Dee Dee Warwick: The Atco Sessions (1970-71) ... plus Private Stock single (1975)

Dee Dee Warwick always sung in the shadow of her older sister, Dionne Warwick, but she created a body of work that holds up well decades later. Dee Dee's '60s recordings, while much less successful than Dionne's, were good New York pop/soul with a more pronounced R&B influence than her sister's, and a few of them were actually substantial R&B hits. In the early '70s, Dee Dee recorded for Atco with limited success, reaching the R&B Top Ten with 'She Didn't Know (She Kept on Talking),' and gaining a couple of smaller R&B hits with 'Cold Night in Georgia' and a notable cover of 'Suspicious Minds.' She did quite a bit of recording for Atco between 1970 and 1972 in a fairly down-home vein, sometimes with backing by the esteemed Dixie Flyers rhythm section, and backup vocals by the Sweet Inspirations, Cissy Houston, and Judy Clay. These sessions sounded something like a poppier variation on the Stax sound, though none of the songs had the arresting qualities necessary to break her to the pop audience. This 22-track compilation of her Atco work is a typically high-class Soul Classics production, including all the hits, non-LP singles, tracks from her 1970 LP Turning Around, and seven unreleased songs that are just as impressive as her official performances from the era. Dee Dee, incidentally, sounds nothing like Dionne here, favoring far gutsier vocals, material, and arrangements. It's good late-period vintage soul, and more evidence that Warwick was one of the more unjustly neglected soul performers of her time. I have included three bonus tracks here. The first one is a nice version of Fontella Bass' classic 'Rescue Me', recorded by Dee Dee on Atco in 1970, although unreleased at the time. The second and third are both sides of an awesome Modern Soul single Dee Dee recorded for Private Stock in 1975 as Dede Warwick , 'Get Out Of My Life' / 'Funny How We Change Places'. http://www.artistdirect.com/

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