Consumer Guide Album

Rita Coolidge: Rita Coolidge [A&M, 1971]
Despite sage advice from my female advisers, I cherished hopes that Coolidge's thick voice--which is grainy rather than gritty, like the Bramlett voice without the bravura--would grow on me the way Tracy Nelson's did. She does get more out of "Seven Bridges Road" than Tracy does by underplaying the overstatement just a little, and it's nice to hear "The Happy Song" as praise for a househusband. But in the end this is so solid that it never sparkles once. C+