Within the mid-Eighties, when Charley Delight was in between file contracts, he went right into a Dallas studio with an all-star solid of space musicians to file a sequence of songs by Brook Benton. He supposed to show the undertaking right into a tribute album to the R&B mainstay and “Wet Night time in Georgia” singer.
“He liked Brook Benton’s writing and his songs,” Rozene Delight, Charley Delight’s widow, recollects. “He had enjoyable. It was a pleasure to do that album.”
In the end, the undertaking by no means noticed the sunshine of day, winding up on a reel in storage till 2017 — three years earlier than Delight’s demise at 86, following a profession spanning greater than six a long time and 40 Quantity One hits. Final month, the gathering, titled Endlessly: A Tribute to Brook Benton, lastly obtained its worldwide launch.
The ten-track album attracts closely upon the music Benton launched early in his profession. A lot of the songs topped, or flirted with the highest, of the R&B charts. “It’s Only a Matter of Time,” “Thank You Fairly Child,” and “So Many Methods” had been all Quantity One hits for Benton in 1959, whereas Delight’s title observe, “Endlessly,” was a Prime 5 hit.
“Delight liked his music, as a result of he stated you can at all times perceive all of the phrases he sang in his songs,” Rozene Delight tells Rolling Stone from her residence in Dallas. “The music didn’t attempt to overwhelm his singing. He might perceive the phrases.”
The file finds Delight pushing his personal musical boundaries into Eighties pop and R&B stylings as he honors Benton. Followers shouldn’t count on “Kiss an Angel Good Morning,” except for Delight’s distinctive vocals. Working with producer Bob Pickering, Delight usually sings over a string part and a saxophone on Endlessly.
Greg Gosselin, whose Music Metropolis Data launched the LP, says the Dallas recording location goes hand-in-hand with the vary within the sound on this tribute.
“The Benton tribute most likely would have turned out fairly in another way if it had been cranked out by the Nashville studio system that had produced Charley’s RCA recordings within the Seventies and Eighties,” Gosselin says. “Altering the locale and utilizing fully totally different personnel contributed to a a lot totally different sound. Excluding Chuck Rainey, the opposite gamers had been all in-demand, journeyman-type musicians working inside the North Texas recording trade. And just about all of them had performed on a ton of station identification and promoting jingles.
“That impacted the recordings as a result of,” Gosselin continues, “together with the orchestral strings, the power of these musicians to convincingly emulate the basic early Sixties R&B and pop period sound has added a sure intangible timelessness to the undertaking.”
Gosselin says that Pickering’s unique masters had been misplaced, and the mixes that made it onto the file started in 2022 after Gosselin sought Pickering’s enter. Regardless of the practically 40-year hole between recording and mixing, the one trendy work carried out for Endlessly was transferring the songs from tape to a digital audio format. In any other case, the file mirrors the sound from the studio.
“This album was minimize with out computer systems,” Rozene Delight says. “These days, with computer systems, you may make virtually anyone, and their music, sound good. However this was strictly carried out with out all that.”
Rozene asserts that the time that handed between recording and releasing this undertaking will function a reminder of her late husband’s versatility and willingness to push himself outdoors of his consolation zone, all within the title of sharing his influences with the world.
“It reveals how a lot he liked nation music,” she says, “and that he was good at it. That’s what he did, you understand?”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and creator whose newest books, By no means Say By no means and Crimson Filth Unplugged can be found by way of Again Lounge Publishing.
