Sandy Posey - A Single Girl - The Very Best Of The MGM Recordings (CD, Imported)

This replaced Collectables' mid-'90s collection, The Best of Sandy Posey, as the best overview of the artist's 1960s material, and hence the best Posey record available. It has 23 tracks where The Best of Sandy Posey has only 14, and has extensive liner notes with quotes from Posey herself, whereas the Collectables release had typically (for that label) scant annotation. Actually The Best of Sandy Posey does have four songs that don't appear on A Single Girl, but the latter album does include the hits that anyone searching for a Posey best-of would demand: "Born a Woman," "Single Girl," "What a Woman in Love Won't Do," and "I Take It Back." Though on the whole the music is rather unadventurous, in its time it struck a peculiar chord: countrypolitan songs that on occasion crossed over to the pop audience (sometimes even in Britain) in a big way, with some echoes of rock, soul (particularly on "What a Woman in Love Won't Do," "One Man Woman," and "Hey Mister"), easy listening pop, and dippy submissive teen idol/girl group vocal flavors that were anachronistic by the time these were made in 1966-1968. There are some big name writers here -- Dan Penn-Spooner Oldham, John D. Loudermilk, and Joe South -- but their contributions aren't nearly as memorable or biting as the songs for which they're most famous. Even though many of these tracks frankly aren't striking, there are some fair non-hits here, particularly those that go into some (for countrypolitan) unusually brooding pop melodies, like "Shattered" and "Patterns." ~ Richie Unterberger