Tag: motown

The Show on the Road – Bettye LaVette

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week on The Show On The Road, we feature an intimate conversation with beloved soul and R&B singer, Bettye LaVette.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • SPOTIFY • STITCHER

Covering her remarkable six decades in show-business, we dive deep into LaVette‘s beginnings as a Detroit hit-making teenager during Motown’s heyday (her neighbor was Smokey Robinson), to her early career touring with Otis Redding and James Brown, and the hard times that followed, as a music industry steeped in racist and sexist traditions largely turned its back on her.

While other soulful song stylists like Sharon Jones, Tina Turner, Mavis Staples and others saw their status and popularity rise with time, LaVette remains an underrated, best kept secret on the Americana circuit, with younger listeners just discovering her remarkable work covering anyone and everyone from The Beatles to Neil Young to Billie Holiday.

After nearly dropping out of music, her remarkable comeback began in 2005 with a string of acclaimed records — bringing her from half-filled bars to singing “Blackbird” at The Hollywood Bowl with a 32-piece orchestra, being nominated for five Grammy awards, and being inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.

One thing you’ll notice immediately is her fiery laugh, which punctuates the episode — even when telling the darkest stories, like her early manager getting shot and her 1960s hits being recorded by white artists, leaving her versions largely forgotten. Her Grammy-nominated newest LP Blackbirds, produced by legendary drummer Steve Jordan, shows her at her most vulnerable best.

Photo credit: Mark Seliger

LISTEN: Liz Simmons, “This Old Heart of Mine”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Liz Simmons
Hometown: Brattleboro, Vermont
Song: “This Old Heart of Mine”
Album: Poets
Release Date: March 1, 2021
Label: Morgana Music

In Their Words: “Growing up with musician parents, I was exposed to many different musical styles — Motown being an important one. I loved Diana Ross and the Supremes, and we had the album A’ Go-Go on vinyl and I remember dancing to it as a child in our living room. I started to work up a bluegrass-inspired cover of ‘This Old Heart of Mine’ a couple years ago — I thought the song would work well with a string band treatment, which is provided courtesy of Wes Corbett on banjo, Flynn Cohen on mandolin and guitar, and Corey DiMario on double bass. I arranged the ’60s-style backing vocals as a loving nod to the era as well, provided by ska singer Dunia Best and jazz singer Nicole Zuraitis. Composed by Motown’s songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland alongside Sylvia Moy, it is a great example of classic Motown, and I cover it with the greatest respect.” — Liz Simmons

Photo credit: Sid Ceaser
Graphic design: Jeremy John Parker

How Bettye LaVette Finally Learned to Let The Songs Sound Like Her (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

When Bettye LaVette covered “Your Time to Cry” nearly fifty years ago, she wrung every ounce of hurt and drama from the lyrics, but especially on the chorus. She stretches out the word “time” until it breaks into two syllables, implying a similar emotional break that doesn’t undercut the song’s determination, but shows what cost she has paid for it. It’s a riveting performance, a raw, southern soul slow burner that should have established her as one of the finest R&B voices of the 1970s.

During those same sessions, she also covered Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” and John Prine’s “Souvenirs,” among other tunes, yet for reasons that were never made clear, Atlantic Records shelved the project, declining to promote “Your Time to Cry” as a single or to release her debut album. That has been a defining moment in LaVette’s long career — and one she subtly and slyly addresses on her new album, Blackbirds. She is the woman wronged, the embodiment of the music industry’s disregard for talent, especially that of Black women. For three decades LaVette continued to work, developing and strengthening her voice and expanding her repertoire. She explains, “When people say I had a resurgence, I want to say, ‘No, I never stopped. You just didn’t come to where I was!’”

Now, nearly fifty years after recording “Your Time to Cry” in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, she has become one of the finest and most accomplished singers in R&B or any other genre for that matter, with a string of albums that showcase her stylistic range as well as her deep understanding of pop history. After releasing a comeback record on the tiny Blues Express label in 2003, she caught the ear of Andy Kaulkin at Anti- Records, who signed her as a new artist at the height of the soul revival of the 2000s.

Since then, she’s covered The Who for the Kennedy Centers Honors ceremony (famously bringing Pete Townshend to tears), recorded with Drive-By Truckers (back in the Shoals, for an album appropriately titled The Scene of the Crime), and reimagined Dylan tunes so thoroughly even his own bandleader didn’t recognize them. And those original Shoals sessions did finally get an official release, first in 2000 on a small Dutch label and again in 2018 from vinyl specialists Run Out Groove.

Blackbirds is among her most powerful albums: a collection of songs by female artists active from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, including Nancy Wilson, Dinah Washington, and Nina Simone, whom LaVette refers to collectively as “the bridge I came across on.” It’s an album that celebrates these artists, but also emphasizes their shared experiences as Black women in the music industry. “Every broken promise broke my heart,” she sings on “Book of Lies,” a song made famous by Ruth Brown. Her voice is lower than it was in 1972, but no less expressive, and she makes that sentiment more than just romantic; it’s also a professional lament, addressed to the industry that derailed her career so long ago.

We spoke with LaVette about Blackbirds in our second half of the interview; here, she tells BGS about her early hopes and disappointments.

BGS: What was your impression when you were down in Muscle Shoals? Had you been there before you recorded?

LaVette: No! What would I be doing there?! What would you go there for, if you weren’t going to record? They had to win me over. I’d wanted to record in New York and Chicago. I always wanted to be very bougie. But after I had accepted how different my voice was — how un-girly-like it was — I identified more with Solomon Burke and Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding. After I was down there for a day, I was absolutely as happy as I could be. They were absolutely wonderful — and wonderful to me. When I got back to Detroit, I could not stop talking about them, especially with the way they wrote and read music.

Were you ever told why your ‘72 sessions were never released?

That has been one of the big mysteries in my career. I can think of that album and my dog Mickey, that I had when I was 11, and just burst into tears at any time. I had Brad Shapiro, who was Wilson Pickett’s producer. I had the Swampers, who I had wanted. I was at the label that I had loved. But when they told me they weren’t going to release the album, I got up under the dining room table and stayed three or four days. My friends brought me food and wine and joints. I’m telling you, I’m about to cry now. It was to be my first album, after having already had a string of singles. For years, all I had was “Your Turn to Cry.” Whenever people would come in with their latest whatever-it-is at my house or at a party, I always kept that song handy, maybe on a cassette. I’d say, “I made a record that was really, really good one time. Y’all wanna hear it?”

I just found out — when I say “just found out,” I meant in the last twenty years, maybe — that it was a split between Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler. Jerry Wexler was on my side and Ahmet was on Aretha’s side. For the longest time I never knew what happened. I had no idea, and it sounded so stupid, for thirty years, to tell people, “I have no idea.” Many people had heard “Your Time to Cry,” and they said, “If that stuff is anything like this, I can’t understand.” When Atlantic put “Your Time to Cry” out, it was just out. They didn’t mention it to anyone. They just put it out. What you wanted at a label was to have one of everything, and maybe a junior one of everything, too. So they could see where that wouldn’t work with me and Aretha. I think Diana [Ross] is probably the reason I was never at Motown. Those personalities wouldn’t have worked.

Judging by reissues from those sessions, you had already worked up a pretty diverse repertoire.

My manager, Jim Lewis, who was the assistant to the president of the musicians’ union in Detroit and a trombone player with the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, was a hard, hard taskmaster. When we started to work this management thing out, he said, “You’re cute. You’ve got a cute little waistline and a cute little butt, but you’re going to have to learn some songs, because there’s a possibility you may not be a big star.” That’s not a given, but you can be a singer for the rest of your life, if you will learn a lot of songs. He said, “You’re a different kind of singer, and you should learn that.”

How so?

I’ve accepted that I sound more like James Brown than Doris Day. But I used to think I had to sound the way Nancy Wilson sounds, which discouraged me from even wanting to learn how to sing. The thought that I could sing it and it didn’t have to sound beautiful didn’t even occur to me, until Jim came along. He told me, “Just let ‘em come out of your mouth. They’re gonna sound like you.” So I had to satisfy myself with the songs. I had to choose songs that I really like, and I would tell people, “Do you like the song or do you like the record? Because those are two different things.”

Jim made me learn a lot of songs. He insisted I learn “Lush Life,” which permitted me to be comfortable at the Carlyle Hotel for ten years. He insisted I learn “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “God Bless the Child,” which put me in the lead role in Bubbling Brown Sugar. He made me learn country and western. Otherwise, I would have been fighting with the local songwriters over them giving songs to Aretha and not giving them to me, you know? I was able to say, “Hey, I can go on and just be real good.” So I approach what I’m doing a little differently. I thought Jim was telling me to sing these songs like these people, but he just wanted me to sing them how they came out of my mouth. However they come out, sing them like that. Now that I’ve accepted that, I’m not so concerned about how it sounds, but how I feel about the song. That helps me present it. I’m very grateful to him.

That comes through on these sessions from 1972, where you’re covering Neil Young and John Prine and doing a song that Bowie was doing at the same time. There’s that range.

Well, it was after that that I did “What Condition My Condition Is In” by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. And that got me another record contract. Kenny Rogers came to Detroit and Jim said, “Why don’t you take it and let him hear it?” I didn’t think he’d like it, but Jim said, “You don’t know how it’ll sound to him.” So I took it to him and Kenny loved it. His brother, Lelan Rogers, was just starting a record label called Silver Fox, and they flew me down to Nashville. I was with them for four or five years, but still no album. All these albums were set to come out and didn’t come out.

After finally breaking out in the 2000s, you established yourself as an interpreter of songs. What do you bring to a song? How do you make something familiar sound like you? Or is that even something you’re thinking about at this point?

That isn’t something that I plan or set out to do. When I hear the song and start to sing it, that’s just the way I sing it. The thing that makes it new is that it’s different. I doubt I could come up with anything new. But it is different, and so I need for people to change their attitude about it. That was one of the things with Interpretations, my British rock album. The thing that helped me the most recording that album was that I didn’t know most of the songs. I had never heard most of them. They didn’t play them a lot on Black radio. So all I did was just lift the lyrics and sing them the want I wanted to.

Michael Stevens was brilliant, and he did the arrangement of “Love, Reign O’er Me” by The Who that I did for the Kennedy Center Honors. When I went to rehearsal, they got ready to go into the tune, and I told him, “I can’t sing it like that.” And he said, “Well, sing it the way you want to sing it.” So I sang the song to him a cappella, and he took a break and after a while came back and redirected everybody. He’d been listening to this song for thirty years — since he was a teenager! — and I’d only been listening to it for three or four days.

Something similar happened on the Bob Dylan album, Things Have Changed. We had Bob Dylan’s guitarist, Larry Campbell, playing on it, and he had a ball. He said, “I’ve wanted to hear these a different way for seventeen years!” Because he knew about the inner workings of each one of the tunes, more than any of us, he started to find clever little things, probably, that he had always wanted to play, and he played them for me.

How was working with these songs on Blackbirds different?

Working on this album was intimidating, in that I didn’t want to bastardize any of the songs or cast them off. I didn’t want to do anything to them just for the sake of doing something, you know? That was kind of daunting. But that’s the thing that makes Steve [Jordan, producer] so important to me. When we develop an arrangement, what I usually do is I’ll get my keyboard player to go in the direction that I want to take the song.

When Steve hears me with the piano, singing it the way I want to sing it, that speaks to him to put something else in there. He no longer hears Billie Holiday’s interpretation of “Strange Fruit,” and he arranges what he hears in his head, not what the other record was. I’m not going to change any of the notes — I’m just going to put them in different places and say them differently, so you can’t follow that trajectory that you know from the record. It has to be different.

(Editor’s Note: Read part two of our interview with Bettye LaVette.)

Photo credit: Joseph A. Rosen

‘Groove and Grind: Rare Soul 1963-1973’

Posted on by Editor

As R&B collections go, this four-disc, 108-song set gets high marks for its intelligent and well-conceived presentation. Producer James Austin wisely eschews the folly of the eye-burning, 5,000 word "expert essay" in six-point type in favor of a few hundred introductory words of enthusiasm for the music, the kinds of singles for which every crate digger lusts with every weekend expedition to the local swap meet.

The rest of this box set’s 120 pages of verbiage (written by an actual expert — Bill Dahl) is housed in a glossy, well-constructed, 8" x 8" hardcover book and focuses exactly where it should: on the songs and the artists who made them. In the case of Don Gardner, whose 1966 single “My Baby Likes to Boogaloo” opens the collection, we learn from whence he came (Philly), what he did (He was once part of the duo Don and Dee Dee.), and where he recorded “Boogaloo” (in the '50s and '60s unofficial Black music capitol of the world — Englewood Cliffs, NJ). There are plenty of photos of the actual singles (a nice touch), a long list of resources (including one of the great R&B blogs, Funky 16 Corners), and a helpful tracking of the songs in each of the collection’s four subgenres: urban soul, group soul, Southern soul, and funky soul.

Musically, the collection stays true to its purpose as stated in the introduction: “There’s not much in the way of hits here, but the grooves are skin-tight, the singers are utterly amazing, and this collection won’t cost you a small fortune that these selections would in their original 45 form.” In many cases, the grooves are strong and the singers are amazing. Gardner’s “Boogaloo” certainly qualifies on the former count, as does the Tempos’ Motown groove of “(Countdown) Here I Come,” the Dynamics’ “Bingo!” (tracked by Ed Wingate, Berry Gordy’s biggest competitor during the '60s). and the Mandells’ ultra-funky “There Will Be Tears, Part 1.” On the latter count, Alvin Robinson leaves his heart on the studio floor on the April ‘66 cut, “You Brought My Heart Right Down to My Knees”; Hoagy Lands channels Sam Cooke on the ‘71 single, “Do You Know What Life Is All About”; and Willy McDougal’s slinky “Don’t Turn Away” is just that — as slinky as it gets.

Passing R&B fans will fail to see the point — not every song here is off the charts and most never made the charts — and audiophiles might be miffed about the mastering as it’s clear a lot of the material was lifted from vinyl, master tapes likely being long gone. But when all's said and done, this is a welcome document of some excellent music which, as the producers noted, wouldn’t be accessible to us without their efforts. To that, they’re owed a tip of the hat.

LISTEN: Charlie Faye & the Fayettes, ‘Sweet Little Messages’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Charlie Faye & the Fayettes
Hometown: Austin, TX
Song: "Sweet Little Messages”
Album: Charlie Faye & the Fayettes
Release Date: June 10

In Their Words: "'Sweet Little Messages' is about that feeling you get when your phone buzzes with a text from someone you have a crush on … in 1962! I love putting modern details into a song with a vintage feel.” — Charlie Faye

Photo credit: Eryn Brooke

The Cream of Four Crops: A Conversation with Lake Street Dive’s Mike “McDuck” Olson

Posted on by Editor

Lake Street Dive rather famously borrows a little bit from a lot of things. At times exuding an old school R&B vibe, at others a bright pop sound, their music is equal parts the Beatles and Motown, with a bit of brassy big band thrown in for good measure. Where that kind of uncategorized approach might sound messy — even noisy — under another band’s thumb, Lake Street Dive doesn’t lose track of their identity, even as they pepper it with myriad influences.

The classically trained four-piece includes guitarist and trumpeter Mike “McDuck” Olson, upright bassist Bridget Kearney, drummer Mike Calabrese, and vocalist Rachael Price, whose bluesy alto grounds whatever musical path the band explores. Lake Street Dive is set to release their third studio album and Nonesuch Records debut,  Side Pony,  on February 19. Produced by Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson), the album involves new risks — like challenging time signatures — alongside the jazzy approach to pop the band has played heretofore. It’s a step forward for the band but, as Olson explains, not a new direction.

I’ve got to ask: Where does the nickname “McDuck” come from?

Oh, it’s an old college nickname. I had mono when I moved into the dorms [at the New England Conservatory of Music] my first year, so instead of being friendly and looking to make new friends like Mike Calabrese was, I told everyone to go away and leave me alone while I got better. I earned the nickname "Scrooge McDuck." Fortunately, the McDuck is the only part that stuck.

Stephen Colbert took a liking to your sound when he hosted The Colbert Report, and he recently invited you back to play The Late Show . What was it like performing for Colbert again?

It was sort of a double-whammy return because Colbert’s show is in the Ed Sullivan Theater, which is also the theater that Letterman taped out of, so it was cool because it was kind of like playing Colbert on steroids. It was also cool to be back in that theater that we had done the Letterman show in. It had been redecorated, and a lot of the same crew people are still working the show, so it was nice to see some of those guys again. It’s fun, too, because we’re not quite as nervous as we used to get, although we’re not completely immune to it. I’d say that I don’t have the same mind-numbing terror going on TV that we used to when we did the first Colbert taping.

One of Side Pony ’s singles, “Call Off Your Dogs,” shows an interesting approach to meter and rhythm compared to the band’s earlier work. Where are you drawing that inspiration from?

The main riff, which is in 3/4 time, came out of Bridget’s fascination with … it’s sort of two-fold. She spent some time in Africa studying music from Ghana and she studied abroad in Morocco as a college student, combined with a bass player’s innate love of Motown bass lines a la the Jackson 5. The composition, in its first version, was all in 3 and had a trickier rhythmic framework.

Then, when we went into the studio to record it, Dave Cobb didn’t encourage us to stay tricky. He’s someone for whom pop music is candy, and he encouraged us to keep some of the trickier musical elements because that’s interesting for people who are in tune with that, but then say, "Okay, if you’re going to have the tricky 3/4 verses, we gotta go into 4/4 on the choruses." Because that’s what’s going to get people up and dancing — that’s the fist pumping. So it was a combination of this sort of studiousness on Bridget’s part, and kind of the polar opposite lack of studiousness on Dave’s part that made us combine those two elements in the studio.

The way the verses and chorus oscillate back and forth with one another, rhythmically, is so interesting. It took me a second to wrap my head around what was happening when I heard it.

It’s nice, too, because we’ve been playing with the disco thing. On its own, the disco thing is very dated. If you release a song that has a straight-down-the-pike disco feel in the drums and guitar parts, it immediately makes people think, "Oh great, leisure suits, the light-up dance floors." Stuff like that. We were reticent to do something that was so derivative of one specific thing just because we don’t like to pigeonhole ourselves. So to blend something so immediately identifiable as disco with something that’s a little bit more intellectual made us feel better about using both elements in the same song.

Speaking about elements, the band rather famously deals in many sounds and influences. How do you keep everything from becoming too chaotic, either in a song or across an album?

I think part of it is that we aren’t necessarily, you know, we’re not studio musicians. If someone needs a country track or someone needs a disco track or someone needs a straight-up Motown track recorded for someone’s record, they’ll call people who are skillful in recreating those styles faithfully. We just aren’t that good at recreating something verbatim and, fortunately, that has worked in our favor. We have our idiosyncrasies that we, if not fall back on, then are actually very comfortable in. So it’s sort of like we’re filtering all of these omnivorous style dalliances through this far more narrow Lake Street Dive sort of sieve. It’s also what we enjoy doing and what we think is fun, what parts we think are most fun to play, and those end up smoothing out the edges of something that is more rigidly stylistic.

Well, that’s what makes it so interesting. I’ll listen to a song and pick out three or four influences, but under your umbrella as Lake Street Dive, it all comes together in this new way. It isn’t chaotic, but in another band’s hands, it could easily devolve into a mess.

Well, sometimes it feels like a mess, but I’m glad it’s not coming across that way.

In your composing or songwriting process, is it the four of you together banging something out, or does someone bring up an idea first?

The kernels for a song idea will come in from an individual. All four of us are pretty avid and voluminous songwriters. It can be something as simple as a hook or, in the case of “Call Off Your Dogs,” a rhythm and a bass line. Or it can be a completely realized song with the lyrics, the form, the solos, all this stuff written out. When it comes to the band for the purposes of learning, that’s when the arranging takes place or, in the case of the studio, we did end up doing a lot of writing together, but it all came from a kernel someone had come up with on their own. We don’t sit around and bang out ideas, you know, staring at each other awkwardly across acoustic guitars. That has never been our method.

Isn’t that how the best songs have been written? Awkwardly staring at someone?

[Laughs] Isn’t that how the Lennon/McCartney thing worked? I don’t know. It’s not for us.

So then, from your perspective, what kind of subject matter interests you as a songwriter?

We tend to use pretty familiar pop tropes as, at least, a starting point. We’re not going out on too many limbs here with subject matter, you know; we’re not writing protest songs. It all boils down to love in one way or another, either found or lost. There’s already been 80 years of pop music based on love found and lost. It’s a pretty deep well and, as far as we’re concerned, it’s not been exhausted yet. Until it is, we’re going to keep writing love songs.

It just so happens to be this quirky perspective, which distinguishes you from the major songwriters focused on that very subject.

It is about finding your filter that you want to apply. It’s not satisfying as songwriters — nor is it satisfying to listeners — to hear a song that’s the same kind of lens. They’re all love songs, but they can be viewed through talking about love as self-examination in the modern era — like “Self Portraits” talking about selfies and things like that. It can be sort of veiled and derived through the study of classic Beatles songs, like “You Go Down Smooth” is. As students of music, we enjoy challenging ourselves and each other to come up with as many different ways to explore this well-trodden subject matter, because it’s just more interesting for us that way, and we’re in it for the long game, too. Shame on us if we let it get boring.

If you’re talking about filters, my takeaway is that yours tends to be much more intelligent than what the average love song purports itself to be.

I hope so, but it’s also … it’s an extremely luxurious position to be in with four songwriters in the band, because we all write. We’re not like Carole King who went into the office everyday and, as a professional songwriter, generated hit after hit after hit. All four of us, we have our hits and our misses, but because there are four of us, we have a lot more hits to choose from. We tend to scrape off the very best from the top, which is awesome because it also means that listening back on previous records you don’t hear songs of yours that you absolutely hate. It’s the cream of the crop — the cream of four crops.

Turning to Side Pony, what’s the shape of that new album compared to your last two studio releases?

Thematically, the hope is that it’s the next step. In that, it’s the next step in the evolution of the band and the four of us as individuals and songwriters. There are hopefully bigger risks being taken, hopefully there are unexpected things, there are stylistic departures. But it’s not a new direction. I think that it’s easy to play a track that relies on disco and think, "Oh, this is going to be a new direction for Lake Street Dive." Never, at any point, did we go into this process and say to ourselves, "Let’s do something new." The thought was more like, "Let’s do something better than last time." Not that last time was bad, just that we always hope to improve upon what we’ve done. That’s the key to longevity, of course.

Genre really does matter in terms of being able to categorize and market a band, but you’ve very proudly remained what I’ve read Bridget describe as "genre-less." Why do you think you’ve been so successful when you’re not necessarily following the formula?

I think the short answer is that we have managed to play successful shows for a really diverse array of audiences over the years and have been able to build a fan base, essentially, wherever we go. We’ve had a lot of luck as openers for bigger bands, and those bigger bands have been a very wide range of artists. We opened for Josh Ritter for a couple of months a few years back, we opened for the Yonder Mountain String Band, we opened for a surf rock band called Los Straitjacketes, which wears luchador masks on stage.

There was a trend: We would be sitting at the merch table after opening for these other bands, and their fans — from one show to the next — consistently we would hear, "Hey that was pretty good." These people that came for something completely different, we somehow managed to keep their attention through our set, sell them merch, and get their names on our email list, and the next time we came to town, they would come back. You can see the music you like in Lake Street Dive. I hope that is what it is, because if not, I don’t really have any other answer.

Photos courtesy of the artist

The Heart and Soul of Daptone Records

Posted on by Editor

A young girl asks her mother, "How can Santa Claus visit them, when they don’t have a chimney? How can he leave presents under the tree, when he can’t even get into their apartment?" These are common questions most parents hear around the holidays, but it resonates powerfully in Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings’ new Christmas chestnut, “Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects.” “I said, ‘Mama, how can this be?” Jones sings in that outsized voice of hers, gift-wrapping every syllable for the listener as the horns flare and flash around her, the rhythm section grooves and the backup singers repeat her not-quite-rhetorical question. Somehow she conveys the innocence of the daughter pondering the rules of Christmas, as well as the affectionate concern of the mother who concocts a story about a magic chimney.

“Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects” could easily have been cheesy and goofy, especially with its references to the projects and the ghetto — terms that sound antiquated in the context of a Christmas tune. Fortunately, the musicians play it straight, grooving hard to reinforce the powerful emotional resonance of the lyrics. It’s only when the little girl grows up and stops believing in Santa that she starts believing in something even more magical: It was her own mother who saved money throughout the year and put those presents under the tree. “Mama, now I know that you were the one!”

In addition to appearing on the new Oxford American Music Issue CD sampler, the song anchors It’s a Holiday Soul Party, the first holiday album from the venerable indie R&B label Daptone Records. It’s billed to Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, but it sounds like they invited the entire roster: Charles Bradley testifies mightily on “World of Love,” Saun & Starr harmonize beautifully on “Big Bulbs,” and seemingly the entire office staff sits in with the Dap-Kings. The album more than lives up to its party designation: With its lively energy and inventive interpretations of well-worn carols (This “White Christmas” is more Tina Turner than Bing Crosby.), it’s easily the best holiday album of the year.

“There’s some cute stuff on there and there’s some traditional stuff, as well,” says Neil Sugarman, who co-founded Daptone, produced the new record, and played saxophone on almost every song. “The nice thing is that there was no pressure. It was very impromptu. We just went in and jammed. And Sharon sings her ass off.”

The same, of course, could be said of nearly every Daptone release. Since it opened in 2001, the label has cornered the market on neotraditional soul music while also showing how loose that word “soul” can be. It obviously applies to the Stax- and Motown-derived R&B sung by Sharon Jones, Charles Bradley, and Saun & Starr. But it also includes the instrumental grooves of the El Michels Affair and the Sugarman 3, as well as the raw gospel of the Como Mamas and Naomi Shelton — even the cinematic funk of the Budos Band and Antibalas. Their records all sound like they could have been made in the 1960s or 1970s then excavated by extremely dedicated crate diggers at estate sales or junk stores. Yet, the music remains anchored in the 21st century and targeted to a contemporary audience.

It’s not a soul revival, precisely because no one at Daptone believes that soul needs to be revived. “People don’t say jazz music is retro or Latin music is retro,” says Sugarman. “But they do say soul music is retro.” It’s an odd popular prejudice, one that Daptone combats with music that consciously emphasizes the past while remaining doggedly engaged with the present. “It’s absolutely roots music,” he says, noting that it’s more urban than rural, more ghetto than holler. “We wear our influences on our sleeves, and there’s a lineage that we pay homage to every time we pull our instruments out of our cases. We try to groove as hard as the records that we love.”

When they formed Daptone nearly 15 years ago, Sugarman and Gabriel Roth tried to emulate the labels they loved, establishing a particular sound, a strong brand, and a loyal following that would take a chance on unknown artists. Charged with running a business, they both remained musicians first and foremost. Roth (sometimes known as Bosco Mann) plays bass, Sugarman blows the sax. “At this point in my life, I like having both. I like controlling the business and controlling my destiny as a recording artist. I love getting on the road with people like Sharon and Charles, and getting the kind of insight into their music that I couldn’t get if I was just sitting in the office answering emails and writing checks.”

For most of its life, Daptone only signed New York artists, many of them older and practicing their craft on the margins of the music industry. Charles Bradley was trained as a carpenter and had been hired to help Roth and Sugarman build a new studio, but he turned out to be an amazing singer whose live shows have galvanized audiences around the world. “He’s the guy we would call any time we needed help. We loved this guy so we wanted to work for this guy. We wanted to help him build a career.”

Similarly, Saundra “Saun” Williams and Starr Duncan Lowe originally came into the Daptone fold as back-up singers in the Dap-Kings, after having performed for decades as the Good 'N Plenty Girls. They quickly established themselves as a core part of the band’s sound — both in the studio and on the stage. “We always talked about making a record with them, but it takes a while to figure out who these people are,” says Sugarman, noting that it took them five years to plan, write, and record their debut, Take a Closer Look, released in May 2015. It was worth the wait, as the album reveals two spry singers with incredible chemistry, not to mention a band that adapted to complement their dynamic.

But the present is not what the past used to be. The market is changing, with newer labels like Colemine and 180 Proof crowding the scene, soul revivalists like Leon Bridges jumping straight to major labels, and consumers relying more and more on streams rather than outright purchases. “I’m not going to lie — it’s getting tricky,” Sugarman says. “Streaming services are taking a big chunk out of our revenue. When you look at the numbers, close to two million people per day click on a Daptone song. It’s exciting to see those numbers. The audience is there, but we’re not getting compensated. It could get to the point where it’s not sustainable as a business anymore, so you have to figure out how to keep putting records out.”

One way of surviving is to grow and expand, albeit very carefully and very gradually. In 2015, Daptone founded an imprint — Wick Records — to release 7-inch singles by New York garage rock bands, starting with a ferocious debut by the Mystery Lights. The label also signed a reggae band called the Frightnrs, whose first full-length is slated for release in 2016. Another upcoming release stands out even more: James Hunter’s Daptone debut, Hold On!, will hit stores (and, of course, streaming services) in Feburary. “He’s an English artist, so he’s the first artist we’ve signed who’s not from New York.”

Sugarman insists that the key to Daptone’s success has been — and will continue to be — its emphasis on community over market shares or compensation. “Not only do we need to like someone’s music, but they have to function within this family. That’s the way it has to be for the music to progress and stay honest. I don’t think we could have pulled off Daptone any other way.”

Photo courtesy of the artist