Long before he secured his pension with 1977’s clowning disco biscuit ‘Ain’t Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)’, Joe Tex was a prolific singles artist whose shaky hit rate belied his true talents. The Texas-born singer-songwriter moved to New York in the 50s to make his fortune, regularly slaying the Apollo Theater’s talent contests with his distinctly southern take on R&B. A fierce rival of James Brown, their mutual antipathy extended to Tex writing 1962’s dis ‘You Keep Her’ after Mr Dynamite moved in on ex-wife Bea Ford. Tex’s tenure at producer Buddy Killen’s Dial imprint caught him in his prime, epitomised by the smooth slow dance A-Side here, later used in the closing-credits of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (the filmmaker first declared his Tex fandom on Reservoir Dogs’ soundtrack). ‘If Sugar Was As Sweet As You’ is its better half though, a fat-free slab of taut rustic soul with Tex warbling its pay-off (“You make sugar taste just like salt”) over a stomping beat, swinging horns and great twangy electric guitar. Later covered by Rockpile, it’s right up there with raspy spoken-word efforts ‘Buying A Book’, ‘Hold What You’ve Got’ and ‘Skinny Legs And All’. While the latter was namechecked on MF DOOM’s ‘Accordion’, Tex also called his style of talking over verses ‘rapping’, cementing his influence on hip-hop. Tex’s B-side form continued when ‘I Gotcha’ [‘A Mother’s Prayer’, DIAL 1972] was flipped and soared to number two.