We have been hearing that break for fifty years without knowing whose voice it was

I heard this in a record store in Detroit recently, and what caught me was that I did not know the voice but I knew every song coming out of the speakers, one after another, in versions I had never heard before.

It is a covers album.

A soul singer running straight through the white rock and pop canon, with Light My Fire, Sunshine of Your Love, Who's Sorry Now and Little Things Mean A Lot all sitting on the front.

That was standard practice for labels in 1969 with young Black women, hand them the hits and let the arranger carry the rest.

Except her Sunshine of Your Love became the version that got mined, taken by Fatboy Slim, Jungle Brothers, LTJ Bukem, Lionrock and Aim. We have been hearing that break for fifty years without most of us ever knowing whose voice it was.

Louella Wilson was born in Philadelphia and raised in Pittsburgh, and she got the nickname from the spankings her father gave her. She sang her first paid gig at seventeen on Fulton Street after Stanley Turrentine put her name forward.

In 1967 Jimmy McGriff hired her for a six week tour that ended in June at Shelly's Manne-Hole in Los Angeles, where H.B. Barnum heard her and asked her to record. She never went home.

Barnum is the other story on this sleeve. He won a national talent contest at four years old, acted on the Jack Benny show as a kid, and went on to arrange for Aretha, Sinatra, Count Basie, Lou Rawls and the Supremes.

His name sits in small type under hers on the front cover.

Then in 1970 she went to an international song festival in Rio, because Dionne Warwick pulled out and Lalo Schifrin, who was on the judging committee, put her name forward. She has said that back in Pittsburgh she was used to singing in the corner bar.

She moved to Paris in 1985 for a festival and stayed sixteen years, came back to LA in 2000, and then a British producer named Will Holland, who records as Quantic, spent years hunting for her, found her and cut an album with her in 2006.

The sticker on my copy says one ninety nine, sold as is. I wish I could say that's what I paid for it.