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Lou Rawls' first album, and still one of his best, finds him backed by jazz pianist Les McCann's trio in a program of blues, pop, and jazz standards. This is all rather urbane stuff; the sonic template is the elegant funk made popular in the late '40s and early '50s by Nat "King" Cole and Charles Brown. Rawls does it all extremely well, even allowing himself a rare foray into gospel-derived falsetto on Percy Mayfield's classic "I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town." He also contributes two songs of his own, at least one of which--"Blues Is a Woman"--deserves to be much better known.
