To Be A Lover (Have Mercy)

Released as Super Eight in Jamaica and To Be A Lover in the UK, this 1977 album paired the incomparable studio wizardry of Lee “Scratch” Perry with the smoothly romantic vocals of Jamaican singer Earl George Lawrence, re-Christened George Faith by Perry. While it lacks some of the revolutionary ire of many of Perry’s Black Ark productions of the time, it shows his sympathetic ear as a producer as he creates a spacey yet warm miasma to gently lift Faith’s yearning mix of originals and soul covers — “In The Midnight Hour,” “Turn Back The Hands Of Time” — to the heavens. Faith never broke through commercially, but this is an unsung gem within Scratch’s formidable canon.