The Very Best of Little Richard
is the first high-profile, high-quality
Little Richard
compilation to be released in the U.S. since 1991's
The Georgia Peach
, a disc that held the title of best available
hits collection for roughly 17 years.
The Very Best
is designed as a replacement to that collection, partially because
was a little old but also because
Concord Music Group
-- the label that formed in 2004 when
Concord
and
Fantasy Records
merged -- now owned the
Specialty Records
vault and could use their own new
collection. So,
revived the
Specialty
imprint and released this excellent hits collection, which at 25 tracks is just as long as
. Fully 20 of those 25 tracks are shared between the two compilations, which should come as no surprise as these 20 tracks are the big hits and standards, ranging from
"Tutti Frutti,"
"Long Tall Sally,"
"Good Golly Miss Molly"
to
"Ooh! My Soul,"
"Bama Lama Bama Loo,"
and the medley of
"Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey"
that
the Beatles
later covered. As
ends a little anticlimactically with a perfunctory rehearsal take of
"Hound Dog"
from
Richard
's last session, a pedestrian demo of the blues
"Baby"
from his pre-
days, and a surprisingly tame live medley from 1964, this pales slightly in comparison to
, but that's nitpicking: apart from these three OK cuts, this is as good a
compilation as you can get, which means this is as good as rock & roll gets. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine