, I Worship The Ground You Walk On, Almost Persuaded.