The Bitch Is Black

This onetime James Brown paramour and Tammi Terrell fill-in was a hard-touring overseas star when, after numerous delays, she finally released her sole Motown album in 1975. Superstar producer Norman Whitfield (Marvin Gaye, Temptations) took the main reins here and kicked out the maximum R&B. The opener, “Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On,” is killer, doors-blowing-down dance-funk with an impossible groove and saucy vocal that showed how Fair was just too much for radio play back in the day. (On the album’s cover, she's all in black and brandishing a whip.) She could be as gutsy as Tina Turner and even James Brown (listen to her dominate the psych-era Temptations’ ditty “Let Your Hair Down”), then unexpectedly flip to her gentler side and lead a classic Motown sound of honeyed strings and sweet vocal accompaniment (“It’s Bad for Me to See You,” “Stay a Little Longer”). Elsewhere she handles Stevie Wonder (“You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover”) and Gladys Night & The Pips (the 1968 hit “It Should Have Been Me”) with all the sassy ease of dungeon priestess administering religious rites.