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Love You Most Of All

by

Ted Hawkins

 
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Love You Most Of All

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Avg: 4.0 (13 ratings)

  • We Say...

    Review by Fred Goodman

    Released posthumously in 1999, Love You Most of All is a coda to one of modern music's most remarkable recording careers. A Mississippi-born street musician and peripatetic wanderer, Hawkins found his way to Los Angeles in the '60s in search of the manager of his musical idol Sam Cooke. Although his search proved fruitless, Hawkins set up shop on the boardwalk in Venice Beach, becoming a fixture of the street scene. "Discovered" by record producer Bruce Bromberg, Hawkins released his first album of busker's tunes and covers, Watch Your Step, in 1982. His warm, unadorned approach won Hawkins raves, including a five-star review in Rolling Stone, but he remained largely a street musician until his discovery a few years later in England. Moving to London, he began the most commercially fruitful stretch of his career, touring Europe and the Far East. Yet when he ultimately returned to the US, he once again slipped into obscurity until being signed by DGC Records in the mid '90s, a year before his death.

    Love You Most of All is a marvelous showcase for all of Hawkins' charms: he had a warm, generous singing style that embraced rather than overpowered songs, and a full if unadorned guitar style. Perhaps through his years of busking, Hawkins also had a sure sense of why songs become standards, which allowed him to pick the kind of tunes everyone knows but never seem to tire of, one of the things that made his recordings so charming. Among the highlights are superb covers of two of his main man Sam Cooke's biggest hits, "Chain Gang" and "Bring It on Home to Me." Such diverse classics as "Dock of the Bay," "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Your Cheatin' Heart" get the Hawkins treatment, and the album includes nods to his gospel roots in "Sweet Jesus" and "Happy Days."

  • They Say...

    Review by Mark Deming, All Music Guide

    Ted Hawkins always resisted being called a blues singer, and a look at his repertoire shows why. While Hawkins' strong but weather-beaten voice could communicate sorrow and heartbreak as few others could, he could also summon up a joyous fire that's a wonder to behold, and he could work this magic with practically any song he chose to perform, from Sam Cooke's "Bring It on Home to Me" to John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads." Both of those songs appear on Love You Most of All: More Songs From Venice Beach, which (as the title suggests) features 13 songs from the same 1985 bare-bones guitar and voice sessions that produced Hawkins' Songs From Venice Beach, and, like the earlier album, it consists primarily of tunes Hawkins sang while busking for change along the Venice, CA, boardwalk. "Take Me Home, Country Roads" features a striking, hypnotic coda, in which Hawkins chants "so glad I'm a country boy/so glad I'm a country boy" until he's taken Denver's song to a soulful place no one (except possibly Toots Hibbert) could have imagined it going, and Hawkins manages a similar alchemy with such chestnuts as "Green Green Grass of Home," "Your Cheatin' Heart," and even "North to Alaska," as well as more likely Sam Cooke and Otis Redding covers. On this disc's best moments, Hawkins stands beside Arthur Alexander as one of the great unacknowledged links between country and R&B. Unfortunately, the best of the material from these sessions was used on the first album, and the five originals recorded in 1990 that close out the album simply aren't on a par with such Hawkins compositions as "Strange Conversation," "Sorry You're Sick," or "The Good and the Bad." But he never sound less than committed on any of the 18 tunes of Love You Most of All, and anyone who has encountered the heart-tugging power of Ted Hawkins voice knows he never gave a bad performance in front of a microphone -- and this disc preserves more than a few great ones.

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