Johnnie Taylor Lifetime: A Retrospective Of Soul, Blues & Gospel 1956-99 CD

Personnel includes: Johnnie Taylor (vocals, guitar); The Highway Q.C.s, The Soul Stirrers (vocals); Steve Cropper, Raymond Jackson, Don Davis, Eddie Hinton, Jimmy Johnson, Bobby Manuel, Dino Zimmerman, Will Macfarlane (guitar); Booker T. Jones (piano, organ); Isaac Hayes (piano); Frederick Knight (keyboards, programming); Bernie Worrell, Marvell Thomas, Barry Beckett, Rudy Robinson, Carson Whitsett, Clayton Ivey, Butch Bonner, (keyboards); Duck Dunn, Bootsy Collins, David Hood, Ray Griffin (bass); Al Jackson, Jr., Roger Hawkins, James Robertson (drums); The Dramatics, Thelma Hopkins (background vocals); The Memphis Horns.
Producers include: Sam Cooke, Don Davis, Steve Cropper, Calvin Carter, Al Jackson, Jr.
Compilation producer: Lee Hildebrand.
Recorded between 1956 and 1999. Includes liner notes by Lee Hildebrand, Don Davis, Wolf Stephenson and Al Bell.
Digitally remastered by Joe Tarantino (Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, California).
Personnel: Johnnie Taylor (guitar); Leroy Crume (vocals, guitar); Charles Richardson, Quanda Brooks, R.B. Robinson, Jesse J. Farley, Lee Richardson, Paul Foster, Richard Gibbs, Spencer Taylor (vocals); Jimmy Johnson , Don Davis , Eddie Hinton, Arthur Armstrong, Bobby Jackson, Leroy Hadley, Raymond Jackson , Steve Cropper, Tommy Tedesco , Will McFarlane, Bobby Manuel, Dino Zimmerman (guitar); Brian Gum, John Frantz, Tim Mika, Bennett Randman, Linda Geidel, Bob McNally, Mickey Davis, Peggy Plucker, Janet Dressler, Claudette Hampton (strings); Sybil Cheesman (flute); Joe Arnold, Edgar Redmond, Andrew Love (saxophone); John Anderson , Wayne Jackson (trumpet); John Ewing (trombone); Gary Armstrong, Harrison Calloway, Dennis Soule, Jim Horn, Ben Cauley, Vinnie Ciesielski, Charles Rose, Harvey Thompson, Ronnie Eades (horns); Booker T. Jones III, Isaac Hayes (piano, organ); Frederick Knight (keyboards, programming, background vocals); Clayton Ivey, Rudy Robinson, Marvell Thomas, Barry Beckett, Bernie Worrell, Carson Whitsett (keyboards); Johnny Soul, Roger Clark (drums, percussion); Earl Palmer , Al Jackson, Jr., Roger Hawkins, James Robertson (drums); Jack Ashford (tambourine); Vickie Lancaster (percussion); Sonya Washington, Angela Walls, LaTonya Youngblood, Leonard Williams, Thomisene Anderson, Catherine Henderson (background vocals).
Liner Note Author: Lee Hildebrand.
Arranger: Rene Hall.
Taylor gets honored with a three-CD box set for this career retrospective. And it truly is a career retrospective: it spans 1956-1999 and includes a good deal of material that he did for other labels before and after his lengthy Stax stint. It's true that you have to be a pretty deep Taylor fan to commit to nearly four hours of his music. It's also true that even if you are a big Taylor fan, you're likely to need some patience to last through some of the average cuts, or his stylistic transition from gospel to soul to disco and retro-soul. Overall, however, it's a fine commemoration of an important if not quite great soul star. The most valuable components of the set are found on disc one, which kicks off with a half-dozen gospel tunes from his stints with the Highway Q.C.'s and the Soul Stirrers in the late '50s, moving into some of his soul sides for Sam Cooke's SAR label in the early '60s. For the remainder of disc one and some of disc two, there are plenty of fine soul-blues cuts from his early days at Stax in the mid-to-late '60s that will be familiar to relatively few listeners, his fine soul-blues-gospel vocal blend resulting in some of his finest work. As time wore on -- even starting in the early '70s -- Taylor's material got duller and more homogenized, though there were always some highlights to perk up your ears. Unsurprisingly, then, like most box sets, this gets less interesting the closer it draws to the finish line, although wisely his late-'70s Columbia era (yes, "Disco Lady" is here) and post-'70s Malaco output is represented by a mere four cuts each. Ultimately, it's a well-doMojo (Publisher) (2/01, p.89) - "...The Philosopher of Soul...The finest of his songs...tell woebegone tales from the hypotenuse of the triangle of love, the emotional geometry in which Taylor specialized....He [has] a powerful feeling ..."