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Mary Saxton


Mary Saxton - Is It Better to Live or to Die / Losing Control - 7

Is It Better to Live or to Die / Losing Control - 7"
Pace - 1966


Michael Panontin
Mary Saxton may not exactly be a household name up here in Canuckistan, but her singles fetch big bucks across the pond in U.K. northern soul circles.

Saxton was just a tweenie when her mother allegedly drove her from Edmonton down to Calgary so that she could sing with a band called Jimmy Fitzgerald and the Corvettes. By 1964, she was back home fronting a five-piece called Mary and the Sensations, which managed to perform on the CFRN-TV show Club 3 (a reel-to-reel clip of which can amazingly be found on YouTube).

But it was not until 1966 that Saxton's star really started to shine. The still-teenaged singer signed on to a tiny local label called Pace (the original home to King-Beeez' 'Gloria') and started working with producer Gary Paxton, with whom she would record her first bona fide soul classic. The Canadian music press at the time took to calling Saxton 'Canada's Answer to the Motown Sound' and on these two sides the young Albertan does not disappoint. 'Is It Better to Live or to Die' is a sort of bloodless take on all those angst-ridden teen tragedy songs so popular at the time - a 'splatter platter' without the splatter, you might say - but its sullen themes failed to gain much traction on the Canadian charts.

Much better is the upbeat 'Losing Control' over on the flip, co-written by Paxton and a pretty blatant rip-off of the pounding Motown beat. The song was actually first recorded by an obscure group called the Fashionettes, but for some reason that version, which some northern soul anoraks consider the superior one, never saw the light of day until its inclusion on Ace Records' 2004 comp Boy Trouble - Garpax Girls. The Fashionettes' version may be filling the dance floors these days, but it is the Saxton disc that is emptying all those bank accounts, with near-mint copies of the Pace seven-inch selling for over $1200 USD.
         
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