Timi Yuro: The Lost Voice of Soul! (1993)

When the big, BIG voice of Timi Yuro burst onto an unsuspecting American public with the million selling ‘Hurt’ on Liberty Records in July 1961, most people assumed firstly that she was a man, and secondly that she was black. Her subsequent appearances on TV were greeted with astonishment: it just didn’t seem conceivable that those full-throated anguised howls could possibly have emanated from such a petite frame. But, of course, they had – and they continued to do so as she racked up hits like ‘Smile’, 'What’s a Matter Baby’ (beautifully covered by the Small Faces in 1965), ‘Insult to Injury’, ‘Make the World Go Away’ and ‘Gotta Travel On’ (several of these crossed over to the R&B charts, at a time when it was unusual for a white artist to do so) – until she left Liberty in 1964, at which point her run of success abruptly dried up. She returned to the label briefly in 1968 and cut the highly-acclaimed Something Bad on My Mind album, which yieded the fiercely-collectable ‘It’ll Never Be Over for me’, nowadays one of the rarest Northern Soul singles of all. This compilation of Timi’s Liberty material includes all her hits, plus the pick of her B-sides and album tracks. Timi Yuro was America's finest white soul singer of the ‘60s and her finest records deserve mention in the same breath as Aretha Franklin, Irma Thomas, and the other soul queens of the era. Taken from the original liner notes.

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Timi Yuro singing her signature song, 'Hurt':

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