Lost hearts
The greatest soul singer you’ve never heard of reissued for the first time. By Lois Wilson.
George Scott ★★★★★ Find Someone To Love REAL GONE MUSIC. LP
GEORGE SCOTT is one of soul music’s mystery men. Growing up dirt poor in Pineland, South Carolina, the eighth of nine children, on the strength of this, his one solo LP from 1971, he deserved to be a star. Find Someone To Love is not just a great ‘lost’ soul album but a great soul album full-stop. And yet straight after its recording Scott disappeared, never to be heard of again. (He’s not – as cited elsewhere – the George Scott who co-founded The Blind Boys Of Alabama.)
Produced by Atlanta’s Johnny Brantley and issued on Brantley’s Maple label, Find Someone To Love got some radio airplay from DJ Eddie O’Jay – he provided the short linernotes on the original release – but then disappeared like Scott. The album is known today, if at all, for featuring a pre-fame Jimi Hendrix on one track: the Billy LaMont-scribed Sweet Thang, a blistering funk number recorded in ’66 with Lonnie Youngblood on horn.
Scott, a screamer in the mould of Maple label-mate Lee Moses, clearly is the full package, delivering a tough, Southern-styled soul, his raw vocal fraught and urgent, framed by roughedged R&B garage rhythms. These 10 tracks mark him out as an Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett in the making.
Half of the songs are written by brothers Edward Lewis and James Tony Lewis with Marion Farmer, producer Brantley’s go-to songwriting team at Maple – they provided Lee Moses with his scorched earth signature Time And Place. Of these, Why Is It Taking So Long, I’m A Fool For You and My Neighborhood are all devastating heartbreakers, the first-named recorded by Nate Adams in ’67 on Atlantic. Adams’ version is good, but here, Scott’s on-the-edge-of-breakdown gospel hits like a sucker punch: “Please let me back in,” he sobs.
Other tracks are equally impactful; in Scott’s hands, Jimmy Norman’s Family Tree is a Northern soul dancer, perfect for night-time kicks, while This Aching Heart is a James Brown-styled slab of Live At The Apollo show-stealing.
But it’s the fierce, energetic title track that sees Scott at his electrifying best. Written by Brantley and James Lewis, who had previously recorded a more tame version with The Ohio Players in ’68, Find Someone To Love captures the explosive spontaneity of an improvised vamp, an emotional delirium driven by smarting horns, lively guitar and topped with Scott’s fervent shout-outs to Johnnie Taylor and Wilson Pickett.
The mystery surrounding George Scott is likely never to be solved but his LP, reissued for the first time on (green) vinyl, can finally reach the audience it deserves.