This is a welcome vinyl reissue of a super rare 1971 Back Beat album, one that many deep soul experts consider the holy grail. Essentially it was just assembled just to piggyback the success of threeO. V. Wright singles. It contained only 10 songs and had one of the least imaginative album jackets ever. And doesn’t even mention Backbeat’ spelling of “Nickle” on the back cover. Nevertheless, this LP ranks alongside Bobby Bland’s Two Steps From the Blues, Otis Redding’s Dictionary of Soul and James Carr’s A Man Needs A Woman.

Hailing from Memphis, like most great soul artists, Wright started out singing gospel and he could worry a note like no other singer. Case and point is the opener, “Don’t Let My Baby Ride,” a shameless rework of the Thunderbolt of the Mid West, Brother Joe May’s “Don’t Let the Devil Ride.” If Wright’s arrangement sounds familiar, it’s because the rhythm section played a similar, catchy one they coped from a Slim Harpo session they had recently worked on. Likewise “Born All Over” came right out of church. What can one say about “Ace of Spades” and who couldn’t listen to Wright’s signature back-to-back for an hour? But to underline the slapdash approach of Back Beat, owned by the notorious Houston gangster Don Robey, and the label’s eagerness to get the album out, they included “Eight Men, Four Women” here. It’s a great song and a hit, but it was recorded five years before this LP was released and the song was on both of Wright’s previous albums, which also sported equally unimaginative covers. Side two begins with “I Can’t Take It,” which couldn’t have been more emotive. If you ever lose someone you love, this song will take you to another place. The next track is “Afflicted,” a song that caused an unexpected reaction in New Orleans. The song was getting heavy airplay on Black radio stations here and it created a demand for an “Afflicted” single, but it existed only on LP.

Local record man Senator Jones solved the problem though and had Charles Brimmer record a spot-on cover of “Afflicted” which was released on a Hep’ Me 45 r.p.m. Through local record shops and juke box operators, Jones claimed he sold 30,000 “Afflicted” singles in the area. The head turner here is “A Nickel and a Nail” though, and I’ll say this with a straight face: Memphis soul never got better than this. Not by Johnnie Taylor, not by Al Green, not even by Otis Redding. Speaking of the Big O, “Don’t Take It Away,” the closer, interestingly gets support from the Memphis Horns, who supply an arrangement hauntingly close to what they were laying down on Redding’s Stax releases a few years earlier.

If you have a vinyl record player and dig the sound, there’s no two ways about it, you need to go and get this album PDQ.

If not, borrow or buy one, that’s how great O.V. Wright album is. Or as Robey aptly stated on the back cover, “Try it—You’ll Like It.”