Two Shy

Jean Shy is a name I vaguely remember seeing on dance records in the 70s and 80s (but for the life of me I can't remember which ones) and I had her mentally filed away somewhere in a dusty corner of my brain under "disco diva" along with the likes of Loleatta Holloway and Fonda Rae. She seems to have had a very spotty early recording career, jumping from label to label only releasing a small handful of singles but two of them are so great I thought they deserved a plug here (and I could use that terrible pun in the post title). "Keep An Eye" was recorded for the Dakar label in 1970, it's an Ashford/Simpson song orginally recorded by Gladys Knight and is a real primo example of a Northern floor filler. It only seems to be available on the compilation What More Can A Woman Do? which is out of print now - I really must focus more on albums you can actually buy. Jean only released one more single on Dakar and from what I can tell didn't surface on vinyl again until "What Can I Do, I'm So In Love For You" for Fantasy Records in 1976. This is a really wonderful Harvey Fuqua production with a great brassy vocal that shows the kind of gusto required of future disco divas. You can get this on Masterpieces of Modern Soul which is available and is pretty damn terrific and well worth a few shillings (I'll be doing something on what "Modern Soul" actually is in a future post). These days Jean Shy lives in Germany and apparently has had a few hits with some Dutch dance act called T-Spoon which were big in Belgium. Big in Belgium? There's a good joke in there somewhere but I can't think what it is right now.

[Download]
Keep An Eye - Jean Shy
What Can I Do, I'm So In Love With You - Jean Shy