Old School: Soul Man Willie Jones Has "Fire In My Soul" On Comeback Album, Welcomes Frank Black, Steve Cropper and Felix Cavaliere

Item: Old School: Soul Man Willie Jones Has "Fire In My Soul" On Comeback Album, Welcomes Frank Black, Steve Cropper and Felix Cavaliere
Author: Joe Marchese

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for a special news bulletin: Willie Jones, vocalist for The Five Jokers back in the early 1960s, has returned to recording for the first time in decades! His new solo album, Fire in My Soul, arrived this week in the U.K. from Cherry Red Records’ Shout! label, and we’re happy to report that it’s a treat for vintage soul enthusiasts!

Much has been made of today’s crop of “neo-soul” artists, fusing organic elements of traditional R&B into more contemporary grooves. But one modern soul revivalist was actually there at the ground floor: “Willie Jones was the first guy to sing rhythm and blues in Detroit,” said soul singer par excellence Bettye LaVette. “Everybody in the world would come down to watch [Willie’s group] The Royal Jokers. They did, and said, ‘I can do that’ and off they went and made a lot of money, and nobody in Detroit offered a kind of leg-up to Willie that he needed to get his career going.” Yet miraculously, nearly 60 years after Jones first appeared on Atlantic Records, the veteran soul man has reappeared with Fire in My Soul via Cherry Red’s Shout! imprint. Its fifteen robust tracks harken back to classic R&B and gutbucket southern soul but with a vibrant edge befitting the 77-years young singer.

The vocal instrument – an expressive tenor – that led Jones to establish himself as a popular recording artist at Atlantic and a host of independent labels in the early days of popular R&B is largely undiminished despite the passage of time. Jones is joined by a core rhythm section of album producer and multi-instrumentalist Jon Tiven on keyboards, saxophone and guitar and Sally Tiven on bass plus a rotating line-up of drummers including Anton Fig, Simon Kirke, Chester Thompson, Harry Stinson, Darrell Peyton, Tariq Snare and Greg Morrow. “I’ve got a fire in my soul and I just can’t put it out,” he sings on the funky title track, a collaboration with Stax legend Steve Cropper and the Young Rascals’ Felix Cavaliere. Cropper and Cavaliere, who co-wrote the track with Tiven, contribute their signature guitar and keyboards, respectively, to the song as well as to “In the Wind.” (The pair have previously issued two joint albums, 2008’s Nudge It Up a Notch and 2010’s Midnight Flyer. The contemporary blues-soul approach of those projects is echoed here.) Black Francis, a.k.a. The Pixies’ Frank Black, joins Jones on the big, honking soul stew of “Janie, Turn It Over.”

Bettye LaVette, for whom Jones wrote the Atlantic single “Shut Your Mouth” in 1962, pays tribute to her old friend with a typically soul-deep vocal – and even a bit of rap – on “Without Redemption” (“Without redemption, all human goodness fails/Without redemption, there is no peace…”) penned by Jones, Tiven and LaVette with poet-lyricist Stephen John Kalinich, best-known for his collaborations with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Kalinich also co-wrote “Janie” and the brassy, up-tempo “Troubled World” on which Jones duels with Tiven’s searing guitar. Another special guest on Fire in My Soul is Jon Auer of The Posies and Big Star. Auer co-wrote and plays both guitar and keyboards on the rueful “Scar B4 I Bruise” (“They gave me a pillow to sleep on/But I had to make my own bed of nails...”). “Reasons” is similarly dark, though the arrangement has an Allen Toussaint vibe to it. “Add It Up” is a slow blues-flecked scorcher that would have fit snugly in the Otis Redding songbook.

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There’s a delicious snarl in Jones’ voice as he rides the tight grooves of “Your Lies” and “The Road from Rags to Riches” and confidence and lust on the May-December romance “Don’t Mean a Damn” which evokes “Everyday People” by way of Muscle Shoals. “Keep Your Head On” is a moody ballad in which Jones laments with a note of pain, “It’s such a struggle to keep my head on straight…” There are some lighter moments, though, as on “Rollin’ and Smokin’” in which Jones gets behind the wheel of his “cherry red Cadillac” (a tip of the hat to his label?) in the “groovy scene” of California in pursuit of some “green” – prescription, naturally – from his doctor! It's high times where Willie is concerned: “I’m burning up the grass ‘til I run out of gas,” Jones gleefully croons to the accompaniment of rollicking piano. “Shaddup and Drive” is breezy rock-and-roll.

Fire in My Soul is accompanied by a fine package with the same customary quality Shout! affords its usual slate of reissues. Clive Richardson supplies a few pages of very welcome liner notes filling in some of the gaps in Jones’ history, though decades of the singer’s life – the 30-year period between his Wingate single in 1966 and his return to performing with The Royal Jokers in 1966 – still remain shrouded in mystery. The album has been mastered by Simon Murphy at Another Planet Music.

Willie Jones’ Fire in My Soul might be the most unexpected comeback yet of 2014. Fans of vintage soul will find plenty to like in this exuberant collection from a singer who isn’t yet ready to deliver his final shout.

Willie Jones, Fire in My Soul (Shout! 82, 2014) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. )