Marcia Griffiths – Here I Am Baby
Marcia Griffiths – Green Grasshopper
Marcia Griffiths – Gypsy Man
Ran into this one at Avalon Vintage in Highland Park, which more or less has taken the place of the store Strictly Grooves which I was raving about last year, only now with lots of 60s/70s clothing and memorabilia. Rodney is still in charge of the records and there’s still tons of seriously deep gems to be had. My collection has been lacking on the Jamaican front since the big sell-off in 2004, so when I saw this record from Marcia Griffiths, released in 1974 on the UK Trojan label, I didn’t need much convincing to pick it up. Price for this and a few other things wasn’t an issue because of some trades I brought in and so I left the store to check the sounds at home. Without thinking about it I put on Side 2 first instead of Side 1 and immediately got floored.
The introduction of “Here I Am Baby” is soooooooo heavy and was instantly recognizable to my ears for a couple of reasons. Back in the early 2000s, the song was one of the many highlights of DJ Sureshot’s Super Status Soundbwoy Reggae Breaks and Beats that got major play on KALX. More recently elements of the song were sampled by Geoff Barrows’ Quakers project on a song called “Soul Power” featuring Dead Prez. My mind hasn’t been quite right for most of the past year, otherwise I’m sure I would have remembered it as soon as I saw the album. Even without my usually sharp sample memory the record gods smiled on me when I got the chance to pick this up, which includes some solid reggae tunes, but it’s the more soulful numbers, like her cover of “Gypsy Woman,” flipped into “Gypsy Man” and “Green Grasshopper, that are the true standouts. Though I won’t be playing a lot of it on the radio show, since Chuck Foster’s Reggae Central is maybe the best Jamaican music show in the country, you’ll see quite a lot more Jamaican music here on the blog this year, though few will be as stunningly funky as this one.
Cheers,
Michael