The Very Best of Solomon Burke looks backward from 1998, but the man on its cover has not yet become the seasoned, heavyset figure pictured on Let Your Love Flow. Rhino presents Burke in the early 1960s: pompadour high, bow tie straight, microphone in one hand, the other raised as though he is halfway between singing a love song and delivering Sunday testimony. The photograph is not merely flattering archival decoration. It tells us which Solomon Burke is inside. This is the young man building his kingdom in public, one 45, one radio market and one crowded theater at a time. The CD gathers Atlantic recordings from 1961 through 1968 rather than music made in 1998.
The comparison with Let Your Love Flow is more dramatic than the dates printed on the two CDs suggest. Although Shanachie released Let Your Love Flow in 1993, most of its material came from Burke’s 1979 album Sidewalks, Fences and Walls. That was a later Burke, nearly two decades removed from his first Atlantic breakthrough, singing longer, looser songs in a record business that had already moved through psychedelic soul, funk and disco. He was no longer a young contender trying to persuade the country that a preacher could sing secular music without leaving the church behind. He sounded like a survivor who knew the machinery of love, disappointment and the music business from the inside.
The Very Best of Solomon Burke captures the period before that experience had settled into his face. Using the 1940 birth year on Burke’s headstone, he was approximately twenty-one when “Just Out of Reach” became his first Atlantic hit and twenty-eight when he recorded “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” That seems almost absurd when listening now. The voice already carries the gravity of someone twice his age. It can sound fatherly, bruised, seductive, judicial and ecstatic within a single two-and-a-half-minute record. Yet the cover reminds us that these were not the reflections of an elderly soul patriarch. They were being made by a very young man with children, church responsibilities, business ambitions and something urgent to prove.
This was not an album-oriented career in the modern sense. Burke’s world revolved around singles. A song was recorded in New York, pressed onto a seven-inch record, taken to disc jockeys and released into dozens of local markets that did not necessarily behave alike. A record might be enormous on Black radio in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Atlanta or Memphis while remaining almost invisible to white pop listeners elsewhere. If a DJ embraced it, requests increased. If requests increased, promoters called. If the song rose, Burke might arrive in town a few weeks later as part of a package show, sing a handful of numbers, leave the stage and get back on the road. The next single could already be waiting before the previous one had finished climbing. Local radio mattered enormously, but Burke was not simply roaming between stations holding copies of his latest record. Radio created the invitation. The live circuit was where he collected the audience. His first Atlantic hit, “Just Out of Reach,” gained crucial airplay after Gene Autry encouraged stations he was connected with to play it, helping the country song cross into both the R&B and pop charts.
And yes, Solomon Burke toured. He toured hard. He played clubs, but also Black theaters, auditoriums, dance halls and package revues where several singers shared the same bill. In 1964 alone, surviving itineraries place him on large shows with Otis Redding, James Brown, Dionne Warwick, Joe Tex, Rufus Thomas and numerous vocal groups. He appeared at venues such as Harlem’s Apollo, Philadelphia’s Uptown and Baltimore’s Royal Theatre, major stations on what became known as the Chitlin’ Circuit. A typical Apollo engagement could demand several performances a day for an entire week, with singers, dancers, comedians and a film crowded into the same program. This was not the relaxed modern routine of arriving in a city for a ninety-minute evening concert. It was closer to theatrical factory work conducted under spotlights. You had to seize the room immediately because another act was waiting behind the curtain.
Imagine hearing “Cry to Me” in that environment. On record, it begins with restraint. The guitar marks out a slow, spare figure, the rhythm section leaves space around Burke, and his voice enters almost conversationally. But he is not merely comforting a lonely woman. He is building pressure. Each line tightens the screw until consolation begins to resemble seduction. In a theater, with people shouting encouragement and couples pressed into their seats, Burke could expand that tension through gesture, timing and preacherly repetition. His childhood had prepared him for exactly this kind of contact. Before becoming a secular star, he had preached and hosted gospel radio programs in Philadelphia. He understood how to feel a congregation respond, how to hold silence for an extra second and how to make one person feel that a message delivered to hundreds was meant specifically for them.
The early songs reveal Burke and Atlantic trying to invent the right setting for that ability. “Just Out of Reach” is built from country music rather than the pounding R&B one might expect from Atlantic. The arrangement surrounds him with backing voices and a gentle, swaying rhythm, while Burke sings abandonment with the dignity of someone refusing to collapse in front of witnesses. For a young Black singer in 1961, recording country material was commercially risky. Segregation divided radio formats, audiences and touring routes even when the music itself crossed those boundaries freely. Burke’s record reportedly confused some Southern promoters so thoroughly that they expected a white country singer to arrive. The song’s success opened doors, but the racial structure of the industry prevented those doors from opening equally.
That tension follows him throughout the compilation. Burke had come from the church and initially worried that being labeled an R&B singer would suggest profanity or moral compromise. Atlantic wanted secular records. Burke wanted language that would allow him to preserve his religious identity while singing about romantic need, betrayal and physical longing. “Soul music” became an answer, not simply a genre name but a bridge between the sacred authority of his voice and the worldly situations inside the songs. He did not stop sounding like a preacher when he sang romance. Instead, he made romantic need sound worthy of a sermon.
“If You Need Me” makes that bridge audible. Recorded in New York in March 1963 with producers Jerry Wexler and Bert Berns and engineer Tom Dowd, it places Burke amid horns, piano, guitar, tambourine and female backing voices. Nothing is overcrowded. The musicians provide a firm floor while Burke turns a simple offer of loyalty into something nearly spiritual. He sings as a lover, but the phrasing resembles testimony. He has known suffering, he has remained available, and he is asking the listener to recognize the truth before it is too late. The session personnel included experienced jazz and studio musicians rather than a fixed touring band, another reminder that the records and the road were partly separate worlds. Atlantic assembled specialists in the studio; Burke then had to carry the finished record into theaters with whatever musicians and rehearsal time the touring circuit supplied.
The stage version of Solomon Burke was becoming larger than the young man on the cover. During a 1963 run at Baltimore’s Royal Theatre, disc jockey Fred “Rockin’ Robin” Robinson crowned him the “King of Rock ’n’ Soul.” Burke embraced the title and expanded it into an act involving a crown, cape, scepter, throne, dancing girls and colored lights. The ceremony was repeated through the engagement, then traveled with him. This was partly show-business promotion, but it also solved a practical problem. Burke was sharing bills with performers who could dance explosively, leap across stages or tear through tightly drilled choreography. He could not compete by imitating James Brown. He competed through majesty, comedy, intimacy and command. He did not chase the audience around the room. He made the room come to him.
“Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” sounds built for that theater. It is less a conventional song than a call to order. Burke addresses the audience directly, explains the human condition and then offers the chorus as a truth everyone can answer together. On this compilation it arrives after a run of personal love songs, but its emotional scale is different. “Cry to Me” speaks into one person’s loneliness. “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” turns loneliness into a public fact. It converts the theater into a congregation without requiring anyone to admit that they came seeking church.
Burke’s life on the road contained very little of the polished glamour suggested by the tuxedo. Black performers traveling through the segregated South could be refused food, lodging and basic service. Burke responded with a mixture of resourcefulness and entrepreneurial nerve. Accounts from fellow performers describe him carrying food, drinks and supplies on tour and selling them as the bus traveled farther from available stores and restaurants. He cooked, traded and negotiated. At the Apollo, he even attempted to control the concessions and arrived with enough branded popcorn to alarm the theater’s management. The same man pleading with devastating tenderness on “I’m Hanging Up My Heart for You” might be backstage twenty minutes later selling someone a sandwich. Romance, ministry, commerce and survival were not separate departments in Burke’s life. They all traveled on the same bus.
This knowledge changes the way “Got to Get You Off My Mind” lands. The record is buoyant, almost cheerful, but it came from grief. Burke said he wrote it following the shock of Sam Cooke’s death in December 1964. Rather than performing sorrow as a slow collapse, he turns it into forward motion. The beat keeps stepping while the singer tries to command himself away from what he cannot stop remembering. It became Burke’s largest R&B success in 1965, the peak year of his Atlantic career. The song’s brightness is not proof that the pain is shallow. It is what working performers often had to do with pain: convert it into something playable, danceable and useful before the next show.
By then Burke was crossing the Atlantic as well. Photographs from his 1965 British visit show the young man from the CD cover still sharp-suited and smiling, while another image from the period catches him sweating directly into a microphone, his face compressed by the physical labor of singing. British musicians already knew his records. The Rolling Stones had recorded “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” while other young bands studied Atlantic and Southern soul records as instruction manuals. Yet Burke’s own American pop visibility never fully matched the reach of his songs. The material traveled more easily than the man who created it.
The compilation’s final stretch shows the crown becoming less secure. After 1965, Burke’s chart position weakened as Atlantic devoted increasing attention to Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin. “Take Me (Just as I Am)” moves him toward the deeper Southern sound associated with Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham and producer Chips Moman. By 1968, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” takes him to Memphis and gives him material shaped by the civil-rights era rather than private romance alone. Burke’s voice remains commanding, but the commercial landscape around it has changed. The youthful king is still singing; the kingdom is shifting beneath him.
The final track, “Soul Meeting,” makes that shift painfully visible. The Soul Clan was conceived as a gathering of major soul singers, with Burke joined by Arthur Conley, Don Covay, Ben E. King and Joe Tex. On paper it should have sounded like a summit. In practice, it never became the movement or commercial force its participants imagined. By 1968, soul music was growing more politically outspoken, funk was beginning to harden the rhythm, album culture was expanding and a younger generation of performers was taking control of the conversation. Burke was not old, but popular music can manufacture age with savage speed. A twenty-eight-year-old could already be treated as someone from an earlier chapter.
That is the deepest contrast with Let Your Love Flow. The later recordings show a man continuing after the spotlight had narrowed, working outside the central machinery that once pushed his singles through the country. His voice had broadened and darkened. Songs could stretch past six minutes. He no longer needed to introduce himself in two minutes and thirty seconds before another act came through the curtain. The performance had room to wander, preach, vamp and reflect.
On The Very Best of Solomon Burke, there is almost no room to waste. Every introduction has to establish a world in seconds. Every vocal entrance has to make the listener stop turning the radio dial. Every chorus has to survive a weak speaker in a car, beauty shop, kitchen, bar or neighborhood record store. Rhino’s booklet notes that several Burke singles had later been remixed or rerecorded for albums, while this collection restores versions associated with the original 45s. That matters because these compact performances were how most listeners first encountered him. They did not initially hear a historical figure whose importance had been carefully explained. They heard a new voice come through a small radio and seize possession of the room.
Picture a listener in 1962. The radio is on while dinner is being prepared, cars pass outside, somebody is arguing in another room. Then “Cry to Me” begins. The record lasts less than three minutes, but Burke changes the air pressure. The listener may not know about his church, the segregated touring circuit, Atlantic’s studio musicians or the child-sized mountain of responsibilities he carried. They know only that this young man sounds as though he has been waiting all day to speak directly to them.
A few months later, his name appears on a theater marquee alongside six or eight other acts. The show begins in the afternoon and repeats into the night. Burke enters in a suit, perhaps later in crown and cape. He sings the record heard on the radio, but now the voice has a body, a raised hand, a grin and the timing of a preacher who knows precisely when the crowd is ready to answer. Afterward, he returns to the bus. There is another town, another station, another theater and another single to promote.
The young man on the cover is not looking back yet. He is reaching upward, microphone in hand, still in the dangerous moment when success has begun but permanence has not been promised. Let Your Love Flow showed what remained after the first kingdom faded: the voice, the wit and the instinct for emotional theater. The Very Best of Solomon Burke shows the kingdom being constructed under pressure, while the paint is still wet and the king is young enough to believe the road might continue forever.
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