Information About The Queen Of Southern Soul Music, Ms. Jody (With A Focus On Her 2013 Dance Song "Just Let Me Ride")

 

Just Let Me Ride

Ms. Jody - Topic, Nov 8, 2014

Provided to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises

℗ 2012 Ecko Records

album Still Strokin’

Released on: 2013-01-08

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NW-DNknw-c

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Edited by Azizi Powell

This is Part I of a two part pancocojams series on Southern Soul singer Ms. Jody, with a focus on her 2012 song "Just Let Me Ride".

This post showcases a YouTube video of Ms. Jody singing "Let Me Ride" and presents two excerpts of essays about Ms. Jody that I found in Southern Soul R&B.com but which that editor indicated were originally published in Daddy B. Nice's Album Reviews.

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2026/08/five-african-american-soul-line-dances.html for Part II of this pancocojams series. Four of these videos feature the follow the leader, single file formation. The remaining showcase video features people dancing in the standard soul line dancing formation that consists of horizontal lines.

The content of this post is presented for historical, socio-cultural, entertainment, and aesthetic purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to Ms. Jody for her musical legacy. Thanks to Daddy B. Nice for his writing and thanks to https://www.southernsoulrnb.com where I found these essays. 

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TWO EXCERPTS OF ESSAYS ABOUT SOUTHERN SOUL SINGER MS. JODY
From  https://www.southernsoulrnb.com/artistguide.cfm?aid=699 "Just Let Me Ride": Ms. Jody: The New Generation Southern Soul, March 23, 2025: Originally published in Daddy B. Nice's Album Reviews

ESSAY #1

June 26, 2021: Daddy B. Nice's Profile [of Southern Soul singer Ms Judy]
“In 2005 Dale Pickens, the brother of Vertie Joanne Delapaz (Ms. Jody), took her to her first blues show--Denise LaSalle--and the experience inspired Vertie to consider performing herself. "I can do that," she remembers thinking. That fall in 2005, a still young O. B. Buchana and his band, Total Control, were celebrating a CD Release Party in Meridian, Mississippi, just up the road from Bay Springs. Pickens knew some of the band members, and he introduced Ms. Jody to them and the band's manager, William Day.

Day was so enamored of Ms. Jody's talent that he asked her if she'd like to travel to Memphis and meet John Ward and Morris J. Williams of Ecko Records, who were also impressed, and Ecko released Ms. Jody's first album, You're My Angel, in March of 2006.

The first single from the album was a Lillie Pickens-composed song entitled, aptly enough. "Ms. Jody," and the upbeat number, although diverting, wasn't strong enough to make an impression. Soon after, however, deejays discovered a country-influenced song on the album called "I Never Take A Day Off (From Loving My Baby)."

"I Never Take A Day Off," with Ms. Jody's unaffected, Nashville-inflected vocal riffing over John Ward's solid instrumental track, sounded almost revolutionary in a soul context, and the record soon caught on across the South.

[...]

 Ms. Jody hit the scene around the same time as Nellie "Tiger" Travis, and your Daddy B. Nice remembers singling out the two of them amongst all the divas from that period as the surest bets to survive and flourish. Both had good songwriters behind them, Travis with Floyd Hamberlin and Ms. Jody with John Cummings (composer of "I Never Take A Day Off") and Ecko's extended stable of writers.

Ms. Jody and Nellie "Tiger" Travis have remained linked together at the top of the female division of the chitlin' circuit for almost two decades, like T.K. Soul and Sir Charles Jones at the top of the males.

But of the two (Nellie and Vertie), Vertie---aided and abetted by her Ecko cohorts---had her career concept down. Travis may have had a more intense triumph or two, but for quality and volume no one compares to Ms. Jody. As her first single proclaimed, she was the female version of Marvin Sease's "Mr. Jody". She was Mizzus Jody. She could cheat, lie, party, dance, cajole, prevaricate, pontificate, and oh---by the way---f-ck* like an angel, and do any of it without a whiff of self-consciousness.

And Ms. Jody's still doing it after all these years. If she hadn't filled the "Jody" vacuum and braved its minefields of cliches, someone else would have had to. But who? Who could have done it with her common-sensical demeanor and oft-times brilliance?

At her best, Ms. Jody shakes those old cliches like Raggedy Ann dolls, transforming them into universal truths as she does in her mid-career classic, "When Your Give A Damn Just Don't Give A Damn". By the end of that anthem, Ms. Jody has morphed into Every Woman's Woman, a dispenser of wisdom, equal parts confidante, psychiatrist, therapist and spiritual advisor.

 
The dominant track of her later career has been the indefatigable, rollicking and frollicking, Jody-perfect, double-entendre-ing "Just Let Me Ride," in which she "saved the horse and rode the cowboy"... And when that "(chestnut brown) cowboy left the stables, he was wearing a smile."...
-snip-
*That word is fully spelled out in that sentence.

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ESSAY #2
"About Ms. Jody: The New Generation Southern Soul

Vertie Joanne Delapaz (Ms. Jody) was born on November 10th in Chicago, Illinois. Two years after she was born, her parents--contractors in the Chicago area--returned to their former home in Bay Springs, Mississippi, about 65 miles southeast of Jackson, where they continued to live (and listen to a lot of Delta-flavored R&B around the house) through Ms. Jody's childhood.

Ecko Records in Memphis released Ms. Jody's first album, You're My Angel in March of 2006, and it immediately drew air play on legendary WMPR, Jackson, Mississippi, and other southern soul stations of the deep south.. Prominent singles from the debut included the country tune that would become one of Ms. Jody's all-time classics, "I Never Take A Day Off".

[...]

Ms. Jody's In The Streets Again (Ecko, 2010) returned Ms. Jody to the top of the Southern Soul singles charts with the throwback-sounding, mid-tempo "The Bop," but there was little else of enduring value on the set, and the follow-up, Ms. Jody's Keepin' It Real (Ecko 2011), failed to generate much enthusiasm, gaining a rare two-star rating from Daddy B. Nice.

2011's Ms. Jody's In The House righted the ship in resounding fashion, showcasing a revitalized Ms. Jody negotiating some of the finest material since her early CD's. In actuality, the music was even better.

The centerpiece of Ms. Jody's In The House was a song that both broadened and amplified the musical virtues of Ms. Jody's signature hit, "I Never Take A Day Off." The song, recorded in both a radio version and a long, voice-over (talking) version spanning over six minutes, was ”When Your Give A Damn Just Don't Give A Damn Anymore”.

The album represented a career-defining pinnacle for Ms. Jody, with almost every selection garnering airplay and acclaim. Memorable singles included: "Southern Soul Dip," "I Did It," "I Never Knew Good Love Could Hurt So Bad," "Something I Want" (a duet with David Brinston), "Just A Little Bit Won't Get It," plus excellent covers of her own hits ("Ms. Jody's Thang Zydeco Remix") and others (Lorraine Turner's "You Lost A Fortune" and Brenda Williams' "Let Me Be The Shoulder").

Still Strokin', Ms. Jody's eighth consecutive Ecko-published CD, arrived in 2013. While not quite as strong a set as MS. JODY'S IN THE HOUSE, Still Strokin' was nevertheless a disc of very high quality, notching another series of popular radio singles, led by the propulsive "Just Let Me Ride," closely followed by the title tune, "Still Strokin'," "Another Get Drunk Party" (a remake of an early Ms. Jody tune), "Where Can I Find A Good Man," "You Didn't Appreciate What You Had When You Had It," "Good Love," and two more well-executed cover songs, "Ms Jody Don't Mind Breaking Up Somebody's Home" (from the Ann Peebles standard) and "Dance Party" (from the Quinn Golden standard).

[...]
 

A greatest-hits compilation, The Best Of Ms. Jody (Ecko 2015) was followed by I Got The Feeling (Ecko 2016), a veritable triumph. Blues Critic, in a blurb, gushed that, "At this point in time it's safe to say Ms. Jody is the "Queen Of Southern Soul Blues," and Daddy B. Nice awarded the album five stars ("southern soul heaven"), noting that:

Is there any sight in southern soul more rewarding and reassuring than Ms. Jody slipping out of her shoes and singing and dancing barefoot onstage? How lucky are we fans to have such a natural woman at the helm of our musical ship? Earthy, sexy, unfailingly scandalous yet somehow not obscene, Ms. Jody accommodates all the onstage, "grown-folks-only" shtick that LaMorris Williams and other male artists indulge in to make the audience howl--flirting, lap-dancing, grinding and rolling with a member of the opposite sex beckoned onstage for the fans' vicarious delight--and yet she endures as a country girl, humble and practical, an "every-woman" whom all women and even the "mens" can identify with.

The CD review in its entirety (as well as many other Ms. Jody album reviews) can be read in Daddy B. Nice's 21st Century Artist Guide to Ms. Jody, Tidbits #8. https://www.southernsoulrnb.com/artistguide.cfm?aid=554

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This concludes Part I of this two part pancocojams series.

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