Blog: Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

We reach a decade of Covered With Soul mixes with interpretations of songs better known in versions by the Mamas and the Papas, Rolling Stones, Randy Newman, The Righteous Brothers, Brook Benton, Ben E King (or Shirley Bassey), Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, The Shirelles, Frankie Laine, Frankie Valli, Jimmy Cliff, Blood Sweat & Tears, Bob Dylan, Chicken Shack (or the late Etta James), Kris Kristofferson, Gil Scott-Heron, Carpenters, Doobie Brothers, Bread and Abba. Even if you are a casual observer of soul music, you will know at least one voice here among the lesser known singers: Dorothy [...]

Last month I announced the end of the In Memoriam column. The reaction, by comments and messages via email and Facebook, surprised me. I had been under the impression, acquired by the few comments they received and the very average hits recorded, that the feature was only mildly popular (which serves to stress the importance to comment on posts in features you enjoy). The labour required for the In Memoriam feature remains prohibitive, but by cutting out what really took a lot of time – researching and collating the music and pictures – I can still provide a [...]

I posted this piece on November 24 last year. I re-post it now as a tribute to Don Cornelius, who died, apparently by his own hand, at the age of 75 today, February 1. Don Cornelius was the father of my favourite sub-genre of music, early 1970s soul. With this, I salute him. If you say Soul Train , Americans of a certain generation and fans of soul and funk anywhere will think of funky [...]

In this trio of murder sings, we deal with a horse-loving psycho, a mother-loving psycho and a couple of miners for whom three was a crowd. * * * Willie Nelson – The Red-Headed Stranger (1975).mp3 Ah, the follies of the blonde woman! As the song begins, we are told what the "yellow-haired lady" doesn't know: don't mess with the red-headed stranger and, whatever you do, don't try and steal his pony (here we must assume that Nelson [...]

There isn't much I remember specifically about the late summer and autumn of 1980. We holidayed in Czechoslovakia and Austria, I despised school, my granny died, and I read English football magazines to brush up on my English skills. But I recall the vibe of that time, and these songs help conjure it. * * * Kelly Marie - Feels Like I'm In Love.mp3 Here's a great bit of trivia: Feels Like I'm In Love was written by [...]

This compilation is not accompanied by an instalment in the country history, because the next chapter goes with the next mix. And, in some ways, it makes sense that this mix has no history (of course, the timeframe is covered by past articles in the series) because the late 1970s was a time of hiatus. Many of the stalwarts of just a few years earlier ceased having strings of hits, and those artists who had grown out of the Outlaw movement now had their day. In this mix, the likes of Guy Clark, John Anderson, Larry Jon Wilson [...]

We haven't had German curiosities for a while. Well, here are some: Marlene Dietrich singing a folk anthem, Bowie going to Berlin, a Schlager icon rocking out for peace, a short-haired teen doing Be My Baby, Chubby Checker twisten in Deutsch , and a politician getting remixed. * * * Marlene Dietrich – Sag' mir wo die Blumen sind (1962).mp3 The Springfields - Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind (1963).mp3 While Mae West [...]

December's headline death probably is that of the great Cesária Évora , who emerged from the tiny West African island of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony. But as a soul fan, percussion maestro Ralph MacDonald is my headline departure of the month. He wrote some stone-cold classics and appeared on an impressive catalogue of soul and fusion albums, including those released in their heyday by Bill Withers, George Benson, Donny Hathaway, Ashford & Simpson, Brothers Johnson, Margie Joseph, Patti Austin, Grover Washington, Maynard Ferguson, The Crusaders, Michael Franks, Eric Gale, Bob James, Herbie Mann, [...]

1967 model prepares to drive her Camino to wherever the Summer of Love is happening. Here we begin another new five-yearly cycle of intros quizzes, starting with 45 years ago: 1967 (and what a great year for music that was). Next month we'll skip to 1972, then 1977 and so on. 1967 was the year the first edition of Rolling Stone was published, so-called "race riots" broke out in cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, Muhammad Ali is stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing induction into US Army, Dr Christiaan Barnard performs [...]

With Christmas out of the way, and the year almost over, it's time I finally get around to compiling my Top 20 albums of the year of 2011 (in fact, there are 21 entries). Each album is represented on the mix with a song, and each entry has a link to the artist's homepage or other outlet where the album can be ordered from. Because this list is intended not only to show off my impeccable taste, but also to showcase artists, all data files in the mix have been downscaled to 128kbps. This is not really a chart, but [...]

The trouble with acoustic covers of popular songs is that some earnest singer armed with a guitar will slow down Jingle Bells and whisper the lyrics as if they have a deep meaning. I have no principles that compel me to disallow the notion of whispering songstresses, but on this Christmas mix I've tried to keep them to a respectful minimum. Still, we have the doses of yuletide angst which the acoustic genre prescribes to go with the upbeat welcome of the merry season. Don't be alarmed by the inclusion of three tracks called Christmas Song: they are [...]

Seeing as the History of Country series is proving so popular, let us put on a Santa-red Stetson and have a country Christmas. This lot is old-skool: Ernest Tubb riffs (badly) on his 1941 honky tonk classic, Loretta Lynn socks it to it disagreeable Santa, while Brenda Lee aims to lassoo him, yee ha. George Jones goes X-Mas twisting, and Buck Jones provides some serious pathos. And if you had to choose one man to sing Little Drummer Boy, it would have to be Johnny Cash, right? Hey, even horrid old Jingle bloody Bells sounds good here! [...]

We continue on our five-yearly cycle of intros quizzes, revisiting 25 years ago: 1986. It was the year the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, US bombing of Tripoli and the Challenger space shuttle explosion. In South Africa the apartheid regime declared a state of emergency, Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated, Mozambican prrsident Samota Machel died in a plane crash above South Africa, and in the Philippines the tyrant Fernando Marcos was deposed. Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize and the first computer virus, named Brain, starts to spread. As always, twenty intros to hit songs from that [...]

Last year we had two compilations of classic Christmas soul (plus one featuring newer stuff); here is a third volume. It kicks off with a spoken intro by The Jackson 5 . Jermaine is crying – and the manner in which that is established always makes my smile – and he needs yuletide comforting. Wonderful stuff. Towards the middle we get socially conscious. Stevie Wonder , still just 17 years old, hopes for no hunger and no tears, but for peace and equality of man. Then the Harlem Children's Choir , who sound rather older [...]

Everybody knows that Ringo Starr left Rory Storm and The Hurricanes to replace Pete Best in The Beatles. This month, Ringo's replacement in the Hurricanes passed on at the age of 67. As a bandleader, Keef Hartley later played at Woodstock. He died on November 27. It is not very well known that boxing legend Joe Frazier , my favourite fighter of all time, was also a bit of a soul singer. Some of his stuff cashed in on his boxing background; the song featured here is a straight soul number, and it's pretty good. [...]

Thanks in large part to country-influenced acts like The Byrds, The Grateful Dead and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, rock fans were starting to dig the country scene — not Nashville's crooners or John Denver, of course, but the Outlaws, Gram Parsons and some of the old pioneers. Some of California rock's great names had their roots in playing bluegrass; people like Eagles co-founder and Flying Burrito Brother Bernie Leadon, the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and the singer-songwriter J.D. Souther, who wrote for the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt, the Texan "Queen of Rock" who made her start as a country [...]

If you say Soul Train , Americans of a certain generation and fans of soul and funk anywhere will think of funky dancers with big 'fros and hot threads, Don Cornelius' flamboyantly fashionable suits and baritone voice, the animated train, hair care products ads, scrambleboards, awkward audience questions, cool catchphrases and great music. You could bet your last dollar, it was gonna be a stone gas, honey. Soul Train 's cultural impact was tremendous. The first nationally syndicated black music show, it was owned by a black man (presenter Cornelius), staffed mostly by black people, [...]

I've said it before: no other series on this blog is as much fun to put together than the Covered With Soul compilations. And I've yet a few mixes in store. There are have been a couple of pretty radical reworkings of songs; Maxine Weldon 's interpretation of George Gershwin's I'll Build A Stairway To Paradise (best known, perhaps, as Georges Guetary's showstopper in the An American In Paris musical) is one of them. On the other hand, if the version of Spirit In The Sky by The Stovall Sisters has [...]

Last week the Internet magazine Nerve.com invited me, quite out of the blue, to contribute to their fortnightly feature "Five Albums You Should Listen To This Week". It seems Nerve asks only "titans of the mediasphere" to write that column. So here we have confirmation what the loyal reader knew all along: that the halfhearteddude is indeed a titan (remember us!). So, here are Any Major Titan's halfhearted recommendations . I was asked to choose five albums from the country/bluegrass/folk genre. To enforce some discipline on myself, [...]

In past instalments of this series I have been very careful to issue a caveat about the music that I would feature, emphasising that the songs were chosen not because I endorsed them, but because they had the power to transport me back to a particular time or place. This caveat still applies, but it is becoming less necessary than before as the series goes on. This episode features some of my all-time favourite singles, and a few songs which I don't mind hearing again. There is only among these eight songs from which I'd emphatically have to distance myself. [...]