Millie Jackson - Caught Up / Still Caught Up (Hip-O)

Love affairs and their ruinous consequences have long served as fodder for musical commentary. From “Frankie and Johnny” to Bob Mould’s “Thumbtack” popular song is rife with indictments of infidelity and the cheating heart. Most of the time the point-of-view fixates on the jilted spouse or lover, the lyrics scripted as a cathartic means of leveling guilt and weathering grief. Millie Jackson tilled a fresh plot of ground with the back-to-back albums captured on this budget-priced two-fer. Widening her lens to encompass not only the voice of the archetypal wronged woman but also the unpopular angle of the woman doing the wronging she crafted an influential landmark. Both records are high concept Soul sagas. Caught Up outlines each side of the affair (conspicuously leaving out the vantage of the man in the middle) as first the “other woman” and then the wife state their emotion-fueled cases and concerns. Side A is a minor revelation as Jackson pulls no punches in running down a first-person account of the nameless coquette’s conceits and deceits. “The Rap” proves especially revealing as the woman rolls out a cold-hearted checklist of her devious tactics in snaring a married man, noting: “you can think of a whole lotta good stuff to tell a nigger when you're by yourself” over a tight funky backdrop supplied by the legendary Muscle Shoals Swampers. Another kernel of callous wisdom: with a married man “the sweetest thing about the whole situation is the fact that when you go to the Laundromat, you don’t have to wash nobody’s funky drawers but your own.” The inevitable confrontation between seductress and scorned wife occurs on “All I Want is a Fighting Chance” with the former audaciously pronouncing to the latter “we’re wives-in-law” atop a chugging fuzz-tone guitar and riffing horn rhythm. Later songs sketch the ensuing train wreck of the triangle with tight (if occasionally sappy) musical arrangements and Jackson’s always passionate oratory. Still Caught Up reverses the testimony order, opening with the somewhat implausible plot turn of the wife offering an olive branch to the adulterous husband and the tables turning poetically on the duplicitous “other woman.” Everything wraps with the now-abandoned vixen’s colorful and histrionic descent into cackling jealous hysteria. Plenty of supremely soulful jams pave the story along the way from inception to denouement, making the journey’s various excesses more than potable.