Next Hundred Years
For years Ted Hawkins sat on a milk crate on the Venice Beach boardwalk in California and passed the hat. Although he strummed an acoustic guitar, he was not a blues or folk artist; he was a soul singer in the fashion of his biggest hero, Sam Cooke. On Hawkins' first major-label release (though his sixth album overall), that passionate soulfulness in his raspy voice and insistent guitar still dominates the foreground, even though producer Tony Berg has tastefully mixed in supportive musicians. Readers have good reason to be suspicious when critics hail an obscure street singer as a major talent, but Hawkins, who died shortly after this record's release, was the real thing. If Cooke himself had bounced in and out of prison all his life and ended up singing on the street with an acoustic guitar, it's hard to imagine how he would have sounded any different than this.--Geoffrey Himes