Clyde McPhatter & the Drifters

AMG Review of Clyde McPhatter & the Drifters

Bruce Eder
All Music Guide

The Drifters' debut album didn't appear until 1956, more than a year after Clyde McPhatter had left the group that he founded. Thus, this LP was actually an oldies release from the date of its first appearance, and even more so when it was repackaged in 1958 (a time when McPhatter's solo career was running as hot as a pistol) with new notes. With McPhatter's high tenor voice featured as the lead on every song (basso Bill Pinkney occasionally stepped forward as well), this release and its title made perfect commercial sense on either date. For fans of the singer or the group, or anyone who wasn't around to buy the singles assembled here when they first came out, this was an awesome collection. Numbers like "Money Honey" became the basic language of rock & roll as surely as anything ever written by Chuck Berry, and soaring soul ballads like "Warm Your Heart" and "Lucille" (a rare McPhatter song copyright) are good to hear in any era. On hot "jump" numbers like "What'cha Gonna Do?," McPhatter uncannily anticipates the sound upon which Jackie Wilson would build his career in the second half of the 1950s. In short, this is an album that just didn't stop rocking. Helping along in the endeavor were saxman Sam "The Man" Taylor and guitarist Jimmy Oliver (who shines with some particularly hard-edged playing on "Warm Your Heart." The original LP has since been supplanted by several CD reissues that are very carefully mastered, but it had a pretty cool cover and, in the 1958 reissue, some of the most extensive jacket notes seen on an LP outside the jazz or classical fields up to that point (focusing, of course, on McPhatter's career).