Mr. C:

Lost Soul was originally a series of albums I put together at CBS Records in the “80s that cobbled together truly inspired CBS label singles that sadly missed their commercial mark. The Lost Soul concept seemed to fit the final piece of the SWEET SOUL MUSIC discography.

Looking at this list almost thirty years later, the song selection still seems on the money. And if CD reissues and YouTube have made them readily available, the navigation compass remains true to the spirit of intent. Lost Soul stands as a sturdy and lovingly assembled tribute to great voices from the shadows.

For this edition– a special bonus cut!

"Believe in Me Baby Pt.1 +2” (Jesse James/20th Century Fox) Reworked Little Milton cover to an appreciative audience with an emotional sermon on “the fast life and things like that.” A 6 minute charging soul drama that ends at peak crescendo. Showtime.

Mr. G:

Joe’s right. It was so great working on Sweet Soul Music and getting these mix tapes in the mail – one after another, close to 40 in all. It was the basis not just for a book but for a lifelong dialogue, one that pre-dated Sweet Soul Music and has never really stopped.

Listening to this mix today – which was never actually a tape, more like an ideal – reminds me once again of the richness and diversity of the music.

Now don’t forget: you can still see Otis Clay, a 2013 Blues Hall of Fame inductee, who, like Mavis Staples, continues to perform with undiminished fervor, each of them as emotionally compelling (wait’ll you hear Mavis’ new Jeff Tweedy-produced album) as they ever were. And if you like Jackie Moore’s beautifully controlled version of Paul Kelly’s “Personally” (co-produced by William Bell), check out Kelly’s own “folk soul” album on Bullseye, Gonna Stick and Stay, from 1993, or his great Warner Archives collection, The Best of Paul Kelly, with all but one song on both albums written by Kelly himself.

There’s a Sam Cooke component here that I was not fully aware of at the time. I knew that Arthur Conley’s “Let’s Go Steady,” which stands as an explicit tribute to Sam, was written by J.W. Alexander, Sam’s business partner, mentor, and friend. But I’m sure I didn’t know that Bobby Womack’s striking “What Is This?” was produced by Fred Smith, a Kags songwriter and SAR employee (Sam and J.W.’s publishing company and record label respectively), who had great success on his own as songwriter and producer (the Olympics’ “Western Movies” was just one of his many hits, and he worked with Bill Cosby’ for years), and was the owner of Keymen the label on which Bobby’s single appeared.

Maybe what stands out most of all for me, though, is Little Richard’s epic “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got (But It’s Got Me).” As Joe wrote on the final page of the book, it is “arguably the greatest soul ballad of all time. The Mt Rushmore of soul.” And it is. I can remember seeing Richard with Jimi Hendrix on guitar at the Donnelly Theater in Boston in May of 1965 around the time he recorded the song. (I ushered the show!) He didn’t sing “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got” that night. His showstopper was “Shake a Hand,” on which he left the mike and came to the edge of the stage, projecting his voice effortlessly without amplification and imploring the audience to join him. Which, without hesitating for a second, they very soulfully did.

I remember, too, buying that great Don Covay composition in its various Vee Jay versions (it came in two parts, and different lengths, for some reason, on different pressings). I bought it at Skippy White’s Mass Records: Home of the Blues, where I bought just about every soul record that I own, including Jesse James’ gently insistent “Believe in Me Baby” and Aretha’s first Atlantic album, I Never Loved Man the Way I Love You, the night it came out. That’s where Joe got much of his collection, too – but Joe went me one better. I just brought my Paperback Booksmith paycheck to Skippy. Joe went to work for him after graduating from college – and I’m sure it was the best postgraduate course there ever was.

Quinton Claunch & Roosevelt Jamison August 2012

I’m not sure exactly how I first met Roosevelt.

Probably it was through Quinton Claunch. It was 1981 or 1982. I had started working on Sweet Soul Music, and Memphis – and James Carr, and Goldwax Records, and Otis Redding – were all, of course a big part of the picture. Quinton was co-founder and co-owner of Goldwax, whose biggest star, and probably greatest talent, was James Carr. But James was going through a period of trials and tribulations during which he was virtually incommunicado, and Roosevelt, who had originally brought him to Goldwax, was pretty much his only lifeline to the world. Roosevelt had also written “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” recorded initially by another of his discoveries, and another soul singer of incomparable talent, O.V. Wright, and then, in somewhat circuitous fashion, by Otis Redding in the version that the Rolling Stones picked up and made known to a whole other world on Out of Our Heads.

It doesn’t really matter. The point is, I met Roosevelt, who was working at the University of Tennessee’s Interstate Blood Bank at the time (only one of two or three full-time jobs he was working simultaneously), and once he heard what I was doing, Roosevelt took it upon himself to be my guide.

I don’t know where he found the time – I don’t know where he found the generosity of spirit. But that was Roosevelt – it was his mark in life as well as in music. He seemed to possess an empathy gene, a need to be of service that carried over into every aspect of his life. He was a songwriter primarily, definitely not a singer (his friends told him “to stick to the other end of the business,” he always said ruefully), and with the exception of “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” I’m not sure he ever really profited from the music business – and then only to a limited degree. He had discovered both O.V. Wright and James Carr when they were singing in the same gospel group, the Harmony Echoes, one of a number of quartets that he would rehearse in the back of the blood bank on the corner of Beale and Fourth in the early 1960s. His dream was to bring their talent to the attention of the world (“O God, what is it that Thou has for me to do?” he wrote at the time, seeking inspiration) – and he succeeded. But when I met him fifteen or sixteen years later, O.V. had just died, a victim of drugs at the age of forty-one, and James, two years younger, had himself descended into a fog of drugs and depression.

We started going around. Or, rather, Roosevelt started taking me around – that’s really the point of this story – to a host of his friends who were in large part, like Roosevelt himself, “the story behind the story,” fellow spirits of abundant but insufficiently heralded talent, who looked at me a little like, What are you doing here, but then, since I was vouched for by Roosevelt, never hesitated to welcome me into their homes. I met O.V.’s brother, Eddie Lewis, who Roosevelt assured me sang just like O.V. We went to see the great songwriter and soul singer George Jackson (some of his better-known compositions are Otis Clay’s “Trying to Live My Life Without You,” Z.Z. Hill’s “Down Home Blues,” and Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll,” not to mention the Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple”). And, of course, Roosevelt expended a great deal of time and energy on getting me together with James Carr. There were numerous missed appointments, but finally we picked up James at his sister’s and, after driving around a little, finally settled on a little restaurant in South Memphis, where we sat uncomfortably under the harsh fluorescent light.

James was having trouble just staying awake, expelling his breath loudly from time to time and largely unresponsive to Roosevelt’s promptings. “This gentleman can do a lot for you, sir,” Roosevelt said. “Do you understand where I’m coming from?” But James simply couldn’t. “Aren’t we friends?” Roosevelt tried desperately. “Sometimes,” said James, not really meaning anything by it. “You know,” said Roosevelt, whose dream always remained, to bring the attention of the world to the beauty he saw all around him, “everyone who comes to your concerts loves you. But there are many questions the public would like to ask. Because you’ll go down in history as one of the greatest blues singers of all time.”

There was no truer friend than Roosevelt Jamison. He was the kind of person who couldn’t see a stray dog without needing to feed him – and I always liked to think I was one of his stray dogs. At the book release party for Sweet Soul Music in Memphis, Roosevelt, of course, showed up, and so did his mentor, Dr. L.W. Diggs, the renowned hematologist and pioneer in the study of Sickle Cell anemia, who, defying the state of Tennessee’s laws of segregation, had trained Roosevelt surreptitiously as a medical technologist in the ‘50s, paving the way for him to eventually take over a supervisory position in the University of Tennessee hematology lab. Dr. Diggs was 86 at the time and, as far as I know, no dedicated fan of the music itself. But his granddaughter, who lived in New York, had read an excerpt from my book in the Village Voice that mentioned both Roosevelt and her grandfather, and he showed up for the party dressed like the only distinguished physician in the room.

Roosevelt hadn’t seen him in a while, and he introduced me to Dr. Diggs excitedly (“You remember, I told you about Dr. Diggs!”), and despite an all-star turn out from the music world (Rufus Thomas, Solomon Burke, Sam Phillips, and David Porter, among others), Roosevelt spent most of his time with his one-time mentor and friend, reminiscing enthusiastically about old times.

I saw Roosevelt many times over the years, and it was always renewing. Perhaps most of all because he was someone for whom the dream would never truly be over.