Over the course of three decades, beginning in the late 1950s, songwriter, musician, producer, and entrepreneur David Lee released fourteen 45s and two LPs on his Impel, Washington Sound, and SCOP (“Soul, Country, Opera, and Pop”) labels, run out of his record shop in Shelby, North Carolina. He wrote most of the songs himself, including his biggest hit, “You’re Letting Me Down,” which he recorded in 1971 with a then-unknown young Greenville, South Carolina soul singer named Ann Sexton. This first-ever anthology of Mr. Lee’s career features an array of unheralded soul and African American gospel groups from the North/South Carolina borderlands, including Joe Brown and the Singing Mellerairs, Brown Sugar Inc., the Yakety Yaks, and pioneering teenage “salt and pepper” combo the Constellations. Pressed in an edition of 500, the vinyl LP includes an eight-page booklet of detailed liner notes, a vintage SCOP promotional newsletter, and a coupon for free MP3s of all fourteen tracks, twelve of which have never before been reissued.
