Lifetime: A Retrospective of Soul, Blues & Gospel 1956-1999
Before Johnnie Taylor was the soul sage of "Who's Making Love" or the pop-disco smoothie of "Disco Lady," he was a gospel star--the lead singer of theHighway Q.C.'sand later of theSoul Stirrers, where he followedSam Cooke. He eventually shook off Cooke's vocal mannerisms and left gospel for the soul and disco world, but the church always stayed in his voice--and in the wry moralism that underscored even his most libidinous songs. When he sang "I've Been Born Again," it was nominally about the woman who'd made him monogamous, but his prayerful phrasing argued otherwise. Taylor died in early 2000, andLifetimeis a smartly constructed survey of his entire recording career, including dozens of big hits and a healthy helping of alternate takes and rarities (admittedly, though, the last two decades of the years in the title are represented by all of four tracks).His first big break in secular pop came when the unrelated Little Johnny  Taylor had a hit with "Part Time Love" but couldn't promote it effectively;  Johnnie with an "ie" stepped in and remade himself as a bluesy shouter, backed  up by the Stax house band in Memphis. By the end of the '60s, he'd hooked up  with producer/songwriter Don Davis, who was his creative foil for the commercial  peak of his career and introduced his voice to the Detroit sound for a string of  little morality plays that zoomed to the upper reaches of the R&B; charts. (Admirers ofXTC's "Standing in for Joe" should enjoy Taylor's "Standing in for Jody.") The culmination of this  period, and of his hitmaking career, was "Disco Lady," a 1975 collaboration with  P-Funk sidemen, butLifetime's final disc even makes Taylor's long  decline sound as sharp as the rest of his canon.--Douglas Wolk