With Clarence’s guidance she honed her performing skills and eventually started recording at Rick Hall’s FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The results are evident here in 26 tracks, released on Capitol Records, full of funky southern soulfulness. They include eight singles (A& B sides) including ‘I’d Rather Be An Old Man’s Sweetheart (Than A Young Man’s Fool)’,’ I’m Just A Prisoner (Of Your Good Lovin’)’, ‘Sweet Feeling’ and ‘Stand By Your Man’. She also does a stirring version of ‘That’s How Strong My Love Is’ to compare with Otis and O.V. Wright – Her original distinctive voice once heard is not forgotten. 
Mitty Lene Collier (born 21 June 1941) Mitty Collier was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the seventh child of Rufus and Gertrude Collier, and attended Western-Olin High School, Alabama A & M College and Miles College where she majored in English. She began singing in church as a teenager, and toured with gospel groups, the Hayes Ensemble and the Lloyd Reese Singers, before starting to sing rhythm and blues in local clubs to help subsidize her college education. In 1959, while visiting Chicago, she entered DJ Al Benson's talent show at the Regal Theater, winning for six straight weeks and gaining her a slot on a bill with B. B. King and Etta James as a prize. This brought her to the attention of Ralph Bass of Chess Records, who offered her a recording contract. 
Johnny Taylor's "Part Time Love". It reached # 20 on the Billboard R&B chart, and was followed up with "I Had A Talk With My Man", a secularized version of James Cleveland's gospel song "I Had A Talk With God Last Night". The orchestrated ballad reached # 41 on the 
Billboard Hot 100 and # 3 on the Cash Box R&B chart, and became her best known song, later being covered by Dusty Springfield and Shirley Brown among others. Her next record, "No Faith, No Love", was also a reworking of a James Cleveland song, and reached # 29 on the Billboard R&B chart and # 91 on the pop chart. She released an album, Shades Of A Genius, in 1965. Her last hit, in 1966, was "Sharing You" (# 10 on the R&B chart, # 97 pop). She left Chess in 1968 after recording a single, a new version of "Gotta Get Away From It All" recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals with producer Rick Hall. She recorded five further singles and an album with William Bell's Peachtree label in Atlanta, Georgia. However, in 1971 she developed polyps on her vocal cords, losing her singing voice, and gave up her secular music career.
"When a Man Loves a Woman" was Sledge's first song recorded under the contract, and was released in March 1966. The song's inspiration came when Sledge's girlfriend left him for a modeling career after he was laid off from construction job in late 1965. Because bassist Calvin Lewis and organist Andrew Wright helped him with the song, he gave all the songwriting credits to them. It reached #1 in the U.S. and went on to become an international hit. "When A Man Loves A Woman" was a hit twice in the UK, reaching #6 in 1966 and, on reissue, peaked at #2 in 1987. The song was also the first gold record released by Atlantic Records. The soul anthem became the cornerstone of Sledge's career, and was followed by "Warm and Tender Love" (Covered by UK songstress Elkie Brooks in 1981), "It Tears Me Up", "Take Time to Know Her" (his second biggest U.S. hit, reaching #11 and written by Steve Davis), "Love Me Tender", and "Cover Me".
In 1994, Saul Davis and Barry Goldberg produced his new album, Blue Night, for Philippe Le Bras' Sky Ranch label and Virgin Records. It featured Bobby Womack, Steve Cropper, and Mick Taylor among others. Blue Night received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album, Vocal or Instrumental, and in 1996 it won the W.C. Handy Award for best soul or blues album.
Sledge was an inaugural Rhythm and Blues Foundation Pioneer Award honoree in 1989. He won the W.C. Handy Blues Awards in 1996 for best Soul/Blues album of the year with his record Blue Night. In 2005, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Kirkland was born in Jamaica to a mother, aged 11 (Kirkland was raised believing his mother was his sister), and first heard the blues from "field hollers", and raised in Dothan, Alabama until 1935, when he stowed away in the Sugar Girls Medicine Show tent truck and left town. Blind Blake was the one who influenced him the most in those early days. He was placed on the chorus line with "Diamond Tooth Mary" McLean. When the show closed a year later, he was in Dunkirk, Indiana where he briefly returned to school.
He joined the United States Army during World War II. It was racism in the military, he said, that led him to seek out the devil. After his discharge Kirkland traveled to Detroit where his mother had relocated. After a days work at the Ford Rouge Plant, Kirkland played his guitar at house parties, and there he met John Lee Hooker. Kirkland, a frequent second guitarist in recordings from 1949-1962. "It was difficult playin' behind Hooker but I had a good ear and was able to move in behind him on anything he did."
Kirkland became Hooker's road manager and the two traveled from Detroit to the Deep South on many tours, the last being in 1962 when Hooker abandoned Kirkland to go overseas. Kirkland found his way to Macon, Georgia and began performing with Otis Redding as his guitarist and band leader. As Eddie Kirk, he released "The Hawg" as a single on Volt Records in 1963. The record was overshadowed by Rufus Thomas's recordings, and Kirkland, discouraged by the music industry and his own lack of education to change the situation, turned to his other skill and sought work as an auto mechanic to earn a living for his growing family.
The 1990s brought Randy Labbe as manager, booking agent and on his own record label, Deluge, recorded Kirkland. Three albums were produced during this Maine period, one live, one with a guest appearance from Hooker and one containing a duet with Christine Ohlman. By 2000, Kirkland was on his own again, always doing his own driving to concerts in his Ford County Squires, crossing the country several times a year. Labeled now as the Road Warrior, "A thickset, powerful man in the waistcoat and pants of a pin strip suit; red shirt, medallion, shades and a black leather cap over a bandanna, his heavy leather overcoat slung over his arm,.... he's already a Road Warrior par excellence."
A documentary short entitled PICK UP THE PIECES was made about a year in Eddie's life (2010) and it could be viewed on youtube.com up until Eddie's death when the family asked that it be removed. It followed Eddie's struggles as an uneducated African American trying to make it as a Blues musician and it chronicled his hard life that included taking three lives in self-defense, his stint in the armed forces resulting in an unfair discharge, his struggles with poverty, his many children ( he claimed 73), and his love of music.
This electric blues act with a soul bent recorded for Jewel Records, among other labels. Roman Carter (lead vocals, bass), Albert Carter (guitar), and Jerry Carter (vocals, piano) came from Garland, AL, and began recording in 1964 for producer/songwriter Duke Coleman's local label. Stan Lewis' Jewel Records licensed a pair of their singles, of which "Southern Country Boy" got to number 21 on the R&B charts nationally. They never cut an album, but before splitting up in 1967 (when Albert and Jerry Carter were said to have been drafted) the trio recorded more than a dozen single sides, which have since been collected on several compilations. Lead singer Roman Carter, who also cut solo singles for Jewel, endured as a solo performer over the next 40 years and was given an award as Best Male Blues Vocalist at the Fifth Annual Real Blues Awards, sponsored by Real Blues magazine in 1999. Several years later, Carter teamed up with veteran producer/composer Tom Rothrock (who launched Beck's career during the previous decade) to issue the full-length Never Slow Down in November 2007. 
Have you ever seen a self professed 'fat old white guy' with a big grey beard look like a 5 year old on Christmas? That was Cliff when Kent finally came up with volume 2 of the Clarence Carter singles. I had listened to tales of Carter's version of Sixty Minute Man more than once in the previous year and it was guaranteed to be on this set (it is). Not every volume 2 is worthy as we all know, but this one stands up to the high standards established by volume 1. "The second volume of Clarence Carter’s Fame singles opens with his biggest worldwide hit. A cover of a Chairman Of The Board album track, ‘Patches’ is a song that could be considered a corny attempt to capture the heartstrings. In fact Clarence initially refused to record it. He regarded a song about rural poverty as a slight upon his people, while producer Rick Hall thought it could apply equally to black and white Americans. Hall won, and the record climbed into the Top 10 of the pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic.
The first part of this compilation sees the search for another hit of similar magnitude lead Clarence further away from his black southern audience. Over the previous four years he had progressed from a promising newcomer with gritty masterpieces such as ‘Tell Daddy’ and ‘Looking For A Fox’ to a million-selling hit-maker with ‘Slip Away’ and ‘Too Weak To Fight’, all cut for Fame and released on Atlantic Records. A string of Top 10 R&B hits made him one ofAtlantic’s most successful soul artists.
Yup, the same cover with a different title - this set too is 18 tracks and a bit different from the actual pictured LP but it does include the title track and most of that record, the rest is on part one.
The fun stuff in this blogging are the 'discoveries' that you manage to pull on yourself and your readers. Over the months here Unkie Cliff and I have both offered up some of these - Billy Wright, Eldridge Holmes, Charles Brimmer, and Shine Robinson are a few examples. The other day Cliff mentioned Ray Agee as someone he had read about and sought for years and he put a 12 track album on one of the flash drives that we pass back and forth. As it turned out, I already had that album and some 25 more tracks that I'd never listened to. Once I got started listening, it became clear this guy was special and I'd soon found even more tracks and so had Cliff. Our current count is 59 tracks but that doesn't mean they are all killer. I've distilled them to a two part compilation of 36 tracks, the two volumes are my own selections from those 59. I've used these covers and album titles because they suited my purpose and the title track was included on each, not because the groupings correspond to any published album. This first volume contains 18 tracks recorded between 1956 and 1965. 
A family gospel quartet was young Agee's first music, but he was recording blues by '52 so it is likely he had begun singing secular music at least a couple years prior. Agee first recorded at Aladdin in 1952, but he rarely managed more than a couple singles at any label over the first decade of his career. In the 60's he had a couple larger blocks of recordings at Celeste Records and later Krafton Records. It does not appear that he recorded beyond 1975: he is reported to have died around 1992, but according to our resident genealogist Cliff, there is no death record filed and he could easily still be alive.
Clarence Carter
Now I surely don't want anyone to think that my historic Blues piano stuff was anywhere near over so I'm going to slip this one into our little August Soul festival.
Davenport's career began in the 1920s when he joined Banhoof's Traveling Carnival, a medicine show. His first fame came as accompanist to blues musicians Dora Carr and Ivy Smith. Davenport and Carr performed as a Vaudeville act as Davenport & Co. He also performed with Tampa Red. Davenport recorded for many record labels, and was a talent scout and artist for Vocalion Records. Davenport suffered a stroke in the early 1930s and lost movement in his hands. He was washing dishes when he was found by the jazz pianist Art Hodes in 1938. Hodes assisted in his rehabilitation and helped him find new recording contracts.
Davenport claimed to have been the composer of "Mama Don't Allow It". He also said he had written the Louis Armstrong hit "I'll be Glad When You're Dead (You Rascal You)", but sold the rights and credit to others.
If you do any reading about the history of Fame studios and Muscle Shoals, you will find numerous references to Dan Penn's legendary demos that often left the stars who were given those demos to learn the songs, shaking their heads in wonder. More than once the comment was heard "Why the hell do you need someone else to sing this? This version is terrific!"; then someone would point out the skinny blond kid over in the corner with his guitar and say "Yeah, but it's him." The idea that maybe they might have a talent who could have been a superstar somehow never seemed to occur to anyone, including apparently Penn himself. 
You would think that one unknown white soul genius in a tiny group of musicians would be plenty but when writer/guitarist Dan Penn left the Muscle Shoals Sound he was soon replaced by another jaw dropping talent named Eddie Hinton. These too are primarily unreleased song demos that will have you shaking your head in wonder. So much talent! No wonder that Duane Allman tried to poach him for the Allman Brothers Band (I assume instead of Dickie Betts?); his vocals and guitar would have made them even more epic!
I'm going to dedicate this post to Everette and Tyrone.