'60s Soul Discoveries

It's tough to say why sonic soft-serves like the Dynamics didn't enjoy the success of their Atlantic Records brothers, seeing as their "Ice Cream Song" is a tasty triple-scoop of sweet-cream harmonies, honeyed instrumentation, and delicious double entendre. Or why the gospel-drenched truth of singer O.V. Wright's "A Nickel and a Nail" never got its just due. Or even why soul screamers Lorraine Ellison ("Stay With Me") and Linda Jones ("Hypnotized") aren't superstars today. All we can tell you is, with our '60s Soul Discoveries, a spotlight shines where it should've shined a long time ago.

Searching out soul discoveries doesn't have to mean excavating a whatever-happened-to shouter or uncovering a "sweet Jesus!" rarity. Sometimes it's about discovering something different about someone you already love. Take Aretha Franklin's "A Change is Gonna Come." Beneath her testifying is some serious piano playing: seems she's got as much soul power in her fingers as she does in her pipes. Or how about Sam Cooke's "Baby, Baby, Baby"? This man-done-wrong weeper is the dark-side flipside of hits like "You Send Me."

When we go deep into soul discoveries, we go deep, digging up dusties from big names: Tyrone Davis, a man who knew his way around a lady's heart, drops some cold, hard facts on the fellas with "A Woman Needs to Be Loved," and the Drifters drift off from smooth seas to rocky shores with "Baby What I Mean." We've got rarities from underrated soul sirens, like Louisiana chanteuse Bettye Swann's country-born "Don't You Ever Get Tired (Of Hurting Me)?" And we've got "The Duke of Earl" himself, Gene Chandler, working his top hat-and-walking stick thing all over Curtis Mayfield's "Gonna Be Good Times."

Sure, you know the '60s soul classics, waxed by gods and goddesses of the genre who were fortunate enough to cross over and have "signature songs." But what about the one-hit wonders, the chance encounters, the smash hits that never quite smashed, or even the album cuts by the marquee stars that missed the charts? The world of '60s-soul goodness is so big there are dozens of shoulda-been classics just waiting to be discovered. Naturally, we did our thing — getting busy and discovering them for you, from Stax doo-woppers the Mad Lads to perpetually heartbroken Motown beauty Brenda Holloway, from the Queen of the scene, Aretha Franklin, to the music's one-man force of nature, Bobby Womack.