Description
The hugely versatile Dakota Staton was equally comfortable handling R&B, jazz, blues and soul, as her recorded legacy affirms.
Once described by the New York Times as "a stylistic link between the earthiness of Dinah Washington and Big Maybelle, and Chaka Khan's note-bending pop-funk iconoclasm", her earliest releases were aimed squarely at the R&B market.
Indeed, they made sufficient a stir that deejay Alan Freed featured Dakota's discs on his daily R&R radio shows, and even featured her on the bills of a couple of his earliest R&R concerts.
But once her record company, Capitol, got her cutting LPs, Staton moved easily into the Jazz field where she carved out a mighty reputation and proceeded to sell hundreds of thousands of albums.
However, her LPs are freely available on CD elsewhere; this unique compilation concentrates on her singles releases between 1954-62, and includes a number of sides which never made it onto LP.