Solomon Burke - 1993 - Let Your Love Flow

Shanachie – 9202  305.62MB FLAC

The Oakland Public Library stickers almost turn Solomon Burke into a classified substance: MAIN, CD, RB, BURKE. One label partially covers the title, the disc has its circulation number written directly across it, and Shanachie somehow manages to spell his first name “Soloman” on the artwork. None of this diminishes the man staring from the cover. Burke looks less like a singer posing for a photograph than someone waiting for you to finish talking so he can tell you what is actually going on.

Solomon Burke came out of West Philadelphia and the church. Raised largely by his grandmother, Eleanor Moore, he was preaching publicly while still a child and became locally known as the Wonder Boy Preacher. This matters because preaching was not merely something Burke did before becoming a singer. It remained the architecture of his singing. He knew how to begin conversationally, hold attention, repeat a phrase until it changed meaning, and then raise the emotional temperature without losing control of the room. Even in secular love songs, he often sounds as though he is addressing one person and an entire congregation at the same time.

Burke repeatedly said that he never really left gospel. It remained the foundation under his rhythm and blues, country songs, romantic pleading and theatrical spoken passages. You can hear that foundation in the authority of his voice, but also in its generosity. His gift was not simply volume or range. It was social intelligence inside the voice. He could command, reassure, seduce, confess and testify within a few lines, shifting the balance according to what the song needed. Where another singer might deliver a lyric, Burke could make it sound like an event happening between himself and the listener.

His early records for Apollo led to Atlantic Records, where he became one of the artists who helped define soul music before the term had completely settled into place. His first large Atlantic success, “Just Out of Reach,” came from the country songbook, and that was no accident. Burke’s musical world included gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, pop and country without treating them as separate fenced properties. During the early 1960s he recorded “Cry to Me,” “If You Need Me,” “Got to Get You Off My Mind” and “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” records built around the tension between spiritual urgency and human appetite. The Rolling Stones and other British groups covered him, but Burke’s originals retain something difficult to imitate: the sense that the singer has responsibility for everyone in the room.

By the end of the 1970s, however, popular music had changed around him. Burke had moved through several labels after Atlantic, and the hits had become less frequent. The recordings on this CD first appeared in 1979 as Sidewalks, Fences and Walls on Infinity Records. Let Your Love Flow is therefore not a 1993 recording session, despite the date attached to this Shanachie edition. It is a retitled and resequenced return to a late-1970s album made when Burke was no longer being treated by the record industry as one of its central stars, even though the central instrument, that enormous and unusually flexible voice, was still completely present.

The producer was Jerry Williams Jr., better known as Swamp Dogg, working with Bahamian percussionist King Errisson. Swamp Dogg was an inspired match for Burke because he also distrusted tidy musical borders. His records could contain country writing, deep soul, funk, humor, social criticism and deliberate roughness without ironing them into something respectable. Here the arrangements give Burke room to preach and plead while the rhythm section moves through country-soul, funk and pronounced Afro-Latin accents. The result is polished enough to carry Burke’s voice but not so polished that it seals him behind glass.

“Boo Hoo Hoo (Cra-Cra-Craya)” opens this CD with Swamp Dogg’s slightly crooked humor, while songs such as “Lucky,” “The More” and “Please Come Back Home to Me” place Burke in the confessional territory where he could be especially convincing. He was able to make emotional excess feel reasonable. When he begged, he did not shrink. He enlarged the feeling until surrender seemed like the most dignified option available. The title song and “Sweeter Than Sweetness” draw on the warm, direct language of country-soul, while “Sidewalks, Fences and Walls” gives him a larger social and dramatic frame. Burke could take a simple physical image and treat it as a barrier between people, then sing as though he intended to remove it personally.

The album also includes “Please Don’t You Say Goodbye to Me,” which had given Burke his final appearance on the R&B chart in 1978, and a version of the Isaac Hayes and David Porter composition “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” permanently associated with Sam & Dave. Covering that song places Burke beside another branch of gospel-powered soul. Sam & Dave performed it as a two-man surge; Burke approaches the material with the weight of a single voice accustomed to filling every available role. He can be the caller, the responder, the preacher and the person being saved.

There is a small discographical puzzle hiding in the packaging. The back insert announces two songs “previously excluded from album release,” although the original 1979 Infinity LP appears to have contained all ten selections. The wording most likely refers to the eight-song Charly repackage that circulated under titles including From the Heart and omitted “Please Don’t You Say Goodbye to Me” and “See That Girl.” This Shanachie disc restores those two tracks, changes the running order, gives the collection a new title, and accidentally changes Solomon into “Soloman.” It is less a definitive edition than another room in the strange house this music has occupied.

When this CD appeared in 1993, Burke was active but had not yet received the broad late-career reconsideration that was coming. He released Soul of the Blues that same year, entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001, and won his first Grammy for Don’t Give Up on Me in 2003. That later album introduced him to listeners who had missed the Atlantic singles and the decades of records that followed them. Let Your Love Flow sits before that public return, carrying a neglected late-1970s session into the CD era while the larger culture was still deciding how much of Solomon Burke it had forgotten.

This particular copy eventually entered the Oakland Public Library system, where the labels, handwriting and worn plastic show that it became something people could discover without already knowing what to request. That feels appropriate for a singer whose career never followed a clean museum timeline. This is not the obvious starting point for Solomon Burke, and it is not usually listed as his masterpiece. It may be more revealing for exactly that reason. Away from the famous Atlantic years and the celebrated comeback, Burke still sounds unmistakably like himself: part singer, part preacher, part counselor, making private trouble large enough to become communal music.