Columbus Soul from WVKO

With the brief flurry of media attention to the 40th anniversary of 1967's Summer of Love, I was in a more nostalgic musical mood than usual in the past couple of months, and spent some time making up a 1967 iPod playlist, which I'll blog about later. I also discovered a wonderful album of old locally-produced soul singles from the late 60's and early 70's. Eccentric Soul: The Capsoul Years, is part of a series of collections of little-known, local R&B records from back in the day. (I use "soul" to refer to R&B music since when I grew up, that's what Billboard magazine called their R&B chart.) These songs were produced in Columbus for the Capsoul label, founded by WVKO DJ Bill Moss (later a political activist and controversial school board member before his untimely death in 2005). As a suburban white kid in the 70's, I got most of my music, soul and otherwise, from the local Top 40 stations, mostly WCOL, but I did occasionally venture down to the far end (1580) of the AM radio dial to listen to VKO, though it never seemed to come in very well.

These songs are a little rough around the edges in both performance and production, but what amazes me is how good they are. A tiny bit of polish on these songs could have led them to be national chart competitors. They're a little bit Motown and a little bit Stax; there's a little pop and a little gospel in the mix. The Four Mints sound like a slightly raggedy Temptations, but their song "Row My Boat" is a lovely mellow ballad that sounds as good as anything that was on 70's AM radio. The same goes for "I Want to be Ready" by Kool Blues. There's a Sam Cooke groove on "You're All I Need to Make It" by Johnson, Hawkins, Tatum & Durr, and Bill Moss himself has an inspirational track called "Sock It to 'Em, Soul Brother," which is basically a series of shout-outs to the "brothers doin' good," like Martin Luther King, Ralph Bunche, and Willy Mays. Most of the 19 tracks here are worth hearing, but the real find is a singer named Marion Black. His deep, bluesy vocal on the minor-key "Who Knows" is a killer; "Go On, Fool" has lyrics that teeter on blues parody ("You had children/Out of wedlock/On the day we met..."; "Come Friday, Saturday and Sunday, you're gone/I had to shop, cook, and clean all alone") but Black's voice makes the song memorable. There is also a fun instrumental called "Hot Grits!" by the fabulously named Elijah and the Ebonites, with Elijah yelling, "Oooo-weee, Hot grits!!" whenever the mood takes him. Sadly, my iTunes version of the album had no digital booklet with liner notes, so I don't know anything about the artists (though there is a press release for the album at Columbus Music History). Sadder still is how short-lived Capsoul was, and that none of these great tunes ever made the national charts.