For those faithful few of you still keeping score, these are numbers 25 and 27 in the Backbeats series and there are only a few more Backbeats albums to go before we will have covered all forty-two discs in the series. Featured on today's albums, both of which were released in 2011, are "ghetto grooves" and "mid-tempo soul gems" so let's get down to it, shall we?
One of my all-time favorite songs happens to appear on Bustin' Out: Bobby Womack's tuneful "Across 110th Street" originally written for the soundtrack of a 1972 movie by the same name. It was later tagged by Quentin Tarantino for the opening scene of his film Jackie Brown. The track has a slightly more melodic and laid back vibe to its funky contemporary, Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly" but both songs can often be found back to back on certain playlists of mine, none of which contain the word blaxploitation in their titles.
It is a sad, hard truth that more than half of the songs on these two albums are in digital licensing limbo and cannot be heard on Spotify. Two dozen songs waiting to be rediscovered by someone somewhere somehow in Summertime. Dean Rudland compiled Bustin' Out with tracks from 1968-1976 while Sean Hampsey compiled They Call It Crossover mined tracks from 1969-1979 - both men have several other volumes in the Backbeats series under their collective compilation and curation belts. The surprise track for me on the latter album is "What A Lovely Way" by Jackie Wilson, a rarely heard, late career album cut from 1971.
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