Cornell Campbell won Henry Rollins over blind—the old who’s-this?-oh-beautiful trick that the best of the sweet reggae singers can play again and again even two generations past those first sessions at Studio One. Campbell, who hovers in a Desmond Dekker falsetto on spirituals that reach out to touch Sam Cooke, had it in the first three words of his “I Shall Not Remove,” a resurrection of the gospel standard that puffs and glows with King Tubby’s dub production but never dissolves the grandeur of that lonesome hopeful voice. (Though his later version of “Just My Imagination” didn’t match all five Temptations, he made a respectable equivalent to at least three.) And while “Natty Dread in a Greenwich Town” or “The Gorgon Speaks” (both part of noted Campbell song series) found Campbell in more jolly moods, it’s the slow and slightly sad songs that put him at his best—something of Gregory Isaacs’ wounded Romeo, but also some different deep and confident and powerful thing that grows from a line of gentle moments, accreting to crescendo and then fluttering away in Tubby’s echo and ebb. U-Roy’s place on this same bill brings in the spaceman delegation, but Campbell sings for simpler things—the solo singer on the dock of the bay, where soul sounds best from a man alone.

CORNELL CAMPBELL WITH U-ROY, PAT KELLY AND STRANGER COLE AT DUB CLUB AT THE ECHOPLEX | 1154 GLENDALE BLVD | LOS ANGELES 90026 | ATTHEECHO.COM | FRI | 9PM | $14 | 18+

Tags: cornell campbell, desmond dekker, dub, Music, reggae, the echo