Raven Records, Australia's finest reissue label, has done it again with this fine volume of material by the late and utterly great (as well as criminally underappreciated) Eddie Hinton. For the uninformed, Hinton was a guitarist, composer, and singer at Muscle Shoals, one of its core of relied-upon session men. He recorded with everyone from the Staple Singers to Solomon Burke to R.B. Greaves to Boz Scaggs. He also cut a lot under his own name, but never found an audience despite being an authentic R&B kingpin. This ...
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Raven Records, Australia's finest reissue label, has done it again with this fine volume of material by the late and utterly great (as well as criminally underappreciated) Eddie Hinton. For the uninformed, Hinton was a guitarist, composer, and singer at Muscle Shoals, one of its core of relied-upon session men. He recorded with everyone from the Staple Singers to Solomon Burke to R.B. Greaves to Boz Scaggs. He also cut a lot under his own name, but never found an audience despite being an authentic R&B kingpin. This collection of cuts relies on all previously released material, the majority of it from the '70s and '80s. There are, however, three cuts from the Coleman-Hinton Project, a short-lived band/songwriting workshop, that went unreleased until after Hinton died and were released on CD in 1995. The cuts from Capricorn's Very Extremely Dangerous, recorded live in their studios in 1978, are utterly brilliant, and they -- including the original "I Got the Feeling" -- open the set. The gorgeously gritty "Hymn for Lonely Hearts," from 1980, was issued by Europe's Zane label in 2000. Then there's the true stunner: 1980's "My Searching Is Over," which was on Letters from Mississippi. Hinton's final two recordings for Rounder, the wonderful Cry & Moan from 1991 and the spotty but nonetheless worthwhile Very Blue Highway, are also represented here by four cuts, the title track of each being the most satisfying and showing that Hinton had both vocal and guitar chops to spare to the very end. This is a fine introduction to one of the South's true musical treasures. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi
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