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Dianne Brooks
Walkin' on My Mind / Need to Belong - 7"
Revolver - 1969
Michael Panontin
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Dianne Brooks is probably the best Canadian singer you've never heard of.
Ray Charles called her "the greatest voice I've heard since Dinah Washington", while to The Toronto Star's Jack Batten she was "the best soul singer in the country". Count Basie, with whom she once toured, was cooler, saying simply, "Man, she's music!"
Brooks was a beloved fixture in the Toronto music scene, but she certainly paid her dues. She began singing at the age of three at church in New Jersey, where she was born. Her mother, recognizing her young daughter's obvious talent, sent her off to New York City to study voice. Brooks joined the Three Playmates while still in her teens, and the group issued several singles on the Savoy label, including the delightfully dreamy doo wop of 'Suga Wuga' in 1957.
In 1959, she moved with her family up to Toronto, just as Yonge Street was beginning its ascent as the country's premier music street. It was there in her adopted home that Brooks' career began to take off. "When we moved to Canada," she would later recall for The Toronto Blues Society, "Bill O'Connor, an entertainer who had his own agency, started me working on TV shows for the CBC, lots of benefits and clubs." Within a year, she had issued her first Canadian single, a little-known gem on RCA called 'The Orbiteer Twist', which featured backing by O'Connor and his band the Orbiteers, with a very young Robbie Robertson on guitar.
From there Brooks hooked up with Al Steiner, who made her a regular at his Club Bluenote throughout the sixties. She is often remembered for her live shows there - and in fact is immortalized in Adrian Hayles massive mural just up the street at 423 Yonge - but for many Canadians back then she would have been a more familiar face on the TV set, where she appeared on numerous shows including Nightcap, A la Carte, While We're Young and It's Happening, to name only a few. Brooks also managed to make her way down to NYC in '67 to record a couple of decent northern soul singles with Harvey Brooks: 'In My Heart' and 'Picture Me Gone', both issued on Verve-Folkways.
Nineteen sixty-nine was a particularly busy year for Ms. Brooks. After ushering it in singing on the New Year 1969 program, she signed on with the newly formed Revolver Records, a label headed up by advertising producer Mort Ross, his go-to jingle writer Doug Riley and British engineer Terry Brown. 'Walkin' on My Mind' came out in February that year. It was the first record released on Revolver and Brooks' best-known recording.
Brooks delivers her usual powerful performance here. But it is Riley's arrangements that really make the record. He was just 23 at the time and still a few months away from his first big achievement arranging Ray Charles' Doing His Thing LP. But the fledgling arranger tossed everything he had into the mix - piano, strings, horns, even a lush backing chorus - and the result is an epic gospel/soul tune that will send tingles of joy up and down your entire skeleton.
'Walkin' on My Mind' was not the success that Brooks, Riley and the others were hoping for. It reached #4 on RPM's Canadian Content list on May 26 but only a lacklustre #67 on the national chart one week later, which might have given the guys at Revolver cause for concern had they not been watching another Revolver release, Motherlode's 'When I Die', start its slow climb to the top of the charts. Brooks kept herself busy for the rest of the year, performing with Riley at Friar's and then appearing with Rob McConnell's Boss Brass at the Savarin Tavern.
She issued a few albums in the seventies, including 1970's Some Other Kind of Soul, where the above accolades can be found. But despite working with artists from Funkadelic and Richie Havens to Dusty Springfield and Emmylou Harris, not to mention appearing as Laverne Baker in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, Brooks' career never really got going stateside.
In all, 'Walkin' on My Mind' was issued in a half-dozen or so countries around the world, including the US, the UK, New Zealand and Belgium, as well as in the Netherlands, where it came sheathed in a cool picture sleeve (shown above).
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