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Album Details

• Artist: Guitar Slim
• Album: The Legends of Specialty Series
• Label: Specialty Records
• Year of Release: 1991
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: jpenso on 2005-03-18

After WWII Art Rupe created Specialty Records as one of the very first independent labels to concentrate on black popular music. Over the years Specialty released albums by some of Rock and Roll's most influential figures such as Little Richard and Sam Cooke; even Ray Charles worked as a session pianist and created arrangements. Guitar Slim was certainly one of these groundbreaking artists but maybe not as recognized because he passed long before many of us were even born, but certainly many artists we listen to today can trace their influences back to Guitar Slim. For those amateur musical scholars out there this was the type of music that led on to inspire the artists of the British Invasion that cherished and collected albums from record labels such as Chess and specialty that would later become the blueprint for the musical landscape of the following 20 years. In this collection we get a very nice cross section of Guitar Slim's recordings at while at Specialty. Starting with his very first hit "The Things That I Used to Do" with Ray Charles on the piano, probably one of the biggest R&B hits of all time. The rest of the album shows the great ability that Slim had with both words and the guitar. The lyrics flow beautifully and his voice adds great emotion, his guitar always with gain high enough that it probably cost a fortune in broken tubes, highly expressive and extremely versatile. The musical styles range from blues to R&B to soul and Rock and Roll, Slim ran the gamut of post war musical styles excelling at each of them. Slim left a great imprint on music that would be heavily influential for years. Specialty does something nice with the version of record I own by adding ten songs and on a few songs they even left some of the conversations between Slim and the producer a nice touch adding to the anthology feeling of the record. Guitar Slim was definitely one the most influential artists in the history of music and this album is definitely a great pick up for anyone's collection.

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