Put those Amy Winehouse records away.

Wherever you are, Duffy, take five.

Kelly Clarkson?  I love you, hon, but take a knee and listen up.

Nicky Minaj?  Lady Gaga?  Taylor Swift?  Take a seat.

I was was watching Steve Van Zandt’s hilarious Lilyhammer – a Norwegian TV/Netflix collaboration about a mobster (what else?) that goes into witness protection in northern Norway – the other night.  In addition to starring and being the executive producer, he’s one of the music directors for the show – and say what you will about Van Zandt, but his taste in other peoples’ music is impeccable.

Anyway – over the closing credits of episode 2 of the first season rolled a song that even I, with my encyclopedic knowledge of music trivia, barely remembered; Evie Sands’ 1970 cover of the Troggs (and The Liverpool Five’s) 1966 hit “Anyway That You Want Me”.

Only much, much better; in place of the Troggs’ awkward tone-deaf garage punk, shimmering white soul:

And I remember making a mental note when I heard the odd Evie Sands song back when I did work in Oldies radio; “Check more of this out”. And finally with the aid of Youtube, I did.

Evie Sands was a nice girl from Brooklyn with a couple of musician parents and a dusky, Dusty Springfield-y voice who caught a little jolt of success – but not nearly enough – during the girl-group boom in the early sixties.

She bent the sound of the Brit Invasion and the girl groups into a bluesy melange – as in this, among many collaborations with songwriter Chip Taylor…:

…of whom more later. “I Can’t Let Go” was a hit for the Hollies among a few others back in the day – not the last time Sands would do the original version of a song that’d be paydirt for someone else.

Soul? Sands made Diana Ross sound like the karaoke singer she always was:

As the decade wore on, Sands – a peripatetic dabbler all over the music dial – evolved all over the place (as in this vid from the old Johnny Cash variety show; they owners disabled embedding, the bastards)

She came to the brink of near-fame when she recorded a new single by Chip Taylor (who is, by the way, the younger brother of John Voight, and the uncle of Angelina Jolie), “Angel of the Morning”; it was the first of dozens of covers of this pop standard, and maybe the best:

But financial trouble at her label prevented the record from getting distributed; while they were ironing that out, Merrilee Rush released a version that sold a jillion copies; the song’s become associated with Rush (and Juice Newton) over the years, but only via commercial misfortune, like so much in the history of pop music.

Sands – like most pop artists of the day – would do a cover or two, as in this vastly better version of a song that Kenny Rogers and the First Edition had a hit with in the sixties (and that Dolly Parton would cover in the late seventies):

She recorded into the seventies…:

…and has found a burst of retro popularity among Brit white-soul fans over the past few years. Sands is 67, still sings and plays guitar and rocks the joint.

Oh, yeah, Taylor Swift – this is a breakup song:

OK. As you were.