Wilson Pickett the mightiest of the soul singers
Whether it's R&B or rock and roll or folk music or whatever it is, it doesn't get much better.
Wilson Pickett was one of the mightiest of the soul singers if not the mightiest. He was a natural force much the same way that Howlin' Wolf was a natural force. Few equalled or approached his power. This much was evident on his very first single with the Falcons, "I Found A Love," one of the greatest recordings ever with Robert Ward playing this totally crazy guitar figure against Clarence Satchel's insistent humming sax with Eddie Floyd and Mack Rice singing backup. No slouch of a group at all but Pickett dominates the procedings. He was straight from the church but the devil was in his shout. And that was just the beginning. He went on to innumerable top ten hits and it didn't matter whether he recorded in New York, Memphis, Mussel Shoals or Philly, he'd just go right to the top. His hits after "I Found A Love" were a bit tamer but only slightly. He also had the unique talent of taking a song that had already been a hit and making it a huge sometimes even bigger hit all over again, whether it was Lloyd Price's version of "Stagolee" or Chris Kenner's "Land of A Thousand Dances," or Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love."
Picket's hits continued into the early '70s and then he kind of faded off the radio. I saw in the in the late '80s with James Brown at a show where Brown was so crazy and out of control, staying on stage for a half hour after the house lights came up, it kind of erased everything that came before. One of my favorite Pickett songs was "I'm In Love" which had essence of soul lead guitar by Bobby Womack. It's pretty damn close to a perfect soul recording in every way. When I was doing an all night radio show about ten years after it was a hit, one night about 3 in the morning I played it three times in a row. Someone called up and said, "You played the same song three times in a row." I said, "I know." They said why'd you do that? I said, "It's only two minutes long and I wantd to hear it for six." And it's still that way with his best stuff, you can't just hear it once.
So find a copy of "I Found A Love." It's really just a doowop song in a sense, but listen to the way Picket sings the line, "If she leaves me, I think that I would die." And the scream after it. It's hard to sit down and listen to it. But either way it doesn't, whether it's R&B or rock and roll or folk music or whatever it is, it doesn't get much better than that by anyone.
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