Back in the day, internet time- which means just a few years ago, the best thing about YouTube was the funny cat videos. Now, by far the best of the many great things about YouTube is the multitude of great, otherwise hard to find music. When I’m looking for a particular old or obscure song, it’s the very first place I look, almost always with success.
I’ve talked about it at least once before, but if you only subscribe to one YouTube channel, it should be Soulhawk:
All I have ever wanted to do was keep this music out there, for I’m sure there [are] still a lot of people in this world who would stumble across these old 45’s and fall in love with some of them.
Soulhawk is single-handedly preserving and making available hundreds of great songs. Each song comes with a photo of the original 45. Very cool.
Back in college, I bartended and DJ’ed at the local college bar. In many ways, the late 70’s and early 80’s is an overlooked treasure trove of good music, particularly funk music. I used to spin those wonderful 12″ extended cut records, full of 6-7 minutes of righteous funk.
Happily, FunkNation did for funk what Soulhawk is doing for early soul. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they are adding additional songs to the FunkNation channel, but what’s there is pure vinyl gold.
Newsome.Org 