Checking Christmas Crates

Crate Diving in Modern America

As the rush to do what we could have been doing for months gets more hurried and irrational, let’s put in a plug for heading out to your local vinyl emporium and digging through piles of vintage records to find the two or three that will WOW your favorite family member.

And since my daughter Layla is the only other family member in my world with a turntable, this edition of CDIMA will focus on what I found for her.

Keep this news to yourself, please, Matt!

I’ve been reading a new book on the crossover R&B/Pop sounds of 1940s and 50s Nashville. The book is Paula Blackmon’s Night Train to Nashville: The Greatest Untold Story of Music City (Harper Horizon 2023), and focuses on radio station WLAC and its nightly broadcast of then-underground R&B. The station was white-owned and run, and while Black entertainers were featured on the airwaves, if they wanted to visit the DJs and promote their own work, they had to be escorted in so as to assure the building guards that no funny business would occur.

Actually, much funny business did occur, but the likes of BB King, Little Richard, and Della Reese also occurred. As did white DJs like Bill “Hoss” Allen whom many assumed was Black.

What a Wonderful World this could be.

In any case, reading the book put me in mind of finding some vintage Soul for Layla, and maybe even myself. So yesterday on my crate-diving excursion at Cabin Floor Records, I asked Joe, the owner, what he had found recently that I might love. We then started digging together and lo and behold, some treasures ripe for the plucking.

Now some of these I’m keeping, so to not completely spoil the surprise, I won’t state which ones exactly will go under my daughter’s tree. But see if you can guess or maybe give my pre-decisions a nudge.

1. The Best of Sam Cooke (RCA LPM/LSP 2625, 1962) featuring, of course, the biggies “Twistin’ The Night Away,” “Bring It On Home to Me,” “You Send Me,” and “Wonderful World.” I’d say it’s in Very Good condition, VG++ for the record itself, and it cost a measly $12.

2. James Brown & the Famous Flames, Tell Me What You’re Gonna Do (Rumble Records reissue). For $17 you get “Just You and Me, Darling,” “I Love You, Yes I Do,” the title cut, and nine other gems originally released back in 1961.

3. Otis Redding, The Dock of the Bay (Volt S-419, 1968). What could/should I say here? The back cover tells me that someone once sold this record for 50 cents. I would love to know how it traveled: to where? From whom to whom? Where is that 50 cents now? How was it spent? This copy is in Very Good ++ shape and I bought it for $25, which means the cost of living has risen since 1968 or even 1978. And even if that title track had never been recorded, the LP would be worth it for Otis’s cover of “Nobody Knows You (When You’re Down and Out).”

4. Stevie Wonder’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2 (TAMLA T313L, 1971). From the period when I was listening to AM radio nonstop, we get “Heaven Help Us All,” “My Cherie Amour,” “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” “Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday,” and that solid cover of “We Can Work It Out.” And Joe, amazing man that he is, tossed this one in for free.

5. Finally, and in my only non-R&B/Soul purchase, though given who it is and who he’d go on to found/join, this one is in keeping with the others, kin and maybe even kind: The Best of The Animals (MGM SE-4324 “Sounds Great In Stereo,” 1966). A $10 “plays clean” bargain, imho. From “House of The Rising Sun,” to “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” to my fave, “It’s My Life,” and that Sam Cooke cover, “Bring It On Home To Me,” we’ve come full circle and can keep on spinning right round (like a record, baby).

So, let’s see if this holiday season, along with the requisite Xmas music, we can’t also find places by the hearth for some vintage sounds that warmed hearts and changed minds back in the days when crossing over was a decision that sometimes meant life or death.