Solomon Burke - Home in Your Heart: The Best of Solomon Burke (1992)

Of the great stars of the 1960s soul movement, Solomon Burke isn't as well-remembered as many of his peers, most likely because he had relatively minor success in the crossover marketplace (never scoring a Top 20 pop hit), and he faded from view on the R&B charts by the early '70s. But if Burke's impact was somewhat narrow, it was also quite deep; he was hugely popular in the deep south, a potent live attraction across the country, and (after Ray Charles) one of the first major attractions at Atlantic Records, who helped define the label's signature polished-but-deeply soulful sound. Burke also had, quite simply, one of the finest voices in popular music, a rich and resonant instrument that possessed a churchy authority that was the ideal match for his material, which balanced the pleasures of the flesh with the price of transgression. While Burke made solid albums after leaving Atlantic, his tenure at that label remains his strongest and most rewarding period, and Home in Your Heart: The Best of Solomon Burke is a superbly compiled and annotated two-disc set that cherrypicks 40 superb selections from Burke's Atlantic archive, including the epochal "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love," "Just out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)," "Cry to Me," "The Price," "If You Need Me," and many more. Someday, some archivist should go through Burke's long out-of-print sides for MGM, Bell, Chess, Dunhill, and other labels and create a compilation that will fill in the gaps of Burke's "lost years" before his re-emergence in the mid-'80s, but for the meantime Home in Your Heart: The Best of Solomon Burke remains the best place to start exploring his body of work, and it's a remarkable collection of Southern soul at its finest.