Various Artists - Covered: Allen Toussaint, Volume 1: 1961-1971

Here's the next major artist in my "Covered" series: Allen Toussaint. Have you heard of him? If you're a fan of music from New Orleans, there's no way you could have missed him. Otherwise, you may know who he is. But you almost certainly know a lot of his songs, because he's been behind many hits.

Toussaint has probably left an even bigger mark as a producer than as a composer. But this series focuses just on songwriting, so I'm only including songs he wrote or co-wrote. I don't want to write a whole essay on his life, so if you want to learn more, here's his Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Toussaint

This is the first of three albums I've compiled of his best known songs. Each one is about 45 minutes long. I must admit that I'm not a super fan of New Orleans music, so I haven't done a really deep dive into his music. He's written hundreds of songs and produced many times more than that. I've generally stuck to the songs he wrote that became hits, as well as some of his most acclaimed songs that weren't hits. I'm sure he has some rare gems that I've missed. If you know of some you think I should have included, please tell me and I'll consider updating these albums.

Toussaint, who died in 2015, was also a performer. However, he started out very shy, and only took to performing on stage with enthusiasm and frequency in the last decade of his life. Even his recording career didn't get off the ground until the early 1970s, with a few notable exceptions here and there. I've generally concentrated on others covering his songs instead of him doing his own, since there are some good "best of" collections for that.

Nearly all the songs on this particular volume were hits. In fact, some of them were hits for more than one artist, so I had to choose which version to include. For instance,  well known versions of "A Certain Girl" were done by Ernie K-Doe in 1964, the Yardbirds in 1965, and Warren Zevon in 1980. I went with the Yardbirds version.

The song "Ruler of My Heart" is a tricky case. I chose to include the original version, which was done by Irma Thomas in 1965. However, Otis Redding had a hit with it later that year, except that he changed the title to "Pain in My Heart." But for all intents and purposes it's the same song, so I didn't include both of them. Still, check out the Redding version if you haven't already, because it's very good too.

01 Mother-in-Law (Ernie K-Doe)
02 Fortune Teller (Benny Spellman)
03 It's Raining (Irma Thomas)
04 Lipstick Traces [On a Cigarette] (Benny Spellman)
05 Java (Al Hirt)
06 Ruler of My Heart (Irma Thomas)
07 A Certain Girl (Yardbirds)
08 I Like It like That (Dave Clark Five)
09 Ride Your Pony (Lee Dorsey)
10 Whipped Cream (Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass)
11 Holy Cow (Lee Dorsey)
12 Working in the Coalmine (Lee Dorsey)
13 Get Out of My Life Woman (Solomon Burke)
14 Mean Man (Betty Harris)
15 Give It Up (Lee Dorsey)
16 Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky [From Now On] (Don Covay)
17 Here Come the Girls (Ernie K-Doe)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16687693/COVRDAllnToussnt_1961-1971_Volum1_atse.zip.html

I much prefer color photos, and it's next to impossible to find good color photos of Toussaint from the era covered by this album. For the album cover, I chose a "color" photo from a compilation of his songs. However, I'm 99 percent certain that it was colorized. Still, it's a good photo and I liked it better than any of the other options. I made some tweaks to it to try to make the colorization less obvious, including changing the background color. (It had been a weird shade of green.)