Doing a 180: Aretha & Donny

2 of the "Greats" are getting vinyl upgrades this week. Read all about it here:

Aretha Franklin, Amazing Grace: This may surprise you as much as it surprised us – we first read it on Wikipedia, and it shocked us so much that we made sure to find another source to confirm it – but as of 2013, this 1972 live gospel album was the biggest selling album of Aretha’s entire recording career. (Perhaps needless to say, it is also the biggest selling live gospel album, period.) Recorded at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles with the assistance of Rev. James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir, Amazing Grace even managed to spawn a minor hit single via Franklin’s take on Marvin Gaye’s “Wholy Holy.”

Donny Hathaway, Extension of a Man: The last solo studio album ever released by Hathaway, this 1973 effort brought the R&B legend two small hit singles, courtesy of “Love, Love, Love,” written by J.R. Bailey and Ken Williams, and his cover of Al Kooper’s “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know.” While it only climbed to #69 on the Billboard Top 200, it proved to be the highest charting studio album of his career, and although the All Music Guide’s reflections on Extension of a Man suggest that it never gets better than its opening track, “I Love the Lord; He Heard My Cry, Pts. 1-2,” they nonetheless conclude that “Hathaway never stops impressing with his conceptions of arrangement and performance.”