HEART FULL OF LOVE

Listen to HEART FULL OF LOVE by The Invincibles.

Welcome back! This week we're going to post a few selections from some sweet soul sixties vocal groups, of greater and lesser renown. I encourage you to have a listen to these tunes even if you don't recognize the name of the group though, because they're all designed for maximum enjoyability.

Heart Full Of Love by The Invincibles came out of L.A. in 1965. It's a really, really typical story for that era. The group started as a gospel ensemble ("The Invincible Songbirds," how cool is that name?), but took on new material (or adapted old material: scroll down here to hear a gospel re-adaptation of today's song) to join the hit parade. They signed to a major label subsidiary (Warner's Loma Records, in this case). But as LPs weren't much emphasized in 1965, The Invincibles never got to make a full album, just a couple of singles. Of course, black soul groups got infinitesimal label support relative to white pop groups in those days (plus ca change), so even though Heart Full Of Love is as compelling a ballad as you'll ever hear (not only a falsetto lead, but falsetto harmonies! Awesome), it only made the merest of dents in the national charts. It was basically a regional hit then disappeared.

The nice coda to this all-too-common narrative is that with the music blog era, these songs are being moved out of dusty second-hand shops (or savvy DJs' crates) and across peoples' laptops worldwide.

Photo: Life in Istanbul (1).