R&B: From Doo-Wop To Hip-Hop

CBS Records (now Sony Music) didn't make a concerted effort to woo the black pop marketplace until the early '70s, so its catalog of R&B and soul was fairly thin until the advent of Sly and the Philly Sound. But that's not to say its labels--particularly OKeh--didn't release some true classics of the genre pre-Family Stone. Just because the corporate powers that be allowed great protorockers such as the Treniers and Roy Hamilton to be largely ghettoized in the '50s is no excuse to miss them now. Or that you shouldn't hear balladeer Walter Jackson's towering, elegant, grateful-to-bursting "My Ship Is Comin' In" (1967) due to the company's lousy promotion of the disc at the time. Despite whatever sins are to be atoned for (including Sony's ego-tripping series Soundtrack to a Century, this set's raison d'être, From Doo-Wop to Hip Hop does tickle one's historic imagination by bringing together raucous touchstones such as "I Put a Spell on You" (in its slightly snipped version) and "Bring the Noise" and smooth ones such as "Me and Mrs. Jones" and "Pony." --Rickey Wright