Joe South (Expanded Edition) by Joe South

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Perhaps because he had so much lost time to make up for making up for when he finally emerged as a featured artist after lurking behind the scenes as a songwriter and session musician, Joe South was working at a white-hot pace in the late 1960s, with three fine if slightly erratic albums emerging one after the other. It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that his fourth, 1971's Joe South, was both less energetic and less impressive than what had preceded it. It's still a worthy record with his expected (and perhaps unsurpassed) knack for combining rock, country, and soul, though it marked no less than the third appearance in four albums of "Birds of a Feather." Certainly the most renowned track is "Rose Garden," a number three pop hit in the hands of country singer Lynn Anderson, though South's version is unsurprisingly funkier and more relaxed. At other points South sounds rather like Elvis Presley might have in the early '70s had Elvis been able to write songs and been less of a showboat. But while the songs are OK (and, in the case of "Rose Garden," quite a bit more than that), there was nothing aside from "Rose Garden" as exciting and striking as the best of what South had done in the late '60s.

© Richie Unterberger /TiVo