The closing third of Soulsville Sings Hitsville stitches together many of the seemingly disparate musical threads that gave Stax Records their recognizable sound.

It features the Soul Children’s splendid, stripped- and slowed-down gospel blues take on “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” (Stevie Wonder) discussed in a previous Soul Children blog. This slow-boiling pot of soul keeps Stevie’s tune cooking hot.

It also features the first CD release of “Ask the Lonely” (The Four Tops) by John Gary Williams, who sang in the Stax vocal group the Mad Lads before engaging as a solo performer. Williams renders a warm version in his light and buoyant - and often falsetto - vocal, sounding quite like Marvin Gaye in the cuddling mood.  (Barbara Lewis also sang this tune on the one album she recorded for Stax.)

Frederick Knight’s version of “Someday We’ll Be Together” (The Supremes) first appeared on his Stax album named after his biggest hit, I’ve Been Lonely for So Long. However, Knight doesn’t sing it in the falsetto that made “Lonely” famous but down lower in his singing register, where his voice is warm and rough and plenty fine enough and his impassioned phrasing and vamps (especially in the bridge and closing, repeated choruses) radiate the heat of Marvin’s most torrid gospel-soul testimony.

O.B. McClinton had a mellow, down-home voice perfect for country music, plus the fortitude to stand among country music’s few African-American singers (I can name you Charlie Pride and…that’s about it). His country take on “I Wish It Would Rain” (The Temptations), recorded in Nashville instead of Memphis and served with twangy pedal steel guitar and loping country two-step bassline, sounds first-rate yet incongruous.

Soulsville Sings Hitsville closes with a previously unreleased Bar-Kays black-rock freakout through “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight & the Pips), a twelve minute vamp that overflows with psychedelic electric guitar and keyboards and, like many other Bar-Kays studio jams, cries out for editing.

Boy, does a collection like this set your mind spinning with other Stax-Motown cover versions that might have been. How great would Otis Redding sound romping through Marvin’s “Ain’t That Peculiar,” for example, or Johnnie Taylor in Junior Walker’s “Shake and Finger Pop”?

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