Search - Joe Simon :: Looking Back: The Best of Joe Simon

Underrated soul singer...incomplete collection of songs

Richard T. Hall | USA | 02/22/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Hard core fans should definitely get the 'Music in my Bones' or 'The Spring Years' collections. But this is a good sampler of Joe Simon's straight-from-the-country, pleading, country-tinged vocal approach. Fave tunes are Teenagers Prayer, Chokin' Kind, and Farther on Down the Road. Joe was in the nasally Al Green/Johnnie Taylor line of church-weaned soul singers; only his voice was deep and mellow, with a more deliberate delivery. Back porch with a glass of ice tea, if you will. He would have made an excellent country music singer if that genre had been more receptive to Black singers back then. Some are critical of the organic, sometimes primitive nature of this sub-genre of soul. But that does make Simon's work any less significant than say, the stripped-down recordings of Delta bluesmen such as Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker."