With a smart assist from Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Mavis Staples transforms Funkadelic’s “Can You Get To That” from a sing-along slab of greasy-good uplift into this Americana-inflected groover.

Last month we got a taste of UK acid jazzers The Brand New Heavies’ first release since 2006′s Get Used To It, and the advance single “Sunlight” signaled a pretty decent return.

The best peace, love and harmony anthem of 1985 didn’t come from the composing pen of Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, wasn’t produced by Quincy Jones and not sung by hordes of rock music’s biggest stars.

The last recordings of an early rock legend had none of the crunchy grit of “Dizzy Miss Lizzy.” Instead, Larry Williams reimagined his sound (and with “Bony Moronie,” one of his most famous songs) as ass-shaking 1970s funk bombs.

It would be easy enough to tag this as Southern rock, or as blues, or even — at times — as gospel, were Randall Bramblett’s The Bright Spots not so consistently all of those things, and something more.

This is a first-time CD reissue in any form of Sam The Sham’s fine 1971 solo album, originally released on Atlantic Records and produced by the legendary Tom Dowd at Criteria Studios in Miami

If your complaint about Michael McDonald’s brand of city-slicker soul, dating all the way back to the Doobie Brothers, was that it lacked a certain grease-popping earthiness, “Judgement Day” certainly bolsters the argument.

Seven years after their last release, acid-jazz pioneers The Brand New Heavies signal a return to original form with “Sunlight.”

Long a shadowy figure, Shuggie Otis had become known more for his absence than for psychedelic soul successes like 1974′s Inspiration Information and writing songs like Brothers Johnson’s No. 5 1977 hit “Strawberry Letter 23″

You may think you’ve never heard of the McCrary Sisters, but you probably have anyway: The quartet was featured, for instance, on Dr. John’s Grammy-winning 2012 Dan Auerbach-produced triumph Locked Down.