Consumer Guide Album

Dusty Springfield: The Very Best of Dusty Springfield [Mercury, 1998]
A self-conscious woman in a girl's world, she found the musical place she deserved only once, when she locked horns with Jerry Wexler for a pop miracle. So Dusty in Memphis is her very best. Her twenties were a little of this and a little of that--'50s pop-folk gone first girl-group, then pop-soul under the clueless tutelage of Englishmen spared self-knowledge by her soaring empathy and breathy grit, which young Brits couldn't resist. Good for them. A-