Tami Lynn – Medley: Wings Upon Your Horn/Love Is Here And Now You’re Gone
Tami Lynn – I’m Gonna Run Away From You
Tami Lynn – Mojo Hanna
Sometimes spending half of your life digging for sounds and obsessing over music is thrilling and inspiring and sometimes it’s incredibly frustrating. My greatest source of frustration is the fact that I have a musical memory that constantly reminds me of some song fragment I heard years and years ago and that I always wanted to track down, but have absolutely no information. One of those memories is being with my Dad at a barbershop in Atlanta and while I was getting my haircut there was a little wall radio playing the local Soul music radio station. Though it’s been maybe 25 years, I can still remember sitting in that chair as a song came on, slower tempo and a woman speaking over the music and going into some of the saddest and most desperate soul singing I’ve ever heard. Tyrone, the barber, mentioning something about the woman, how she lost herself to drugs over some man, but nowadays, all these years later, I don’t know if he meant the artist or he was talking about the song. Needless to say, whenever I run into soul records from the 1970s that feature a female singer doing monologues, I snatch them up, hoping that I’ll be able to check off one of the many musical mysteries that are stuck in my mind.
I’m about 90% sure that this record from New Orleans singer Tami Lynn is not what I heard in that barbershop, but despite that, I extremely happy that I picked up this record, the last record I bought in 2014. The entire first side plays like a concept record, as a woman details the beginning and end of a relationship. I’m not sure if this is the case with all of versions of this record, but at least with mine (which is a white label promo) each of the songs on the first side fades out fully and quickly. It’s only with the first two songs, Tami’s version of a more famous Lynn’s (Country singer Loretta Lynn that is) “Wings Upon Your Horn” and the title track, “Love Is Here And Now You’re Gone,” that I was able to edit them together so that they flow one to the other without any gap. Since I just ran into this record a couple days ago and I’ve been hard at work catching up with all of these posts on the blog, I haven’t been able to investigate if there is a full unedited version of the songs that make up the first side. If not, it’s a real shame, because it’s really exceptional and deep soul.
After all of the pathos of the first side, things pick up sonically, if not thematically, on the second side with a relatively minor but right tasty Northern Soul “hit,” “I’m Gonna Run Away Form You” and a NOLA classic “Mojo Hanna,” previously recorded by a number of others, including Betty Harris and Marvin Gaye. Those tracks seem to have a little bit of that Wardell Quezergue magic in them, though from the credits on the back it’s tough to know who recorded which tracks and where…no matter. Tami Lynn’s album is well deserving of addition into my suddenly quite respectably sized collection (as you’ll see in the year-end all vinyl show, I did A LOT of record therapy in 2014) and well deserving of inclusion in your own.
Cheers,
Michael