More Sweet Soul

When Arthur Conley's More Sweet Soul album was released in February 1969, it had only been a little less than a couple of years since his monster smash Sweet Soul Music had entered the charts. Though he'd been unable to maintain the commercial momentum of that classic soul single, the intervening period had hardly been devoid of chart success, with one of his singles (Funky Street) making the Top Twenty, and another (Shake, Rattle & Roll) cracking the Top Forty. He'd also participated in the 1968 single by Atlantic's short-lived soul supergroup the Soul Clan, also including Solomon Burke, Don Covay, Ben E. King, and Joe Tex. More Sweet Soul itself had a couple singles that barely missed the R&B Top Ten. Yet the LP would turn out to be Conley's last long player for Atlantic, though the company would issue a few subsequent singles. Conley had done sessions at Stax Studios in Memphis, American Studios (also in Memphis), and Fame Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals before More Sweet Soul was assembled. It was little surprise, then, that the recording of the album was roughly evenly divided between Fame and American. Producing was Tom Dowd, the famed Atlantic engineer who'd also handled those duties for all but two of the tracks on Conley's previous album, Soul Directions (also reissued on CD by Collectors' Choice Music). Musicians on the Fame part of the proceedings included Muscle Shoals stalwarts David Hood (bass), Barry Beckett (keyboards), Roger Hawkins (drums), and Jimmy Johnson (guitar). Also present was a young guitarist named Duane Allman, then picking up work as a session musician prior to the launch of the recording career of the Allman Brothers. The blues-rock phrasing for which Allman would become known is most audible on Stuff You Gotta Watch and That Can't Be My Baby, but can be clearly heard on several other cuts as well, including the most well known one on the LP, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.