Frankie Ford - Cruisin' with Frankie Ford (1996)

This has both sides of all six singles Ford did for Imperial from 1960-62 and a couple of unissued tracks from the same era, as well as his 1984 Ace recording New Orleans Dynamo. The main attraction is the Imperial material, which was very hard to find before this reissue. Ford's association with Imperial wasn't very fruitful commercially, producing just a couple of small hits in covers of Joe Jones' "You Talk Too Much" and Boyd Bennett's "Seventeen." This batch lacks anything on the order of "Sea Cruise," but it's still pretty solid vintage New Orleans R&B, produced by Dave Bartholomew. Some of the cuts are sweetened up with strings and backup female singers, but it's mostly on the earthy side; when he slows the pace down on "Dedicated to Fats" and "One Hour," he can sound uncannily like Fats Domino. New Orleans Dynamo is well above average for a 1980s effort by a 1950s rocker; nothing new here (in fact, many of its songs are covers of old New Orleans classics), but Ford and the London musicians execute the Crescent City R&B sound convincingly.~Richie Unterberger