Pretty Purdie - Heavy Soul Slinger
Sorry to be flogging the mixtape compilation compendia angle twice in a row, but I got on another of my little manic binges, and you, fair reader, are the beneficiary. I try to make commonly social-life-destroying traits -- like my obvious predilection towards compulsive, obsessive mania -- work for some reasonably arguable iteration of the common good. It sure beats contemptuously harassing strangers with moonhead conspiracies only the person saying them and the people they're trying to feel accepted by believe on social media all day anyway.
It's astonishing that no one ever got obsessed or manically motivated enough to attempt what I'm about to drop here, but then to get the rights to all these different songs, by all these different artists, on who knows how many labels owned by who knows who would take every lawyer on Earth working 16 hour days for who knows how long to crack.
You also have to take into account that today's birthday battery brahmin -- and it's no lie whatsoever to name him the most recorded drummer in history -- has, at some point or another in the last 60 years, taken credit for approximately 93% of the drum tracks on all the recorded music of those long and fruitful decades.
What takes it to an even more surreal level is that he may, in fact, have played on 93% of the recorded music of the last 60 years. Some people, rare as they are, distinguish themselves by their ability to live up to their own hype. Few, but some.
Bernard Purdie -- nickname: "Pretty" -- is most firmly in this pantheon of people that exist beyond the heavyweight class of their art, in a realm only a handful of humans get to claim.
The most sampled drummer in Hip-Hop history -- and likely the most recorded in the annals of all music, since recording technology was invented -- his records will never be approached, much less broken. They will, however, be danced to by people whose great-grandparents aren't even born yet.
I've wanted to cover him on here since I started, back when wild beasts roamed an Earth covered in red plankton, but I could identify no ROIO or show or whatnot that I felt really did justice to his essence, galactically broad and integral to the arc of the history of this stuff as it is.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, he has formed the engine that has driven so many tracks on so many radios, and ushered folks onto so many dancefloors that, were I to try to list every session and single and album on which he's appeared, I would literally be here typing until time ended.
The timekeeper of more timeless tunes than anyone ever to grip sticks, I was vexed for years on how to make a thing that might capture what stands him as a central figure in all of modern music. That is until I found this other (yes it's tremendous) blog, and the double CD, deep-cut Pretty Purdie put-together its proprietor has up on his page.
As I sometimes get into doing, once I saw what he had assembled -- I exaggerate not when I say that he made, really, as good and as thoughtful a mixtape as someone can make -- my first instinct was to reassemble its all-mp3 playlist, track for track, in a lossless audio format immediately.
That proved sticky with a couple of his more obscure-yet-essential selections, but I got it together for both volumes of his creation.
That's where the legendary mania kicked in.
And then, I wake up days later and I'm sitting there, having to make 93 of the cornerstone tracks of modern music the same damn volume level. By hand. Gosh, my arm hurts... but not as much of a hurt as Bernard "Pretty" Purdie -- in the conversation for Single Greatest Drummer in all species history -- puts on the skins in this merely 6 1/2 hours of badass backbeating, Purdie Shuffling mayhem. Which really could be a physical boxset some day, were all the attorneys in this Milky Way Sector gathered to the purpose.
Bernard "Pretty" Purdie
Pretty Things: The Beats of Bernard Purdie
1966-1980
CD1: The Bernard Purdie Collection, vol. 1
01 Bernard Purdie – Soul Drums (1968)
02 The Five Stairsteps – O-o-h Child (1970)
03 Tim Rose – Hey Joe (1967)
04 King Curtis – Whole Lotta Love (1971)
05 Shirley Scott & The Soul Saxes – You (1968)
06 Aretha Franklin – Rock Steady (1972)
07 Nina Simone – Real Real (1967)
08 John Lee Hooker – I Don’t Wanna Go to Vietnam (1968)
09 Bama The Village Poet – I Got Soul (1972)
10 Gil Scott-Heron – The Needle’s Eye (1971)
11 Esther Phillips – Sweet Touch of Love (1972)
12 David Newman – Captain Buckles (1971)
13 Margie Joseph – Touch Your Woman (1973)
14 Roberta Flack – Sunday and Sister Jones (1971)
15 Wayne Davis – I Like the Things About Me that I Once Despised (1973)
16 Donal Leace - Country Road (1972)
17 Gabor Szabó – Paint It Black (1966)
18 Leon Thomas – Let’s Go Down to Lucy's (1972)
19 Ralfi Pagan – La Vida (1975)
20 Brother Jack McDuff – A Change Is Gonna Come (1966)
CD2: The Bernard Purdie Collection, vol. 2
01 Cornell Dupree – Teasin’ (1974)
02 Joe Cocker – I Get Mad (1974)
03 Robert Palmer – How Much Fun (1974)
04 Steely Dan – Deacon Blues (1977)
05 Cat Stevens – 100 I Dream (1973)
06 Grady Tate – Sack Full of Dreams (1969)
07 Dusty Springfield – In the Winter (1974)
08 Cheryl Lynn – You’re the One (1978)
09 Roy Ayers – Melody Maker (1978)
10 Herbie Mann – What’s Going On (1971)
11 Quincy Jones – Oh Happy Day (1969)
12 Letta Mbulu – Music Man (1976)
13 Joe Bataan – I’m No Stranger (1972)
14 Freddie McCoy – Funk Drops (1966)
15 Marion Williams – Wicked Messenger (1971)
16 Ronnie Foster – Sweet Revival (1973)
17 Hummingbird – Fire and Brimstone (1976)
18 Hall & Oates – I’m Just a Kid (Don’t Make Me Feel Like a Man) (1973)
19 Gene Ammons – Feeling Good (1969)
20 Mongo Santamaria – Baby What You Want Me to Do (1968)
CD3: The Bernard Purdie Collection, vol. 3
01 introduction of BP
02 Bernard Purdie - Hap'nin' (1973)
03 Steely Dan - Babylon Sisters (1980)
04 Gary Burton - Vibrafinger (1970)
05 King Curtis - Soul Serenade (1971)
06 Albert Ayler - Sun Watcher (1969)
07 Boogaloo Joe Jones - Right On (1970)
08 Daryl Hall & John Oates - She’s Gone (1973)
09 Felix Pappalardi - Sunshine of Your Love (1979)
10 Larry Coryell - Morning Sickness (1969)
11 Charles Kynard - Odds On (1970)
12 Richie Havens - Headkeeper (1974)
13 Garland Jeffreys - Harlem Bound (1973)
14 Les McCann & Eddie Harris - Shorty Rides Again (edit) (1971)
15 Aretha Franklin - Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do) (1974)
16 Miles Davis - Red China Blues (1974)
CD4: The Bernard Purdie Collection, vol. 4
01 Buddy Terry - Lean On Me (Lean On Him) (1972)
02 The Soul Finders - Respect (1967)
03 Richard "Groove" Holmes - Flyjack (1975)
04 The Last Poets - Ho Chi Minh (1977)
05 Arif Mardin - Street Scene: Strollin' (1974)
06 Rusty Bryant - Ga Gang Gang Goong (1973)
07 Carla Thomas - How Can You Throw My Love Away (1969)
08 Al Kooper - Magic In My Socks (1969)
09 Sonny Phillips - Sure 'Nuff, Sure 'Nuff (1969)
10 Gary McFarland - 80 Miles an Hour Through Beer-Can Country (excerpt) (1969)
11 The Insect Trust - Hoboken Saturday Night (1970)
12 Houston Person - The Houston Express (1971)
13 Harlem River Drive - Idle Hands (1971)
14 Dakota Staton - Let It Be Me (1972)
15 Dizzy Gillespie - Soul Kiss (1970)
16 Hank Crawford - Baby, I Love You (1969)
17 Phil Upchurch - Muscle Soul (1968)
18 King Curtis - Memphis Soul Stew (1969)
CD5: The Bernard Purdie Collection, vol. 5
01 Herbie Hancock - Wiggle-Waggle (1969)
02 Pee Wee Ellis - Fort Apache (1977)
03 Jackie Lomax - Lost (1972)
04 Johnny "Hammond" Smith - Purdie Dirty (1969)
05 Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway - Where Is the Love (1972)
06 Randy Brecker - The Vamp (1970)
07 Melvin Bliss - Synthetic Substitution (1973)
08 Gil Scott-Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1971)
09 The Five Stairsteps - Dear Prudence (1970)
10 Ben E. King - What Is Soul? (1967)
11 Jimmy McGriff - The Bird Wave (1970)
12 Roy Ayers' Ubiquity - The Boogie Back (1974)
13 Solomon Burke - When She Touches Me (Nothing Else Matters) (1968)
14 Tim Moore - I Can Almost See the Light (1974)
15 Wilson Pickett - Deborah (1968)
16 Yusef Lateef - Livingston Playground (1969)
17 Louis Armstrong - Give Peace a Chance (1970)
18 James Brown - It's a Man's Man's Man's World (1966)
19 Steely Dan - Home At Last (1977)
20 Pretty Purdie - Heavy Soul Slinger (1972)
Total time: 6:36:25
imaginary box set containing 93 iconic grooves of The Maestro, Bernard "Pretty" Purdie
by Any Major Dude with Half a Heart, whose excellent page can be found right here
reconstructed losslessly and remastered by EN, June 2025
volumes 3-5 selected, sequenced, edited and remastered by EN, June 2025
2.36 GB FLAC/direct link
2.36 GB FLAC/direct link
So we see that the sonic revolution of our musical epoch may not have been televised, but it certainly was recorded pretty substantially... and for a whole lot of the time that the tape was rolling, "Pretty" Purdie was perched upon the drum throne like a potentate of propulsion. I just hope he's truly on all of these myriad tracks, but AMD and I researched it all as thoroughly as boys with a high-speed internet box and the will to know the truth can, so we should be good here.
Born this day in 1939, Bernard Purdie is 86 today, and he is still alive and sticking, thank Providence and his continuing good health. I will return in a few days with another unquantifiably influential figure, but today is all about looking -- and sounding -- as "Pretty" as can be, and I hope my (and Any Major Dude's, major kudos and thanx to him) compendium of crunch will assist everyone in cele-vibrating at their very best!--J.
