Nobody's Puppet
Veteran soul singer Bobby Purify teams up with Dan Penn to revive lost art of down-home record-making
Bobby Purify
Better to Have It
(Proper American)
The great soul singers sweat and elide, make sly or avuncular, but the great soul producers drive the car. Think Allen Toussaint's elliptical piano and horns ducking and weaving behind Lee Dorsey, Chips Moman's meticulous settings for Bobby Womack at American Studios, Dan Penn's baroque pop-soul productions of the Box Tops, or Willie Mitchell's magically dry snare-drum sound providing a cushion for Al Green's glossolalia. It seems like a lost art, this fusion of reality-based funk and heavenly filigree—gone forever, like the soul era itself.
Which is why Bobby Purify's Better to Have It is such a pleasant surprise. Produced by Dan Penn at his Nashville studio (and recorded on 16-track analog tape), the album completely avoids the pitfalls of otherwise excellent recent records by Howard Tate and Solomon Burke: undue reverence, needless revisionism and songs by Elvis Costello. In fact, Penn, along with Carson Whitsett and Hoy "Bucky" Lindsey, wrote all but one of the songs on the album. (Penn, of course, is celebrated as a writer of classics like "The Dark End of the Street" and, for James and Bobby Purify, "I'm Your Puppet.") The players are a who's-who of the classic soul era: Whitsett, Reggie Young, Spooner Oldham, David Hood, Jimmie Johnson and Wayne Jackson.
Purify, whose real name is Ben Moore, has recorded under both names. With Ben & Spence, he cut some fine sides in Muscle Shoals for Atlantic in the '60s. In 1971, he replaced the second "Bobby Purify," Robert Lee Dickey, who is the cousin of James Purify and who sang on James and Bobby Purify's '60s hits "I'm Your Puppet" and "Shake a Tailfeather." (With Moore, James and Bobby Purify had a 1976 British hit with a remake of "I'm Your Puppet.") Moore was nominated for a Traditional Soul Gospel Grammy in 1982 for his He Believes in Me.
After glaucoma caused Moore to lose his sight in 1998, he received an encouraging phone call from Ray Charles and began singing on the chitlin circuit. A chance meeting with Bucky Lindsey in Moore's home of Pensacola, Fla., led to his recording with Penn. Moore is a subtle, powerful singer with a wide range of approaches who sounds at times like a more controlled Arthur Alexander or a sane James Carr. He never falls into the trap of over-souling and is essentially devoid of mannerism; he negotiates perfectly the rather tricky structures Penn, Whitsett and Lindsey have come up with here.
Like much of Better to Have It, "The Pond" combines the approaches of Memphis, Muscle Shoals and Jackson's Malaco Studios, complete with a classic New Orleans-style turnaround and a horn arrangement (by Charles Rose) that recalls both Toussaint and Randy Newman. The song also contains a truly classic soul-music couplet: "The bullfrog grinned and licked his chin / He said, 'Yeah, it tasted just like chicken.' "
The centerpiece of the record is "My Life to Live Over," a fusion of gospel and jazz with beautiful chord changes that recall Walter Becker and Donald Fagen—if they were from Memphis. It's a great example of how the basic soul framework can evolve when musicians approach the style in a non-doctrinaire way. And while the sentiments of "Only in America" might induce queasiness coming from your typical Music Row tunesmith, when Purify sings "against all evil I'll take my stand," you get the feeling he's coming from an America you'd be proud to claim as your own—one where singers and producers ride in the same car.
—Edd Hurt
