Robert Palmer’s design eye was a real gift too. I thought his videos were just top notch. He had such a perfect blend of simplicity and mystery in those “Palmer Girls” videos. They didn’t compete with the music, but accompanied it to produce a statement that could be enjoyed over time. He managed to do so much with repetition, limited use of color, and use of contrast. I always looked forward to what he’d be producing next.
Yeah, you’re right, Cran. Here’s some research I should have done before I started shooting off:
http://www.rockonthenet.com/artists-l/annielennox_main.htm
She was born on Christmas Day, 1954.
Just as the Oak Ridge Boys and Statler Brothers are southern gospel gone secular.
It is a great CD. Now if only someone would dig out his old tracks. I don’t think we’d care much what the sound quality were like if we could just get a chance to hear that voice in it’s prime … on all those timeless songs he helped write.
Not at all Jim. I have a soft spot for him too, as I do for Janis Joplin. I just mean that, judged by the standards that their inspirations were aspiring to, people like this don’t even come close. I sometimes think that we should openly recognise a separate category of white soul artists and allow for their misunderstandings of the music they were emulating before judging them. We often do this with early 60’s British R&B (Stones, Animals, Yardbirds etc.) It’s posible to enjoy this music—I do—whilst at the same time acknowledging how poor it usually is, judged by the standards of the people being copied. I think they took American R&B and created a likeable music that was distinctive. Actually, given the huge cultural gulf between ghetto bluesmen and middle class English teenagers and the complete lack of direct contact between them, it’s a minor miracle that the copies sometimes came passably close to the originals. White soul singers have probably suffered because more of them actually did produce good records judged by the standards of the people they were imitating.
I don’t think that judging soul music by two different sets of standards is really a form of Crow Jim discrimination. (Obviously most white folks do judge by standards that mystify black fans and collectors of all ethnicities.) Very often good music starts out as a failed attempt to copy something different and then finds that it has virtues all its own. Apparently proto-reggae (ska, blue beat, rock steady) started out as a failed attempt to copy New Orleans rhythms. Nobody judges it by New Orleans standards.
I’d love to have heard it. Although I can, and often do, sing and play blues with idiomatic accuracy, I rarely try to sing soul. Having a baritone voice doesn’t help; the only consistently good soul baritones like Marvin Junior of the Dells had great voices.
I don’t know about the whole white soul singer thing, but I’m glad Robert left us with “Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley.” He rocked.