Dakota Staton - All In My Mind

The hugely versatile Dakota Staton was equally comfortable handling R&B, Jazz, Blues and/or Soul, as her recorded legacy affirms. Once described by the New York Times as "a stylistic link between the earthiness of Dinah Washington and Big Maybelle, and Chaka Khan's note-bending pop-funk iconoclasm", her earliest releases were aimed squarely at the R&B market. Indeed, they made sufficient a stir that deejay Alan Freed featured Dakota's discs on his daily R&R radio shows, and even featured her on the bills of a couple of his earliest R&R concerts. But once her record company, Capitol, got her cutting LPs, Staton moved easily into the Jazz field where she carved out a mighty reputation and proceeded to sell hundreds of thousands of albums. However, her LPs are freely available on CD elsewhere; this unique compilation concentrates on her singles releases between 1954-62, and includes a number of sides which never made it onto LP.