Jack Kerouac, On the Road. Man (and I do mean man), the Beats should've stuck to poetry.

Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis (1969)

In my youth I never realized how un-Southern the songwriting was (well south Brooklyn maybe): a testament to the Memphis Boys. Dusty herself takes as given that she has the same feelings as Aretha and Randy Newman; there are just differences in expression.

Okay the only one of my "this'd better be in the top ten" picks that wasn't was at number 12, which I guess is acceptable

"Young Republic" shockingly low!

Etta James, At Last! (1960)

A rare chance to show she was most the versatile singer of her time (c.f. her final album.) She makes everything sound raunchy, yet with naivety as a plausible excuse, as if "A Sunday Kind of Love" was about an accidentally discovered position ill-befitting the Sabbath.

Tomas Tranströmer, The Blue House: Collected Works (tr. Patty Crane.) Pretty succinct for a Nobelist. Peak decade is 1973–83; throw in the debut (even then, he knew how to put a collection together) and the late prose reminiscences Memories Watch Me and you get a pretty good idea of his development.

The Miracles: Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 (1968)

Perhaps you understandably don't want to listen to this right now because you're incensed with the group leader, in which case just look up the track listing. Then get incensed at the group leader again for tainting some of the most beautiful songs ever.

Stevie Wonder: Greatest Hits (1968)

Not a bad best-of for a 17-year-old. Even the tween stuff shows the audacious showmanship ("what key?") that made him the leading intermediary between Motown and white record players. Then it's time for him to co-write his own single, and it's merely "Uptight".

The Best of Sam & Dave (1969)

Sweet guy/gruff guy found their voices fit, and thanks to Isaac Hayes, David Porter, and relentless touring, they became '60s music's finest duo as they stopped talking to each other. Stax was right to foreground Sam, but Dave led off one of the era's deepest ballads:

Big blurb energy

'He always said he wanted to “die peacefully in his sleep like his grandfather
And not screaming and whining like everybody else in the car”'
toddsnider.net/2003/07/04/t...

The Immortal Mississippi John Hurt (1967)

His voice never diminished; his guitar only got more misterioso in his final years. And what other bluesman would not only portray a rouged and lipsticked Richland woman but let her rhyme "cock a doodle do-do" with "any dude'll do"? Judgment is for juries.

Every recent award-winning poetry book. "Can you/believe/that the world/is the way it is/and poets/still/aestheticize it?/Anyway,/my book/is different/because/uh/I say/it is."

<blurb: "a brilliant aestheticization of the current moment, in the tradition of all those other aestheticizations">

Mississippi John Hurt: Today! (1966)

He sings and plays so pacifically—even on high guitar notes, he seems to be moving his fingers as little as he can—that when "Coffee Blues" mentions a "lovin' spoonful", you can really buy he means Maxwell House. As for the one about a 9-inch stick of candy, uh.

Old ongoing thread, sharply criticized for not enough Miles:
bsky.app/profile/brad...

Bobby "Blue" Bland: Two Steps from the Blues (1961)

Great singer–arrangement synergy: Bland uses multiple vocal styles (Baptist AND Methodist, he bragged) to quilt heartsongs whose slight spite is reinforced by Joe Scott's horns: bombastic, sure, but with subtler dynamics than almost all imitators.