Major Lance had a brief time in the sun as a top soul performer. He owed a lot of his success to the fact that he almost exclusively recorded songs written by his boyhood friend Curtis Mayfield.
His career tapered off in the late 60s and he moved to England in the 70s to take advantage of his popularity there. He stopped recording in the 80s but continued to tour.
This compilation of his best work is really terrific — there just isn’t a bad cut on it. As you can see from the picture above, Paul McCartney was spinning it in 1964 when it was brand new — he brought a copy back to England after The Beatles’ triumphant tour of The States that year. He knew cool when he heard it.
I tracked the album down, in a new pressing on 180-gram vinyl, after identifying it in this picture, and it was worth the effort. I strongly suspected that it would be.
Click on the images to enlarge.
Excellent detective work in tracking down the LP that Paul was holding!
Once I figured out that there were a couple of “um”s in the title, It narrowed the search considerably.