2. The J.B.s
Before I discovered James Brown, I knew about The J.B.’s and this song. It was a massive tune in our house every year. It was a big family record, a big party record too. In fact, most of the songs I’m choosing on this Baker’s Dozen list are from that era because they were my formative years, going from childhood into puberty, when I was going out and buying records.
Actually, my late grandmother was living in America for many years and she would periodically send my dad the R&B top ten because she knew my dad was into music. That was a great help into getting me into other, lesser artists at the time. But we now had those records of that particularly genre in our house. These days it’s called northern soul, but the tastes in our house were pretty much more mainstream. The biggest-selling artists in the R&B sphere would have been Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Otis Redding and all the Motown stuff.
