The Womack Live

One of the most underrated R&B concert albums of the '60s, The Womack Live can be considered a rejoinder to Live at the Harlem Square Club, the canonical 1964 LP by Sam Cooke, Bobby Womack’s mentor. The location was The California Club, located on Martin Luther King Boulevard in the L.A. neighborhood of Watts: a key stop on the chitlin’ circuit. The atmosphere is high-energy and sticky, driven by interplay between the performer and his people. The setlist is an ingenious mixture of Womack originals (“How I Miss You Baby,” “More Than I Can Stand,” “I’m a Midnight Mover”), recent songwriting masterworks (“Something,” “Everybody’s Talking”), and at least once instance of full-on gospel testimony (“The Preacher”). Utilizing a voice both gritty and supple, Womack had learned well from Cooke. Whereas many live albums from this era were fabricated with fake crowd noise, this set truly captures the room's vitality, epitomized by the medley of Cooke’s “Laughing and Clowning” and Percy Mayfield’s “To Live the Past,” during which local legend Mayfield is pulled onstage to contribute impromptu vocals.