Solomon Burke

For those who don't relish in digging up dusty old records as much as I do, Solomon Burke is a soul singer who's been active since the mid-1950s, but never really got hit with limelight quite the way folks like Otis Redding, Al Green, or Marvin Gaye did. I like a lot of what he did in the mid-to-late 1960s, but his new recording for Fat Possum Records, "Don't Give up on Me", is in my opinion perhaps his best - his phrasing and timbre are so expressive and tender - in a way that he was never able to attain early in his career. I know a lot of you might shy away from "soul", fearing the schlocky overproduced sound that seems to exist everywhere on modern R&B radio, but this album sounds every bit like a classic recorded years ago and only just now unearthed.

Links of note:

Solomon Burke at his record label: http://www.fatpossum.com/artists/burke.html

If you'd like, you can email me here: richard@hearingmusic.com.

Oh, and all content on these pages is copyright Richard Lewis.