Irma Thomas: Something Good: The Muscle Shoals Sessions

CHESS WAS pre-eminently a blues label and Chess was most definitely a Chicago-based label but Chess was also a hit-seeking label and that fundamental fact took precedence over genre or geography when it came to crunch time. By the mid-'60s, the Delta-rooted blues and its variants that had made Chess famous had largely fallen out of favor with the black record-buying audience. Soul music was on the rise and with it came a new crop of independent studio cum label operations--Motown, Stax and Fame/Muscle Shoals--to define and lay down the '60s sound much as Chess had done in the decade before.