Daptone Records announces Black Velvet, final album from the late Charles Bradley

By Katie Rife | September 6, 2018 | 4:37pm

Aux Features Music

Daptone Records announces Black Velvet, final album from the late Charles Bradley

Last September, the world lost soul singer Charles Bradley, a former jack-of-all-trades who released his first album at the age of 62 and who channeled a lifetime of pain into music whose raw emotion rivaled even that of the Godfather himself. Like his labelmate Sharon Jones—another soul artist whose late-in-life success was prematurely cut off by cancer—Bradley left behind an archive of unreleased material when he died. And like Jones, he’s now being honored by a posthumous album release.

That album is called Black Velvet, in honor of Bradley’s stage name from his days as a James Brown impersonator, and it’s set to be released November 9, on what would have been Bradley’s 70th birthday. The album will consist of 10 never-before-heard studio recordings, assembled by Bradley’s bandmates and friends at his label, Dunham/Daptone Records. The recordings span the entirety of Bradley’s recording career, with songs selected from the sessions for each of his previous three albums. Alongside what essentially amount to unreleased original B-sides, included on the album are three covers, Nirvana’s “Stay Away,” Neal Young’s “Heart of Gold,” and Rodriguez’s “Slip Away.”