Various Artists – My Goodness, Yes! Soul Treasures From The Silver Fox Label
My Goodness, Yes! collects twenty of the best singles released on the Nashville-based Silver Fox label. It’s a great portrait of late soul music, and suggests that soul — commonly regarded as the product of specific cities and studios — had by the late 1960s become a free-floating pop style, an amalgam of the approaches taken by performers and producers in Memphis, New Orleans, Detroit and Muscle Shoals.
Started in 1968 by Lelan Rogers and Shelby Singleton, Silver Fox was an offshoot of Singleton’s SSS International label. Though there have been a couple other recent compilations of SSS singles, My Goodness, Yes! is probably the best single-disc collection; at twenty songs, it’s somewhat more stylistically unified than either Sundazed’s Shake What You Brought! or Kent’s Southern Soul Showcase: Cryin’ In The Streets.
The biggest star on the Silver Fox roster was Bettye LaVette, represented here by four songs. An underrated singer whose recent I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise has brought her back into the spotlight, LaVette renders “He Made A Woman Out Of Me” with a combination of delicacy and sexual passion that raises this 1970 R&B hit to classic status. Like all of LaVette’s Silver Fox singles, “He Made A Woman Out Of Me” was recorded in Memphis, and its tough shuffle and gritty guitar make it a worthy companion to anything Aretha Franklin was doing around the same time.
New Orleans singer Robert Parker is represented by a delightful Allen Toussaint song, “You See Me”; its background vocals, buoyant horn arrangement and good-natured lyrics (“I heard a truck horn blowing/Dogs just a-barking”) help define the mostly light tone of this collection. Even when Big Al Downing, on “Cornbread Row”, wishes he were back home in Arkansas, there’s never a feeling of desperation here.
Which means that My Goodness, Yes! might seem slight to students of deep soul. Certainly it presents the style as a mature and received language. There are a few fashionable sitars here, and some stabs at circa-1970 social consciousness (a cover of “Games People Play”). But what makes this collection indispensable is George Perkins & the Silver Stars’s sublime “Cryin’ In The Streets (Part 1)”, perhaps the greatest lament for the Civil Rights movement ever recorded. It’s full of salvation, acceptance and righteous anger, all propelled by rolling drums that promise to move the body and redeem the soul.