All Around The World / Need Your Love So Bad

Originally released on King 4818. This hard-to-find reissue from 1970 features two of Little Willie John's tunes that appear on Dave Marsh's list of the 1001 greatest singles of rock'n'soul. His description of the artist in writing up this particular record is so great I've got to quote a few sentences of it:

That Little Willie John remains all but unknown except to aficionados of rhythm and blues is one of the great injustices of contemporary popular music.... everybody who sang R&B-based ballads in the late fifties and sixties (up to and including Elvis and Sam Cooke) owed him something. He was so influential because the emotional penetration of his music, with its continual high-pitched resonances, engulfs the listener so completely; his was soul music before anybody coined the term.