DeSoto Magazine October 2020

“I’d Rather Go Blind” was one of the songs Mills recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals as was another of the album’s standouts, a take on the Little Richard chestnut “Greenwood, Mississippi.” The recording was completed before Little Richard’s recent passing, but as far as Mills knows the legendary rock shouter never heard her version.

“That would have been wonderful but I haven’t heard of it happening,” Mills says.

She did make a sort-of connection with Little Richard as Clayton Ivey, the song’s original keyboard player, also played on Mills’s version. ​“There was incredible energy in the studio with Clayton Ivey and the entire band,” Mills says. “I didn’t realize until we met that Clayton had recorded ‘Greenwood, Mississippi’ with Little Richard. I didn’t have much time to get nervous as we were doing several songs in that session, and I believe the energy I got from listening to Little Richard’s recording of this song over and over carried through to the live session. This was literally a ‘one-take’ track on the album.”

For her stop in Memphis​, Mills recorded both at Royal Studios and the vaunted Sun Studios where she cut “Just Walking in the Rain,” the album’s bonus track. ​ “The feeling of being in the same studio where Elvis got his start, hearing the slapback as we recorded ‘Just Walking in the Rain,’ seeing the photos on the wall of many of my musical heroes, and knowing that this was the spot where the Prisonaires laid down the original version of the song all gave me goosebumps,”

Mills enthuses. “And at Royal Studios I got to use Al Green’s microphone!” ​Slapback is a kind of doubling echo with a relatively long delay between repetitions of the sound.

“The Triangle” was completed with a session at the famed Malaco Studios in Jackson, where Mills revisited songs like the horn-enhanced R&B of “Someone Else is Steppin’ In,” the slow ballad “I’ll Always Love You,” the funky gospel of “Travel On” and Bobby “Blue” Bland’s song of heartbreak, “Members Only.”

78 DeSoto