Consumer Guide Album

Jerry Butler: The Best of Jerry Butler [Mercury, 1970]
Butler is my kind of ballad singer, not least because a lot of his material is medium uptempo. He's got a big voice--proves it once again on a live version of his 1958 breakthrough, "For Your Precious Love"--but prefers to put his soul across by the way he shifts from straight song to the throaty love sounds that are his trademark. Not surprisingly, it's the seven Gamble-Huff tracks that make this compilation--their lyrics are ordinary, but their lush cool, so well-suited to Butler's own, is anything but. A−