Allen Toussaint – seven of his greatest songs

Irma Thomas – Ruler of My Heart

Allen Toussaint was New Orleans music’s renaissance man – equally adept as writer, arranger, producer and performer, and a man who crossed styles with alacrity. For all that he could throw dozens of instruments into one funky mix, he was equally adept at creating magic from minimalism. In 1963, Toussaint wrote and produced Ruler of My Heart for Irma Thomas, creating a song that sounds lush at first – trilling piano, a cooing chorus – but is soon revealed to be dependent on little more than the gentle shuffle of brushes on drums, a lightly strummed guitar, a skipping bassline, and Thomas’s deliciously restrained vocal. Otis Redding would later reinterpret it as Pain in My Heart, turning it into a more typical Southern soul song, but in Thomas and Toussaint’s version you can hear New Orleans: something stylish, yet spectral. It’s a song that manages to be both beautiful and unsettling, yet you can never quite pin down what is discomfiting about it.

The Rolling Stones – Fortune Teller

Fortune Teller is minor Toussaint, really. He wrote it, under the pseudonym Naomi Neville, for Benny Spellman in 1961, and on that recording the Toussaint trademarks are plain – the piano is pushed to the fore, the percussion uses maracas and what sound like castanets as well as drums, horns are used carefully. But it gained a second life as a standard of the British beat boom. Pretty much every band did a version of Fortune Teller – the Stones, the Who, the Hollies, the Merseybeats, the Downliners Sect, Tony Jackson. It was such a staple that Robert Plant revived it for his album with Alison Krauss, Raising Sand. For all that he was a musicians’ musician, Toussaint was also a writer of hits, and Fortune Teller was the one everyone in the UK saw as their potential hit.

Betty Harris – Mean Man

Toussaint wrote so much for so many that not everything he did could possibly become a hit or a standard. Take this, a 1968 B-side from Betty Harris, who had a musical career based on obscure singles for Jubilee and Toussaint’s Sansu label – which then became collectors’ items and favourites on the Northern Soul circuit in the UK – before retiring to raise a family in 1970 (she returned to the music business to make her debut album in 2007). Mean Man is perfection: a glorious confection of danceable soul, all thrust and velocity. He’s cruel man, you know, a break-the-rule man. But guess what? She forgives him.

Ernie K-Doe – Here Come the Girls

Is Here Come the Girls the only track that manages to take military drumming and make it irresisitibly funky? Toussaint wrote and produced the track for Ernie K-Doe, a fellow New Orleans artist, in 1970 (nine years earlier, he had given Ernie his breakthrough hit, the US No 1 Mother-in-Law), creating something that seems so unlikely you can’t quite believe it works. At heart, Here Come the Girls is nothing but a horn hook, repeated over and over and over – what a horn hook, though! – but it’s Toussaint’s production touches that make it magical: the wonderful backing vocals, the slyly funny lyric (“I can live without coffee / I can live without tea / And I’m livid ’bout the honey bee”), the staccato bassline. It’s a song that never gets dull.

The Meters – Look-Ka Py Py

The Meters had been Toussaint’s house band for Sansu, and struck out on their own in the late 1960s, with Toussaint as producer, though they continued to work as a backing band for scores of artists. The Meters’ contribution to the growth of funk was almost as significant as James Brown’s, though they never achieved the same fame. Partly, of course, that was because they weren’t showmen; partly it was because the Meters specialised in instrumentals; partly it was because their music was perhaps too spare, too sophisticated to grab a wider audience. It was New Orleans funk, which meant it didn’t feel the need to grab the listener by the lapels. Their relationship with Toussaint didn’t end well, but, goodness, it resulted in some great music while they were together. As one of Toussaint’s own songs put it: Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky.

Dr John – Life

Given how intertwined their names have become, it seems astonishing that it wasn’t until his sixth album that Dr John employed Toussaint as producer. Less surprising, though, is that In the Right Place was his commercial breakthrough (imagine that now, to be given six albums to find your way). The opening Right Place, Wrong Time is the one everyone knows, but for maximum Toussaint, let’s go for Life, the only one of his compositions on the album. Listen to that piano line, and the horn line that doesn’t chafe against it so much as slide across it. If someone ever asks you to define syncopation, just play them this recording.

Allen Toussaint – Southern Nights

We couldn’t finish without including Toussaint as a recording artist. He made his first record, The Wild Sound of New Orleans – pretty thrilling rock’n’roll, but without a signature that was distincitively Toussaint – in 1958, then took 12 years to follow it up. Southern Nights was the fourth of his 1970s solo albums and one that might as well have borrowed a title from George Clinton: Cosmic Slop. It’s not that it’s messy; but – I’m struggling hard to avoid using the words “stew” or “gumbo” – it is a melange of American music. In fact, Gram Parsons’ desire to make what he called “cosmic American music” was perhaps more fully realised by Toussaint, because he cast his net wider. The title track incorporated a psychedelic-style phased vocal alongside its piano balladry; Last Train was more characterisically funky; Country John had the syncopation; When the Party’s Over was a soul ballad. Toussaint thought Southern Nights was his most successful album. It would be hard to disagree.