Gladys Knight & The Pips - Early Roots (1975) LP

In 1975, Gladys Knight & the Pips were huge. The group had left Motown for Buddah in 1973, and many of its Buddah singles were burning up both the soul and pop charts. Not surprisingly, a lot of small-budget labels hoped to cash in, and one way to do that was to put out LPs of Knight & the Pips' early work. The people who owned their pre-Motown recordings of the early '60s were usually quite willing to license them; consequently, a surplus of budget LPs by Knight and her Pips flooded the market in 1975. One of them was the appropriately titled Early Roots, an LP that contains nine songs from their pre-Motown period. A few of the selections are essential, including "Letter Full of Tears," "Operator," and Johnny Otis' "Every Beat of My Heart" (the gem that put the group on the map back in 1961). And even though most of the other tracks aren't essential, they are enjoyable. Is this LP the last word on pre-Motown Gladys Knight & the Pips? Definitely not -- "Giving Up" and "Lovers Always Forgive" are among the essential classics that are missing. Even so, Early Roots (which generally sold for around $2-$3) wasn't a bad deal for vinyl collectors back in 1975.