Fortuitously #1

 

There’s a lovely line in Chronicles where Bob talks about a three-minute ballad that “made you stand straight up and stay right where you were. It’s like someone had pulled the cord to stop the train.” He wasn’t talking about ‘From the Cradle to the Blues’ by Margaret Lewis, but he could have been. Simultaneously sophisticated and raw, with Margaret’s phrasing a complete joy, if you can say that about a song that has such a bruised, brooding air about it: “It's a long, lonely road to travel and lose.”

‘From the Cradle to the Blues’ first appeared as the flipside of ‘Goin’ to St. Louie’ (“to get lost in a crowd, can't stand this silence, it's too doggone loud”), a 1959 single on the RAM label of Shreveport, Louisiana, run by Mira Smith who appears backing Margaret as Grace Tennessee, playing her electric blues guitar accompaniment for this rockabilly torch song. It is among many numbers composed by Mira with Margaret, something I first heard on a 1995 Ace CD Lonesome Bluebird, and with my limited knowledge of Margaret’s career I assumed it couldn’t be beaten. I was wrong.

Initially I discovered Margaret, I guess 20-odd years ago, on another Ace CD compilation, Good Girls Gone Bad, showcasing the distaff side of rockabilly, having been attracted to the striking cover shot of the remarkable Sparkle Moore. I recall being very taken with the Barbara Pittman tracks recorded for Sam Phillips, which led me to a Charly compilation (where I fell completely for her Charlie Rich written and produced number ‘Handsome Man’), and the three Margaret Lewis songs included got me to track down her Ace collection, back in the days when there were beautiful catalogues annually of the Ace family of labels’ releases.

While Margaret could really let rip with the wildest of them, like on the electrifying ‘Shake a Leg’, my passion from the start was for the sparse, moodier bluesy ballads Margaret released on RAM, like ‘Birmingham Valley Blues (“down on the levy on my knees, prayin' give my heart ease”), ‘You Can’t Break My Heart No More’, ‘Cheaters Can’t Win’ and ‘That’s Why I Cry’. She was barely out of her teens when she wrote and recorded these, but they were quite dark stuff. Isolated film noir scenes. But lovely. The kind of thing you like to imagine Jessica Pratt might have been listening to while dreaming up Here in the Pitch. I would pitch Margaret as an independent-minded Dorothy B. Hughes or Vera Caspary heroine catapulted into the rock ’n’ roll era.

The story of the RAM (or Royal Audio Music) label (and its offshoots including K Records, for those who like connections) is a fascinating one. Mira (or Myra) Smith was a massive music fan and in 1955, as she approached 30 years of age, decided to set up her own record company in her home town of Shreveport and put out the sort of blues and hillbilly sounds that she loved. There was something special happening and she wanted to be part of it. She didn’t just put out a whole batch of great records, though: she recorded many of them in a studio she built with the help of friends and family, which she wired herself. She had her own record shop too, and as a mean blues guitarist she would participate, billed as Grace Tennessee. Incidentally her own wild instrumental ‘Pow Wow’ is quite something.

I am pretty certain none of this was quite the done thing for young ladies to do as the 1950s became the 1960s. I don’t think it is far-fetched to pitch Mira and Margaret as pioneers. They were definitely upholding the spirit of Alexandra Bergson from Willa Cather’s novel, O Pioneers! They made one hell of a team with their rockin’ country, blues and original songs, to misquote Michael Head’s ‘Grace and Eddie’. Incidentally there was something naggingly familiar about the way Mira would pick the blues, which I eventually traced back to those nights spent listening to the John Peel show on a cheap transistor radio under the bedclothes as a kid, and that introductory theme, a track which I don’t think I ever heard all the way through or knew who it was by until now, but it’s always been there, at the back of my mind.  

For us romantics this all makes for a wonderful story. It must have been an exciting period, but it would also have been a tough time. Simple practical things would affect the success of RAM, like young single women were never going to get bank loans to enable them to grow and compete. So, when the harsh realities of the music business got the better of Mira, in 1962, and RAM was set aside, she kept working with Margaret Lewis. They hit the road, and apparently Margaret’s live sets were quite something: singing, dancing, drumming, all-action performances.

This led to a deal with Capitol for Margaret in 1963, for whom she recorded a few singles. But you get a sense something didn’t feel right, and I suspect the record company executives were not sure what to do with her, especially with the musical climate changing amid a drift for many from rock ’n’ roll to more conventional styles. Yet Margaret was so versatile. She effortlessly could do wild rockin’ gospel rave-ups, she could sing the ballads and blues, she could convincingly perform the more traditional country styles. So, perhaps surprisingly for the time, two-thirds of the Capitol output was composed by Mira and Margaret. This includes the gorgeous ballad ‘I Almost Called Your Name’ which would be frequently covered, including a great version by Freddy Fender the Be-Bop Kid. The best of the Capitol tracks for me is the 1965 b-side ‘If You Ever Wonder’ which has an almost Tijuana or Mariachi Brass feel which would have been in vogue at the time.

The middle of Margaret’s three Capitol singles was recorded on the day I was born. For addicts of connectivity, it was arranged by H.B. Barnum and produced by David Axelrod (or Dave as it says on the label, which doesn’t feel right). A little later Barnum and Axelrod would work with the Lewis Sisters, after their spells with Les McCann and then at Motown, at least indirectly by recording their ‘Stay With Your Own Kind’ with Patrice Holloway and H.B. himself would record their ‘Heartbreaker’ for Capitol. Just to confuse the issue Margaret and sister Rose had also recorded and performed as the Lewis Sisters, initially onstage as kids with Dale Hawkins and then on record for Chess / Checker.

Dale’s immortal signature tune, ‘Susie Q’, is one of the great examples of what M.E.S. described as “r’n’r as primal scream”, built around the astonishing guitar part by James Burton who in his early teens was part of the scene around Mira Smith’s RAM set-up, absorbing the wild blues records Mira had. Incidentally if you look on YouTube you can see a great clip of Dale Hawkins with Margaret Lewis performing Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring It On Home to Me’ live during a TV fundraiser from I would guess some time in the 1980s. 

That middle single Margaret made for Capitol features the full might of LA’s Wrecking Crew, including Carol Kaye, Earl Palmer and Leon Russell. A later integral part of the Wrecking Crew was bass player Joe Osborn who also started out playing guitar as part of the scene around RAM. Apparently, Mira Smith raised concerns with Capitol executives about production values. She was worried that Margaret’s recordings were losing their natural charm in major label studios. She had a point, one that sounds strangely familiar.

If you listen to ‘Raggedy Ann & Player Piano’ from the Axelrod session, with the distinctive piano part by Leon Russell, it’s cool. But if you listen to the earlier raw demo version on the Lonesome Bluebird compilation then that’s something else, with its pounding Jerry Lee keyboard part and the fun lyrics about a lady who kept on dancing when all hell was breaking out around her. That Ace CD had a whole host of other previously unreleased recordings by Margaret and Mira, all of which were amazing, including a cover of Elmore James’ ‘Dust My Blues’. Ray Topping did such great salvage and detective work on that set, one which formed part of a batch of RAM-related CDs he oversaw.

An updated version of the Margaret Lewis collection came out on Ace in 2019, shortly after she died. This one, Reconsider Me, came with a dozen-or-so different tracks, including some alternative demos and live recordings, plus many new great photos, including one of Margaret rippin’ it up live in 1961 with a 17-year-old Johnny Winter on guitar by her side. Johnny also played on some demos Margaret recorded in New Orleans around that time. The new collection dropped the Elmore James cover and added one of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Can’t Stand to See You Go’ plus a live version of Fats Domino’s ‘You Said You Love Me’ from the Shreveport radio show Louisiana Hayride in 1960 with Mira Smith trading electric blues guitar licks onstage with Billy Sanford just before he headed to Nashville and joined Roy Orbison’s band.

Margaret Lewis has spoken in interviews of how as a kid in Levelland, Texas she would haunt a local five-and-dime store which had boxes of old rhythm & blues or ‘race’ records which provided her musical education. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was an early favourite, and Ruth Brown was one of her idols. Fats Domino was another favourite of hers back then, and indeed she met her hero Buddy Holly at a concert by Fats in nearby Lubbock.

I like the way that for Margaret the blues was a living, breathing vibrant thing, rather than a fusty museum piece, not part of a quest for authenticity but about a life-enhancing joy. I sense that’s something that stayed with her judging by a lovely clip that is on YouTube of her singing a medley of some old Jimmy Reed numbers, with Joe Osborn on bass, at a memorial concert held in Shreveport after Dale Hawkins’ death in 2010.

After their time at Capitol in the mid-1960s Mira and Margaret took their fight to the home of all those Nashville Cats and were signed up by Shelby Singleton as staff writers. There were connections back to Shreveport where they had known Shelby and his wife, the Country singer Margie Singleton. As writers, the artist Mira and Margaret would be most closely linked with was Jeannie C. Riley who, following the success of her ‘Harper Valley P.T.A.’ on Shelby’s Plantation label, very much the right song for the right person at the right time, would record 20-or-so of the pair’s songs over the course of half-a-dozen perhaps surprisingly consistently appealing LPs in the three years after her big hit.

‘Harper Valley P.T.A.’, for me one of the great pop moments, prominently features the distinctive dobro playing of Jerry Kennedy, a classic case of something so wrong sounding so right. Jerry, also, had close connections to Shreveport and the RAM set-up, and he married Linda Brannon, a young contemporary of Margaret’s at the label. Linda’s RAM repertoire includes the excellent ballad ‘Just Another Lie’ which I think I am right in saying was written by Ernest Suarez or rather Roy ‘Boogie Boy’ Perkins, another RAM rocker who got his own CD compilation on Ace.

Jerry Kennedy is also a name I know from overseeing the often-astonishing recordings Charlie Rich made at Smash in the mid-1960s. In Peter Guralnick’s Feel Like Going Home Charlie and Margaret Rich speak highly of Jerry as a “ray of sunshine in a den of iniquity”. And he played on Blonde on Blonde. Imagine. Just imagine having a bad day and being able to look in the mirror and say: “Yeah, but I played my guitar on Blonde on Blonde.”

Jeannie’s success with Tom T. Hall’s ‘Harper Valley’ was part of a wave of late 1960s songs that were essentially social realism stories or mini-morality plays dealing with changing times. Margaret and Mira came up with one of the best examples of this, ‘The Girl Most Likely’, for the follow-up to ‘Harper Valley’. I confess I think it’s even better than ‘Harper Valley’ with its drivin’ beat and Jeannie at her barbed, stinging best on a song that deals with class prejudice and the dangers of making assumptions. And it really moves. It’s one to play alongside Laugh’s ‘Take Your Time Yeah’!

There is a fantastic clip, part of the documentary That Nashvillle Sound filmed in 1969, where Jeannie and her young backing group are performing ‘The Girl Most Likely’ in the grounds of Shelby’s home. Jeannie looks fantastic in a fringed suede jacket, and the band really has a garage bite, but the audience bewilderingly is pretty much catatonic until one brave soul starts madly dancing. All very odd.

Margaret and Mira’s songs could be kinda funny, kinda cute, biting, wise, sentimental, smart, sort of subversive, and were pretty widely recorded. How many other all-female songwriting teams were there in Nashville at that time? Very few, I suspect. So, again they were pioneers. Talking of which, also on Shelby’s Plantation label was Linda Martell whose name has come back into circulation via Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. Linda’s sole LP Color Him Father features a handful of Lewis and Smith compositions, including my personal favourite among these ‘Tender Leaves of Love’ (which, for my fellow addicts of connectivity, are blowin’ in the wind). The real highlight of the record though is the gorgeous title track, a cover of the Winstons’ beautiful song.

Another of Shelby’s labels SSS International would also be an outlet for Margaret and Mira’s songs. The best known of these may well be ‘Soulshake’, a 1968 hit for Peggy Scott and Jo Jo Benson which more recently appeared on the excellent Paul Weller compilation on Ace, Sweet Sweet Music. This is another track that features prominently Jerry Kennedy, on electric sitar this time but it is easy to make the connection to ‘Harper Valley P.T.A.’. Mira and Margaret must have been in their element with this song, making connections between the new soul sounds and the rockin’ blues that shaped them back in Shreveport.

The remarkable duo of Peggy and Jo Jo recorded a handful of Smith & Lewis compositions on each of the two LPs they made for SSS in 1968, and boy they could really let rip in such a glorious way. One odd thing about their two LPs is that they do not include any contemporaneous cover versions or reworkings of old classics, which is pretty rare for soul artists at that time. And some of their stuff was gloriously strange, especially with the sitar thing going on. Their default setting was a floorshakin’ juggernaut of sound, but when they slowed down and got tender, like on ‘Big City Blues’ and ‘’Til the Morning Comes’ you got a real sense of the emotional depths they could explore, and goodness me they could really emote.

Another soul singer who had success with songs by Mira and Margaret on SSS International was Johnny Adams, a name I immediately associate with volume 2 of Dave Godin’s Deep Soul Treasures which included Johnny’s SSS Int. recording of ‘If I Could See You One More Time’. Shelby Singleton’s stable of labels are well-represented on that amazing CD. Johnny’s ‘If I Could See You’ appeared as the flipside of his version of Mira and Margaret’s ‘Reconsider Me’. Taking a few wrong turnings on the Internet recently I came across a review of this in one of James Hamilton’s Record Mirror columns from August 1969, as you do.

Very neatly, it starts with news about the activities of “Dave Godin and fellow freaks at Soul City” then turns to Johnny Adams’ ‘Reconsider Me’ / ‘If I Could See You One More Time’ which was given a Polydor release in the UK. James notes that Johnny’s “voice soars to a high and beautiful falsetto in a way that will delight True Soul Freaks, who should hear this. Great.” 

A recording of Margaret singing ‘Reconsider Me’, what was arguably her most successful song, would not be released until 1980 when one appeared as the flip of the striking swamp blues of ‘Why Don’t Anybody Stay Home No More’ on a briefly reactivated RAM 45 credited to Lucy-Margaret Lewis. Jeannie C. Riley later recorded this one, with Margaret at the controls. And my goodness some of the words to this one are bleak in places:

“Sometimes I wonder how will it go when I am gone. Sometimes, Lord, I wonder will it go on and on and on? Pеople goin' around in circles. Gettin' nowhere mighty fast. Families breakin' up in pieces. Oh, we all know it can't last. And it's a sad, sad song when you ain't got no home.” Is that an echo of Charlie Rich’s ‘No Home’ at the end there? Could be. Might not be.

Anyway, I believe passionately that Margaret singing ‘Reconsider Me’ is one of the wonders of this lonesome old world, especially where she comes in with the line: “Hello baby, yes it’s really me!” Again, it’s pure film noir, and it is tempting to imagine Gloria Grahame saying that line when she turns up on the doorstep of an ex in the pouring rain one night.

If you look for Margaret Lewis recordings on YouTube it won’t be long before you come across posts by Arthur Warwick, who is better known as Alton Warwick and was Mira Smith’s cousin (and I believe grew up around Mira and her family, and even helped build the original RAM studio) and who later married Margaret at the start of the 1980s (he has joked that he always was a fast worker!). It should also be mentioned that Alton and Margaret seem to have been tireless campaigners to preserve, celebrate and reignite Shreveport’s musical heritage and spirit.

As a living tribute to his beloved wife, he has created an astonishing archive on YouTube of her recordings, spanning 50-odd years, many of which were never released. As he explains in one comment, when they were in Nashville Margaret and Mira would record demos of their songs in a studio Mira set-up in a house they shared. So, for example, they would record ‘Reconsider Me’ in the late 1960s, with Mira on guitar and Margaret on drums, singing and harmonising with herself. The rawness of the recordings work in their favour. My favourite discovery is their original demo of ‘Darkness Falls’, another song Jeannie C. Riley would record, with a great country meets rhythm & soul setting and another pure film noir theme.

There’s a line in ‘Reconsider Me’ about a sparrow with a broken wing at the door which, if you have a mind like mine, immediately connects to ‘Love Minus Zero’. Coincidentally or not, among Alton Warwick’s posts there is a recording of Margaret singing her ‘It’s Expected of Me’ illustrated by a photo of her with Bob Dylan. I am not sure of the date of the photo or the story behind it, but it looks like it was taken in shall we say ‘modern times’.

And I strongly suspect that at that time Margaret and Bob were very much on the same page musically, certainly judging by tracks Alton has shared from a CD Margaret (as Maggie Lewis Warwick) released in 1998 on a reactivated again RAM … But I Know What I Like. I guess in the slipstream of the Ace Lonesome Bluebird collection Margaret had rediscovered her rockin’ spirit and with some well-connected friends she made a set that makes me think of ‘Add Some Music’: “The Sunday mornin' gospel goes good with the soul / There's blues, folk, and country, and rock like a rollin' stone.”

Before that there was one other LP (credited to Maggie Warwick), 1989’s A Country Sunday Morning, which I think was a cassette-only release (though it is available digitally now) of bluegrass gospel recordings, possibly captured live for a cable TV show. This was Maggie with a band featuring on bass Tillman Franks who with Johnny Horton had been responsible for discovering her as a kid and putting her in contact with Mira Smith. There’s a sequence on this set that takes in ‘The Old Rugged Cross’, ‘Uncloudy Day’ and ‘Amazing Grace’, sacred songs one might never need to hear again but which Margaret sings with such astonishing pure passion that she could make a true believer out of a lost old sinner like me.

Just before this though there was a mysterious 1988 single ‘Love Colored Eyes’ on the Gumbo label, which looks self-released and sounds nice and raw. It’s credited to Warwick and Smith, with Margaret producing. This would have been a short time before Mira’s sad death, so I like to think it was a gift to her. I don’t know. I do know the flipside was a lovely cover of ‘Warm Your Heart’, an old Drifters with Clyde McPhatter number which, coincidentally or not, Aaron Neville would record shortly afterwards. That seems to bring us back to where we came in with Bob Dylan writing about recording Time Out of Mind in New Orleans.

Johnny Adams singing ‘Reconsider Me’ (with, I assume, Jerry Kennedy very present again) appears on another Kent CD, Southern Soul Showcase: Cryin’ in the Streets from 2005 (one I characteristically totally missed out on at the time) which rounds up some of the deeper and often slightly strange sounds released on Shelby Singleton’s SSS International group of labels from 1967-1970. There’s some familiar tracks on there, like George Perkins’ ‘Cryin’ in the Streets’ and Sam Dees’ ‘Lonely For You Baby’, and it doesn’t get any better than those two. The inclusion of recordings by Reuben Bell and Eddy Giles also provides a link to one of my most cherished Kent CDs, Shreveport Southern Soul: The Murco Story, which is a must-have, especially for the Dori Grayson tracks featured, particularly ‘I Can Fix That For You’ which I consider to be one of the greatest things ever.

Another astonishing Johnny Adams track on that Kent SSS Int. CD is his version of Margaret and Mira’s ‘I Want to Walk Through This Life With You’. There was an earlier, even more astonishing version, recorded for Sound Stage 7 by Ella Washington which Margaret refers to in an introductory note she wrote for the CD booklet. Margaret’s own haunting demo version appears at the end of the updated edition of her compilation on Ace. One of Margaret’s own recordings appears on another Kent CD, joining the dots nicely. Again, I have to admit I was unaware of this until recently, but the 2020 Saturday Night Special CD in Kent’s long-running New Breed R&B series features Margaret’s remarkable ‘Somethin’s Wrong Baby’.

This appeared on the flipside of a RAM 45 in 1961. The lead track was ‘John DeLee’, a sort-of supercharged traditional tune with a bit of Buddy Holly about it. It feels ancient, but the credits list Clyde Baum and Tillman Franks as composers, and I like to think it was Margaret’s own idea to include a reference to those brown-eyed handsome men. ‘John DeLee’ is delightful and irresistible but in no way prepares one for the flipside which is a wild R&B rave-up with Margaret at her fiercest, a track recorded in Nashville which feels way ahead of its time, with Mira’s arrangement a really wonderful nasty soul blast. And the crazy thing is I never even heard it until relatively recently as for some strange reason ‘Something’s Wrong Baby’ was left off the original Lonesome Bluebird compilation.

This wild track, now one of my favourite things ever, was composed by blues man Little Melvin Underwood, though his own recording of it did not surface until 1999 when Ace put out Red River Blues, mostly a collection of Shreveport blues recordings from RAM records. It’s a cool compilation, and I guess the big hit it includes is TV Slim’s original of his ‘Flat Foot Sam’ which would be taken up by Chess / Checker due to its success. Among the cover versions was one by local Shreveport rocker Tommy Blake of ‘F-Olding Money’ fame (to Fall fans at least).

Most of the tracks on the Shreveport blues collection are down at the mod R&B end of the blues spectrum, which suits me. I have no idea if any of the tracks made it to the Scene Club for the connoisseurs to shake their tailfeathers to. Probably not. And yet, Margaret Lewis’ ‘John DeLee’ / ‘Somethin’s Wrong Baby’ did somehow get a UK release on the madly eclectic Starlite label, a record company early modernists would have been familiar with, not least for the Jamaican ska 45s they were putting out, thanks to a deal with Chris Blackwell. So, maybe Guy Stevens did pick up a copy of Margaret’s single, misguidedly thinking there might be a connection to his hero Jerry Lee, and flipped it over and thought: “Wow!” Who knows?

What I do know is that my favourite recording by Johnny Adams is of Margaret and Mira’s ‘Georgia Morning Dew’, a sublime piece of country soul, one of those vogue-ish homesick blues songs. It was also covered by Michael Henry Martin on his 1971 Real ’n Funky LP on SSS, an album produced by Margaret Lewis and Mira Smith (and how many all-female production teams would there have been in Nashville back then?). I know very, very little about Michael, but the LP is great, although the title is a little misleading. It’s a real mixed-up collection, which I find fascinating. Some of it is straight old-school crooning, often on the country side, which is fine, but it gets really interesting when the material is more soulful and Michael gets deep down and, yes, funky, putting him I guess in Monumental Tony Joe White and Kris Kristofferson territory.

The arrangements are wonderful, with lots of subtle things going on in the background. Among the singers and players there’s old compadre Billy Sanford on guitar. And among the material is Bobby Scott and Danny Meehan’s ‘Virginia Born’, a companion piece to their ‘Willoughby Grove’ which Larry Jon Wilson would cover so movingly. Plus, there’s a great bluesy take on that old Drifters song, ‘Warm Your Heart’, which Margaret would return to. Apart from the beautiful rendition of ‘Georgia Morning Dew’ the real treasures worth seeking the LP out for are gorgeous takes on Bob’s ‘The Man in Me’ and ‘New Morning’ which are quite something, and gently, quietly are really funky and soulful.

Another production for SSS by Margaret and Mira is ‘Go Get It’ by Tyffany, a 1971 single by what I understand was an all-female group from Maine.  This maybe has something of Creedence Clearwater Revival about it, which really works. The song itself is a great, positive feminist anthem. The flipside is (yet) another recording of ‘I Want to Walk Through This Life With You’ with some lovely harmonies.

I have no idea what happened to Tyffany. I have a strong suspicion they recorded an earlier single with Margaret and Mira for the Sumpter label (that was Shelby Singleton’s middle name) as Helen’s Babies, 1969-ish, which featured a madly punky acoustic hoedown version of ‘Sugarmaker’, originally recorded by Peggy Scott & Jo Jo Benson. It is also a song Margaret would return to 30-odd years on in a rumbustious ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues’ way.

The only other record I am aware of that Margaret and Mira were involved with on Sumpter, apparently as part of a project to encourage new young talent, is a 45 by Flight 505, about whom I know nothing, but the lead side is a wild piece of funky garage punk called ‘I Love the Bass Man’. The flip, ‘The Port of New Orleans’, has more of a Creedence ‘Up Around the Bend’ feel which is fine by me. Both titles are credited to Margaret and Mira.

Jeannie C. Riley later recorded ‘Go Get It’ for her 1986 self-titled LP produced by Billy Strange. A year or two later Jeannie recorded several tracks with Margaret Lewis producing. I am not sure if these were ever released, but they have been shared on YouTube by Alton Warwick. Oddly, Margaret’s own recording of ‘Go Get It’ got a digital release early last year as a standalone track, intriguingly via RAM records.  Perhaps not surprisingly it’s the best version.

And then a few months later there appeared the How Would You Know collection which gathered together Margaret’s four singles for SSS International plus two bonus tracks. This was put out digitally by Sun Records which threw me at first until I remembered Shelby Singleton had bought up Sun at the end of the 1960s, so presumably over time SSS Int. has been absorbed as part of the Sun organisation as a more recognisable brand. I don’t know. I am aware that Shelby worked his new purchase hard in the 1970s, so I guess SSS Int. gradually took a backseat, which may be one reason Margaret and Mira disappeared from view after 1971 for the rest of the decade. Maybe they just had better things to do. Perhaps they stayed active. I would love it if they were.

Margaret’s own SSS debut in 1967 was ‘Kangaroo of Love’ which is great fun, and somewhere between Nancy Sinatra at her most waspish (Margaret was only a year older than Nancy, interestingly) and the punky sneer that Jeannie C. Riley would adopt. It’s a tale of someone who’s hit the big time and has turned his back on the old love who offered him so much support at the start, with Margaret in an exaggerated Southern accent disdainfully declaring: “May the kangaroo of love kick your face”. It’s the sort of thing Morrissey might have included among his selections for an NME ‘Portrait of the Artist as Consumer’ piece back in 1983, but not later. And yes, there was the obligatory promo pic of Margaret with Shelby and a marsupial.

Once again there is a sense that SSS Int. didn’t really know what to do with Margaret and again some might say she was too versatile for her own good. But some of these recordings are among the best things ever, particularly where she is allowed to get really soulful. Three tracks in particular I rate incredibly highly. The (previously unreleased) title track ‘How Would You Know’ and ‘Stop Look Around’ (the flipside of ‘Kangaroo’) are irresistible soul sides with a definite Country feel. Do I detect the hand of Mira here in the production and arrangements? Maybe. Either of these two tracks could grace a Kent CD collection or Northern Soul session and hold their heads up high.

Strangely, for someone who would be part of the label’s songwriting staff, Margaret’s last two singles for SSS were covers. One was ‘Mrs Cooper’s Tea Party’, a Tom T. Hall satirical special, presumably in the wake of the success of ‘Harper Valley’. The other is a reworking of Bobby Goldsboro’s then recent hit ‘Honey (I Miss You)’ from the female perspective with a lovely twist at the end. The flipside of that is the incredible ‘Milk and Honey’, one of Margaret and Mira’s, with a sumptuous orchestral arrangement by Don Tweedy. It may not satisfy all of Dave Godin’s criteria for deep soul, but it is a remarkably emotional performance of a song that I can imagine Timi Yuro or Walter Jackson having a whale of a time with. Or Elvis. Especially Elvis. But none of that’s going to happen. So, Margaret’s recording is, for me, the best thing ever at the moment.