Genres can be a misleading thing. Cynical cash-ins aside, it’s doubtful that musicians plan their movements in order to fit in with a certain scene, sound or idea. More often than not, that several people have opted to move their style in a particular direction at roughly the same time is a pure accident, a random twist of fate that’s judged to constitute a brand new genre only after considerable amount of time has passed. So it is with Country Funk.

The title of the track ‘LA Memphis Tyler Texas’ by the spirited Dale Hawkins (a former rockabilly star of ‘Susie Q.’ fame) instrumental that opens this 16-track feast from the seemingly infallible Light in the Attic sums up the proceedings nicely. At some point in the late ’60s, various songwriters and bands started to blur the previously steadfast boundaries between the rural concerns of the countryside and the grit, noise and bustle of the modern metropolis. To help get their point across, downcast storytelling tunes in the country tradition got dressed up in the fatback rhythmic finery of prime soul and funk. Inspired to batter down musical conservatism and erase once and for all the artificial divide between “white music” and “black music” by such forward-thinking soul/funk labels as Stax and Hi, as well as the progressive aims of the burgeoning counterculture. The resulting, deeply diverse recordings were bundled together only much later, probably around the time the groundbreaking – and now much sought-after – Country Got Soul comps came out in the early 2000s, some 25 years after the cut-off point for this collection.

Mixing super-obscure rarities with genre giants with superlative outcomes, Country Funk proves just how loose a collective this “movement” – commercially marginal in its heyday and since – really was. The contents run the gamut from John Randolph Marr’s ‘Hello LA. Bye Bye Birmingham’, a fine, wounded grass-isn’t-greener-on-the-other-side country lament presented as a horn-laden Stax stomper, to Johnny Jenkins’ ominously barked ‘I Walk on Gilded Splinters’, a percussion-heavy reading of Dr John‘s New Orleans swamp-funk standard that’s more Hendrix than Hank (Williams). Along the way, we encounter a compelling mix of the relative high-profile (Bobbie Gentry and Tony Joe White, both on spectacularly steamy form), the criminally underrated and recently unearthed (Jim Ford’s incredibly funky ‘I Wanta Make Her Love Me’, the gritty melancholy of Bobby Charles’ ‘Street People’, the mighty Larry Jon Wilson with his signature tune ‘Ohoopee River Bottomland’), unexpected visitors (former teen idol Bobby Darin’s thoroughly convincing ‘Light Blue’), and the long-since-forgotten no-hitters (most notably Dennis The Fox, whose tongue-in-cheek ‘Piledriver’ appears to foresee the damnation-preaching aspects of Nick Cave’s vocal style).

You could whinge about the omissions – there’s no Mickey Newbury or, perhaps understandably, anything from Elvis’s late ’60s/early ’70s country-soul phase, even though Presley’s occasional songwriter Mac Davis (‘In the Ghetto’) offers one of the collection’s biggest gems with ‘Lucas Was a Red Neck’. But that would be unfair. A rare compilation where virtually every track is a highlight, Country Funk delivers a welcome reminder of the greatness that can ensue when musicians ignore the rulebook.