Willie Hightower: Willie Hightower : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In his hometown of Gasden, Alabama, long-lost Sixties soul singer Willie Hightower is still singing lyrics like these in local clubs: "My friends get invited to those fancy balls/But nobody gives me a call." The phone has started to ring again for Hightower, however: Damon Albarn's label has issued Willie Hightower, an excellent collection of eighteen Southern-soul tracks from the singer's first bloom in the Sixties. Hightower has a gritty, gospel-reared tenor that recalls Sam Cooke after a night of bourbon and cigarettes. Hightower -- which combines Hightower's 1969 Capitol album If I Had a Hammer and three singles released on Fame in 1970 -- displays the singer's debt to Cooke with a cover of "You Send Me" and the hopeful "Time Has Brought About a Change," an obvious tribute to "A Change is Gonna Come." The highlight is a cover of Joe South's "Walk a Mile in My Shoes," produced by Rick Hall and recorded at Fame Studios. It's a chugging, horn-powered anthem that cuts to the quick of race relations in the post-Jim Crow South and has lost none of its bite. "Mile" has the earthy power of some of the greatest Muscle Shoals music, and that's mighty fine company indeed. The best part of this discovery? Hightower is working on a new album.