James Carr - You Got My Mind Messed Up import

As well as being a seminal soul 45, YGMMMU is - for this writer - one of the greatest soul albums of all time, period, if only for the fact that it includes both the title track and everybody's #1 deep soul selection The Dark End Of The Street. Most people I know would happily shell out for an album that included just these two tracks - myself included. James being among the top two or three soul singers of all time - equalled only, in this man's opinion, by his late brothers in soul Otis Redding and O.V. Wright - there's no way things could be otherwise.

Even if you have some of this material elsewhere, there's little likelihood that you'll have it in the kind of sound quality that it comes in here. For a start, virtually all the tracks have been mixed, from the original Goldwax multitracks, into stereo by obsessive JC fan and all-round good bloke Rob Keyloch. (The original YGMMMU album and the Goldwax 45s were all originally released in mono). I should stress that these tracks are "mixed" rather than "remixed" - Rob has faithfully followed the template of the original mono 45s, and in doing so he has created mixes that couldn't sound any more true to the music if Goldwax founder Quinton Claunch had fashioned them himself, in Sam Phillips' studios on Memphis' Madison Avenue, in 1967.

Outside of the studio James may have been a fully paid-up member of life's walking wounded club (and if you didn't already know this, the excellent sleeve notes by respected author Barney Hoskyns will tell you James' sad story in full). In front of a mike, though, he was always on the money and seldom less than unbeatable, whatever he chose to sing. (Sadly, we'll never know how he might have sounded doing the phone book, but you can bet it would have been a killer version!)

Here is one great singer, singing a pile of great songs.