Tuesday, April 13, 2010

I instinctively reached out to help the young lady

v/a You Heard It Here First (CD)

Another compilation, this time from Ace Records. It is a collection of first (or early) recordings of tunes made substantially more famous by someone else. I bought it to finally get a recording of the original of 'Tainted Love', here performed by Gloria Jones as a northern soul stomper. A lot of the other tracks fall into the "interesting" category, but one genuinely fascinating track is Mark James' recording of 'Suspicious Minds' – it sounds like a karaoke version of the song, as when Elvis recorded it they took in the same players, backing singers, arrangements and orchestrations.

The record also has the Dick Berry original of 'Louie Louie' and an early version of 'Hey Joe'.

One thing that strikes me about a lot of these songs is that they were not originally recorded by their writers. This means that a lot of the artists here would have made no money whatsoever from the songs they pioneered becoming hits. Oh well, such is life.

An inuit panda production

No comments: