Having saved my money for an album, I put it on the spindle, dropped the tonearm and sat on my bed with the cover, reading every word.\u00c2\u00a0 And the more albums I bought, the more networked the players and personalities ended up becoming, to the point where I started buying albums BASED on the credits.<\/p>\n
They say this paradigm is dead.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ll just say it’s been reinvented, and like so much in this twenty first century, it’s BETTER!<\/p>\n
Having written about One EskimO’s "Kandi"<\/a>, I was inundated with e-mail informing me it was based on a sample of Candi Staton’s "He Called Me Baby".\u00c2\u00a0 Check out the original here:<\/p>\n They don’t make them this way anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 Today, you call up the beatmaster du jour, pay for the beats and lay your rap atop it all.\u00c2\u00a0 Whereas you used to go into a studio, in Muscle Shoals, and guys who honed their chops for eons laid down a groove so deep you couldn’t help but getting swallowed up by it.<\/p>\n Yes, Candi Staton’s take came out on Rick Hall’s FAME label, as in FAME Studios.\u00c2\u00a0 You’d have been better off avoiding the Grammys completely and journeying to a smoky bar where people who played for enjoyment as opposed to fame laid down a sound with a pocket so inviting you couldn’t help but fall in, smile and dance.<\/p>\n But it gets better.\u00c2\u00a0 Turns out that Candi’s take wasn’t the original.\u00c2\u00a0 No, the first hit was almost a decade before for Patsy Cline.<\/p>\n A great song, but it makes you realize the genius of the Candi Staton arrangement.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a completely different record, with a very different feel. Patsy’s take is full of remorse, you’re sitting by the Victrola drinking a scotch.\u00c2\u00a0 Whereas Candi’s man is gone, but she’s going to win him back, by being strong and sultry.\u00c2\u00a0 And if he doesn’t come back, GOOD RIDDANCE!\u00c2\u00a0 Because a woman this hot will soon be overrun with suitors.<\/p>\n But it turns out that Candi Staton wasn’t the first to rework "He Called Me Baby" into an R&B number.\u00c2\u00a0 Searching in Spotify I found a late sixties take by Ella Washington.<\/p>\n I don’t even remember listening to this Ella.\u00c2\u00a0 Makes me realize songs that on the surface are out of my genre can win me over, no matter how old they might be, through their sheer emotion, the genius of the players.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, through the aforementioned Spotify, I found a more modern take by one Pat Cooley, who I’d never even heard of previously.<\/p>\n And speaking of Spotify, the Candi Staton take there was completely different from the one on YouTube.\u00c2\u00a0 Almost a demo.\u00c2\u00a0 More like the album rendition before they polished it up for radio.\u00c2\u00a0 You can hear this take by Googling "Candi Staton He Called Me Baby", it’s the one on LaLa that comes up in the results.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like rather than setting up in the studio with pros, a band came over to Candi’s house and worked out the arrangement on their acoustics, adding a bunch of horns later.<\/p>\n And that ultimately brings us to One EskimO’s take:<\/p>\n\n
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