Bobby Purify - Better To Have It

Better To Have It is a southern soul summit of sorts, thanks to the reappearance of Bobby Purify, the gathering of such session kings as David Hood, Spooner Oldham and Reggie Young, and the continued re-emergence of Dan Penn, who co-wrote twelve of this disc's thirteen songs and served as producer. In fact, it's a reunion of many of those involved in the 1966 recording of the Penn/Oldham song "I'm Your Puppet", a smash for the Sam & Dave-like duo James & Bobby Purify. There's only one catch: It was a different Bobby Purify who sang on that record -- Robert Lee Dickey, the original Bobby Purify. (I hate to break it to y'all, but James & Bobby weren't really related.)

The Bobby Purify of Better To Have It, whose real name is Ben Moore, was actually the third pseudo-sibling to team up with James Purify, stepping in for Dickey's replacement, Buddy Grubbs. Moore had previously been to the left of the ampersand in Ben & Spence, contemporaries of the original Purifys and a duo that recorded at least one Penn song, the majestic "Long Ago". (You can find it on the Sundazed compilation Looking For My Baby!) During Moore's tenure as Bobby Purify, he and James Purify remade "I'm Your Puppet" and it hit big on the British charts.

All that, while valuable for clarification and scene-setting, hasn't a thing to do with Purify's voice. If not one for the ages, it's at least one to which age has added even more character. Close to 40 years on from "Long Ago", it remains a frequently stirring vessel for Penn's words, which tend to form stories about love's detours, wrong turns, dead ends, and generally hazardous traveling conditions.

The album occasionally suffers when the arrangements are more toward the middle of the road than the dark end of the street. But when everything comes together -- Purify's evocative voice, Penn's lyrics, Wayne Jackson's trumpet, the whole glorious southern soul package -- on the title track and its spiritual brothers "Hate To See You Go" and "Testimony Of A Fool", we're time-machined back to late '60s Muscle Shoals, when soul duos and such roamed the earth.