POET TRILOGY BROUGHT OUT THE BEST IN BOBBY WOMACK

https://youtu.be/gxWqRBIu6tQ?si=5cR8DY6duAt1tsdl

Soul music, and I mean the real McCoy from yesteryear, the Motown sound and the Stax rhythm, is a lost artform which rarely gets challenged by all the convoluted modern day versions such as doo-wop and hip hop. 

Occasionally a singer will come along and remind us of old times by belting out a good
vocal, but lets face it, there will never be another like Aretha Franklin or Marvin Gaye and many of their peers from the late 60`s and early 70`s who welded great powerful singing with innovative rhythm and blues. 

Stax, the more obscure record label of the two, was the more rhythm and blues influenced who tended to give lesser known artists with more of a blues pedigree a go. 

Motown was the more showpony of the two labels, unless you were razzle dazzle and knew somebody in high places generally you were discarded by Motown the minute you put a foot wrong either in the artistic or commercial stakes. 

Having said that, Motown did have a fantastic record of finding really great gospel influenced singers, even if many of the Motown artists tended to be a bit too predictable and lacking the spontaneity of many of the Stax soul musicians, who were actively promoted to be themselves more

and improvise in the studio. 

I mentioned Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin, Aretha I think was an amazing talent, she is my second favourite female vocalist, second only to Eva Cassidy, and there was and never will be another Marvin,
even if he was off with fairies on crack cocaine half his life and a very unpredictable musician who never quite could string together a cohesive album from start to finish. 

One of my favourite soul albums comes from somebody who is very much a chip off the Gaye block, but arguably better because he was probably more sophisticated and had better songs to sing, is the often forgotten Bobby Womack.

Womack was one of the darlings of soul music in the early 70`s, he was with record labels United Artsists, CBS and Arista, all very mainstream and commercial, when
he recorded some of his best known and most definitive music, at least according to many critics. 

But then tragedy struck in the late 70`s, his brother Harry died as well as his new born son from cot death. What may have been
the end of many a musical career after enduring tragedy on this scale, Womack, just like Eric Clapton in the early 90`s turned personal trauma into something creative and he went about recording three what turned out to be very obscure records for tiny record record Beverley Glen.

The three records, `The Poet`, `Poet II` and `Someday We`ll All Be Free` from 1985, which unofficially become known as `Poet III`, become collectively known as the Poet Trilogy. 

There is some really great soul music on
all three albums, and the good thing is that Music Club record label about 10 years ago released a best of the Poet Trilogy compilation, taking the cream of the crop
off all three. 

Womack to me was blessed with the swagger of Marvin Gaye and the vocal accentuation of Lionel Richie, and arguably that makes him better than the two of them. 

The record deal with Beverley Glen ended in acrimony due to a dispute between Womack and its owner Otis Smith, so subsequently there was never going to be a fourth album added to the three brilliant ones he had recorded, but it still doesn`t take the gloss

off what is really the last great definitive output of soul music like soul should sound, without any pop, hip hop, can music and industrial noise to wreck it. 

I am not the worlds greatest fan of soul music, blues and rock is my favourite disiplines, but Womack really had something
special back then. 

If Lionel Richie gets a bit boring and Marvin Gaye seems a bit `all over the show`, then I would highly recommend you get your hands on the compilation I am talking about. Soul doesn`t get much better.