Garethx

That's a fantastic photograph of Tommy Tate on the album cover. An essential purchase, I think.

Jerry Long is quite a famous Motown staff arranger: perhaps his most famous arrangement was The Temptations Just My Imagination.

I agree with Tony. Searling etc. cherry-picked tracks which were already huge on an existing, quite separate scene.

Is there any substance to the rumour that Mr. Paris was a Japanese American? Fascinating to see apparent confirmation of the involvement of what looks like the entire staff and roster of Motown's West Coast office, though. You can see how the very polished production came about. Doc is an interesting label. I'm only aware of this 45 and the Sandy Wynns classic. Are there any more releases? The Pennsylvania address would seem to be a diversionary tactic to put people on the wrong scent when looking for moonlighting Motown staff.

Something of a classic indeed on that scene. A really good example as well in that it illustrates the point about rhythmic restraint which Jordi makes above and which a lot of these records have. They tend to be syncopated without being too funky. There is usually a gloss to the production which marks a record out as having two-step potential.

A quick look at Popsike reveals that most of the copies on there are vinyl. I suppose the point I was trying to make was that it does exist on styrene too.

Two Step, like Crossover seems to mean lots of things to lots of people all over the world. The context in which you're referring to it here would be the slick, sometimes orchestrated urban soul of the late 70s and 80s which found favour with the more soul-oriented end of the reggae blues party scene in London, Sheffield, Manchester etc. at the time. A lot of the records played at the time had a pronounced accent on the on-beat: hence the term two-step. Classic two-step tracks that will be familiar to most soul fans are things like Starvue "Body Fusion" or The Three Pieces "If Only I Could Prove To You". These two are pretty-much definitive anthems (alongside a thousand more) but give a fairly good idea of the two step sound at its best. Like all scenes though there are records played which don't have anything in common with these musically. Rather like Northern it can be a broad church, but in the main it is the type of orchestrated, melodic dance music pioneered in the early 70s by the likes of Curtis Mayfield, Leroy Hutson etc. Of course the term also applies to a lot of other scenes as well. There is a two-step component of the UK garage scene, for instance, which tend to be the lighter and more melodic end of that music, but I think when you see two-step or stepper on a soul record list it will refer to records of the type above.

Nice thing about the Canadian copies of Donald Jenkins is that they're on vinyl. The Cortland release was a more than reasonably-sized local hit and must have sold thousands of copies, so really not rare at all. I agree that you see more copies of The Shufflers than Jay & The Shufflers. The white dj copy of the latter would seem to me the trickiest way to get this 45, but again I would hardly classify any variant as particularly rare. A great record, though. Covered as Derek Martin by G.H. I wonder if it had been spun anywhere on the scene before this? I can imagine it going down a storm in the R&B clubs of London, Manchester etc. as a new release.

Fantastic prices on all of these.

Bear in mind this was a few years ago, Jason. The 45 was hawked around the usual suspects who already had a copy. Beyond them there tends to be a vacuum of people willing to shell out large swathes of cash on a sound that may either: 1. not work on the dancefloor; or 2. turn out to be not rare enough to demand such a pricetag. Halo has undeniably become a bit more of a 'known' record in the interim so maybe might fetch the two grand mark again. The period before it filters down from the handful of people who would pay £2,000 for a virtual unknown into the domain where the wider collecting scene becomes aware and receptive to paying a huge price is one where potential bargains are to be had.

The price hike of the Bobby Williams 45 is a puzzling one. Manship's one was a demo, which is arguably a lot harder than the issue, which I maintain is not a rare record in any sense of the word. In fact, there's been a copy on practically every major monthly soul mail order list since I started collecting over twenty years ago (starting at around £10 on Soul Bowl in the early 80s) and the stream of issue copies shows no signs of abating yet. Is it in-demand as a dance sound again? I hardly think so. Great record, but £350 seems madness. Pricing records according to what 'trophy-hunters' (not my words) are prepared to pay is fraught with difficulty. Take the Halo 45 mentioned in another post here yesterday. Sums in the region of £2,000 were paid by a few individuals to become one of the first to have and play the record, but once such people had it the price in the real world was much harder to gauge: a friend of mine found one in Washington DC a few years ago and actually had great difficulty shifting it at any price on his return to the UK. If a copy of Halo appeared on here priced at £2,000 it simply would not sell. The figures that rank and file collectors are prepared to pay should determine the price of a record rather than one-off auction results.

On looking at my post again I think it looks a bit confrontational: this wasn't my intention, so apologies Toby if you felt I was being unfair. At the time the topic was in the sales section and I thought there are just too many questions over this particular record for it to go to sale without discussing it. I have my doubts over whether a Candi/Chavis record would have been test-pressed at Bell Sound in New York. Has anyone else got a genuine Bell Sound acetate of any of this group of labels releases? Major New York labels or any of the larger independents such as Jubilee: yes. But a small label from Wilmington? I don't know. The first post states that the other side is blank, but the scan shows it has a track with a run out. A lot of acetates which are blank on one side tend not to have any label at all on that side (though not all, as these kind of records are far from an exact science, maybe the whole point). The blank side therefore becomes a very convenient canvas on which to cut a naughty acetate of a big sound. If the record was bought in the US I would be more prepared to believe it was genuine. If it were found in the UK doubts would start to creep in. This particular title has been in-demand for over twenty five years here and by the early 80s people were already going beyond simple emidiscs when pressing acetates of in-demand titles: sometimes going to great lengths as seen by the scan of The Ringleaders TP in the topic last week (I'm not referring to the genuine Ringleaders discs being auctioned by John Manship but the alternative scan as posted on Benji's site which had the correct serial number but which looked totally unlike the authentic discs). As for the credits being hand-written as opposed to typed: again, there are no hard and fast rules on this; I too have seen both variants on Bell Sound discs. On a related note: what does everyone think the Mel Britt acetate on ebay will go for? Enough about that suggests it's genuine. Completely unplayable but a fascinating part of Northern Soul history, I would have thought.

What makes you think it's a genuine, original acetate? The Bell Sound label looks like it's been peeled off another disc and stuck on this one. Would this recording ever have been previewed on a Bell Sound disc? I don't want to appear awkward or uncharitable, but provenance is everything with these types of records. Collectors have been having Northern monsters cut to existing blank acetates for decades. They've been cutting their own acetates and slapping well known manufacturers labels on them to make them look 'authentic'.

Could this situation not be sorted in a one-to-one conversation with the seller? Bringing the matter to the attention of the forum before the dealer's had a chance to discuss the matter with the customer seems counterproductive to me.

You are, of course, correct Pete. I must say I've played the soundfile of the Connie Stevens 45 on Bell that John Manship's auctioning quite a lot. The kind of record that should in theory make the Northern Soul scene a bit of a laughing stock but is actually quite brilliant in its own way. I think it would take a brave deejay to play it out in this day and age but, as JM says, this could have been absolutely massive in the heyday of the Casino or Cleethorpes Pier.

Why would or should anyone have a reason to hate (as in the title of the thread) this magnificent piece of soul music by one of the greatest vocalists to ever draw breath?

There's a version on Youtube by Harold Payne (the song's writer) which gives a measure of the mighty job Womack did with the raw material.

Womack's version of this is the only one worth bothering about. A pleasant pop song taken to the limit with a truly great BW vocal and, crucially, the harmonies which all other versions miss by a mile. Kelly Rowland's version is strictly karaoke.

A few copies on gemm.com. Think Rob 'Hip City' Messer's selling one on there for about 30 quid.

Isn't it Roy Hamilton's version of Reach Out For Me from the RCA Victor lp which features the "tell me, tell me, tell me" ending? Lou's version of The Panic Is On is very interesting and always sounded good when Ady played it out. At home it sounds a bit unfinished when compared to Roy Hamilton's epic. Still great to hear his voice on anything though. I've stated here before that I feel he was a vital piece in the jigsaw of early soul, as his phrasing and power was far more down home than Roy Hamilton, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke etc. In that way he really paved the way for the success of, for example, Otis Redding.

In the "classic album" market condition is everything. Bear in mind that there are people beyond the narrow confines of the soul scene who collect these titles as well: a quick look at popsike yields results like a sealed, non-cutout copy of the Superfly album sold for over $200.

While I agree there are any amount of used copies around at £20 I still maintain that a sealed gatefold copy of "Curtis" on US original would easily fetch fifty quid any day of the week.

A sealed version for 11.99 is likely to be a re-issue. A sealed original would be around £50+. I think the full version of Move On Up is one of the most amazing records ever made, which hasn't dated one day since it was made. The single version (while great) sounds kind of incomplete to my ears.

I'm not a fan. I find his production style to be the poor man's version of the Philly sound. His voice, while certainly distinctive was one of the most limited instruments in black music. For that reason his stuff tends to work best when in the hands of female singers: Love Unlimited, Gloria Scott etc.

Tim Brown reviewed it in one of his mags a few years ago, with the observation that it was quite a rare record. He went for the Disturbing Thoughts side of the record, which is almost there for me, but maybe doesn't have enough of the roaring tenor lead (Wes Wells?) who features prominently on many of their best sides.