Shirley Brown - Woman to Woman - Vinyl LP

Vinyl LP

Woman to Woman is Shirley Brown's first album and finds the singer settling in nicely to a set of slow ballads, all soaked with an ache that the singer seems born to convey. The title track is the song most associated with the singer and one of the great love-triangle melodramas of the '70s, sparking a series of answer songs, the best of which is Barbara Mason's "From His Woman to You."

While not a song cycle like Millie Jackson's Caught Up, which took the cheating subgenre to its extreme, Woman to Woman does create an insular feeling, wrapping the listener in a string of indirectly related emotional contexts. From the intimacy of "So Glad to Have You" to the more direct "Between You and Me" and all points between, Woman to Woman displays all the good and bad complexities that soul singers found at the dark end of the street.

Wade Kergan