Читать книгу A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race And The Soul Of America - Craig Werner - Страница 9

Section One

“A Change Is Gonna Come”: Mahalia Jackson, Motown, and the Movement

1

The Dream

Everyone knows the image and the words. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr., wiped his brow in the August heat, challenged the salt-and-pepper crowd spread out before him to create a world where children will “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Beamed by television from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado to Stone Mountain in Georgia, King’s vision of interracial harmony called forth an unprecedented display of shared faith. For one day in 1963, America transcended its history and let freedom ring.

Like its defining snapshot at the March on Washington, the larger story of the freedom movement is familiar if not altogether accurate. Bearing its anthems of redemption down the streets of the civil rights–era South, the movement called out to America’s conscience—and the country answered. Repudiating violence, King led the masses of the black South up from the shadows of slavery and segregation. Inspired by King’s compelling moral vision, mainstream America heeded the call of King’s allies, the Kennedys, and dismantled the barriers separating blacks from whites. Like Lincoln and JFK, King was rewarded for his struggle and his martyrdom with a hallowed place in the gallery of American heroes.

The images and the stories that go with them are so familiar they’ve lost their meaning. It’s not that they’re entirely false. King was an inspirational leader. For people of all colors committed to racial justice, the sixties were a time of hope. You could hear it in the music: in the freedom songs that soared high above and sunk deep within the hearts of the marchers at Selma and Montgomery; in the gospel inflections of Sam Cooke’s teenage love songs; in Motown’s self-proclaimed sound track for “young America”; in blue-eyed soul and English remakes of the Chicago blues; in Aretha Franklin’s resounding call for respect; in Sly Stone’s celebration of the everyday people and Jimi Hendrix’s vision of an interracial tribe; in John Coltrane’s celebration of a love supreme. For brief moments during the decade surrounding King’s speech, many of us harbored real hopes that the racial nightmare might be coming to an end.

It didn’t. It still hasn’t. And there’s a bitter irony in the fact that King has become as much a problem as an inspiration for those seeking to fulfill his vision. Reverberating for three decades, invoked by politicians of all races and parties, quoted by his enemies to bolster causes he condemned in life, King’s words too often drown out the multitude of voices that made the freedom movement something more than a frozen image on a stamp. Representing the march and the movement requires a montage, not a close-up. When all we can hear are the words of the great man, we miss the deeper sources of the movement’s energy.

The story was larger, deeper, more troubling than any one dream. The hope was more complicated, the inspiration more profound, than our public memory admits. To hear the real story, we need to listen carefully to the voices of those who were there, starting with the gospel music that gave the marchers the strength to go on. We can begin, simply enough, by pulling back from the close-up of King’s sweat-streaked face and refocusing on a woman standing in the second row, in the shadow of the Great Emancipator. Mahalia Jackson.

2

Mahalia and the Movement

If King gave the movement a vision, Mahalia Jackson gave it a voice. By 1963, she was nearly as well known as King among both whites and the blacks whose support had lifted her out of poverty and obscurity. During the mid-fifties, Mahalia’s weekly CBS radio show brought gospel music into the homes of white Americans who would never have gone near the black churches of New Orleans and Chicago where she had learned to sing. Mahalia achieved the nearly impossible feat of becoming a major star without crossing over into the secular world. On occasion, she agreed to sing pop songs like “Danny Boy” and “The Green Leaves of Summer,” but she steadfastly resisted the producers who wanted to cash in on her powerful voice in the new interracial market for rhythm and blues.

Like Ray Charles, who played a crucial role in opening that market, Mahalia modeled her style on the singing of the black sanctified churches. Often the poorest churches in poor communities, sanctified churches valued religious ecstasy more highly than polished phrasing or perfect pitch. At times, a sanctified church could erupt with a collective energy that transformed centuries of bitter hardship into moments of pure connection—with self, community, and the soul-deep presence of the Lord. Hinted at in Brother Ray’s “I Got a Woman”—a secular remake of the gospel classic “There’s a Man Going Round Taking Names”—such moments were the core of what the white audience was just beginning to hear in Little Richard’s ecstatic whoops, lifted straight from gospel singer Marion Williams. Although Mahalia showed little interest in the spiritually suspect rock and roll, she understood the point: “I believe the blues and jazz and even the rock and roll stuff got their beat from the Sanctified Church. We Baptists sang sweet. . . but when those Holiness people tore into ‘I’m So Glad Jesus Lifted Me Up!’ they came out with real jubilation.” Mahalia’s resistance helped maintain her strong connection with the churchgoing black community—still a large majority in the early sixties—even as she gained the ear of whites ranging from my grandparents listening to her radio show in rural South Dakota, where I first heard her voice, to John Kennedy, who hosted her at the White House.

Mahalia’s presence at the Lincoln Memorial on that blistering August afternoon in 1963 was no accident. During the early days of the Montgomery bus boycott, Mahalia met King and Ralph Abernathy at the 1955 National Baptist Convention meeting in Denver. When the two young ministers asked her to lend her voice to the struggle, she embraced the opportunity. In Montgomery, she stayed with the Abernathys and performed at one of the rallies that defined the movement. Looking back, it’s difficult to imagine the pressures at work on each black person who found the courage to attend that rally. The threat of physical violence was real. Two days after Mahalia left Montgomery, a dynamite bomb went off outside the bedroom where she had slept. But beyond that, the black residents of Montgomery faced the constant threat of economic retaliation. In an economy controlled by whites, being branded a troublemaker meant being fired. And retribution could be extended to family members—elderly parents, children starting out in the world. It could mean a hasty midnight departure for the North—or a long, slow parade to the local cemetery.

Again and again, movement veterans testify to the central role gospel music played in helping them find the strength to overcome their fears. So it was crucial that Mahalia was physically present while the police and the Ku Klux Klan—not always two distinct groups in the Deep South—circled the church. That night in Montgomery, Mahalia sang “I’ve Heard of a City Called Heaven” and “Move On Up a Little Higher.”

Her choices illuminate the political power of gospel music, which is obvious to most blacks and obscure to most whites. When Mahalia sings that she’s going to make heaven her home, she’s most certainly singing about saving her soul. When she moves on up, her destination is a place by the side of Jesus. But she’s also, and without any sense of contradiction, singing about freedom, moving up to full participation in American society. Heaven is heaven, but it’s also a seat at the front of the bus. When, in a classic gospel cut that rocks as hard as anything the Rolling Stones ever played, Mahalia promises that she’s going to “walk in Jerusalem,” none of the cooks and maids whose marching feet carried the movement misunderstood her.

The strategy of expressing dangerous political messages under the cover of, and in concert with, religious lyrics extends back to slavery times. For Southern black communities whose cultural traditions had been passed down through the generations, the ultimate goal was freedom. The use of double meanings, accessible only to those attuned to the cultural code, developed as a survival strategy. Any slave openly expressing dissatisfaction, much less calling for resistance or rebellion, risked beating, whipping, death. Still, slaves did resist—sometimes spectacularly, as with the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831, which resulted in the deaths of fifty-five whites in rural Virginia. But, in large part because hundreds of blacks were killed in retribution for Turner’s revolt, resistance typically took less direct forms: work slowdowns, which whites attributed to black “laziness”; failure to follow simple directions, attributed to black “stupidity”; “lost” property, blamed on black propensity for theft. When slaves stood barefoot in a white church and sang to their masters that “everybody talkin’ ’bout heaven ain’t goin’ there,” the singers knew whose destination was in question.

Unable to communicate openly in public spaces, slaves developed ways of sharing information that remained invisible to their white masters. Aware that the Christianity they were taught by proslavery ministers counseled endurance on earth in exchange for a heavenly reward, “docile” slaves sang ostensibly passive lyrics like “swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.” Taking the black song as evidence of the slaves’ “childlike” acceptance of their condition, few whites heard the political message. But the slaves knew that the “River Jordan” was also the Ohio River, that the chariot’s destinations included Philadelphia, Buffalo, Boston, Canada. “Wade in the Water,” one of the most common slave songs and still a gospel standard, provided literal escape instructions for slaves pursued by bloodhounds. When they heard a voice call out “Steal away to Jesus, I ain’t got long to stay here,” slaves knew that Harriet Tubman used the song as a summons to the Underground Railroad.

Schooled in the cultural traditions of the segregation-era South, Mahalia was deeply aware of the power of masking. Studs Terkel, whose Chicago radio show first introduced her to a large white audience in 1947, recalls: “She explained to me that the spiritual wasn’t simply about Heaven over there, ‘A City Called Heaven.’ No, the city is here, on Earth. And so, as we know, slave songs were code songs. It was not a question of getting to Heaven, but rather to the free state of Canada or a safe city in the North—liberation here on Earth!”

While the songs Mahalia sang in Montgomery testify to the push for liberation, they highlight two very different aspects of that drive. “Move On Up a Little Higher,” Mahalia’s signature song, sold over two million copies, almost all of them to blacks, when it was released in 1947. Accompanied only by piano and organ, Mahalia carries her audience into a world impervious to the violence and poverty that have torn the black community apart, a world where “it’s always howdy howdy and never goodbye,” where the saints can lay down their burdens and put on their robes. The quiet confidence that allows Mahalia’s voice to move just ahead of the beat, to lead the community, anticipates the more obvious assertive energies underlying the masked messages in “Walk in Jerusalem,” “I’m On My Way,” and “Walk All Over God’s Heaven.” The black community’s overwhelming affirmation of Mahalia’s voice expressed a shared determination grounded in the unshakable knowledge that, in the eyes of God, their struggle was righteous. When Mahalia assured them that his eyes were on the sparrow, that he would calm the raging sea, it helped black folks gather their energy. When Mahalia called on her people to keep their hands on the plow, her voice helped them hold the plow, and each other, tight.

Mahalia’s powerful voice always carried undertones of something like despair, undertones that provide the emotional center of “I’ve Heard of a City Called Heaven.” Reaching deep into the agonies of black history, the song testifies to losses that, from any earthly perspective, seem too much to bear: the four young girls who died in the Sunday morning bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963; the millions of Africans who died in the cramped holds of the slave ships and whose bones littered the Atlantic. The litany of horrors has been recited so often that it has lost its ability to shock. Almost no one stops to think what it means that during the search for the three murdered civil rights workers whose deaths gave the Freedom Summer of 1964 its symbolic meaning, workers pulled up body after body of black men who had simply been forgotten, whose deaths had never attracted any attention outside the black communities who knew only that they were gone, who could never be sure whether they had been killed or simply run away.

It gets to the point where none of it can be said in words. Yet it is the foundation of black life in America. Even as she dedicated herself to a future in glory, Mahalia refused to forget the past. In “I’ve Heard of a City Called Heaven,” she voices that refusal as a moan. As theologian and social critic Cornel West observes in The Future of the Race, the moan lies at the core of black expression:

. . . it is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan—a cry not so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition. . . . The deep black meaning of this cry and moan goes back to the indescribable cries of Africans on the slave ships during the cruel transatlantic voyages to America and the indecipherable moans of enslaved Afro-Americans on Wednesday nights or Sunday mornings near god-forsaken creeks or on wooden benches at prayer meetings in makeshift black churches. This fragile existential arsenal—rooted in silent tears and weary lament—supports black endurance against madness and suicide.

When Mahalia sang “I’ve Heard of a City Called Heaven,” she was reaching out for a home, trying to find a way to hold on to the belief that, someday, things would change. That night in Montgomery, as the community gathered in the church prepared to take the movement to a new level, it was crucial that Mahalia acknowledged both the reality of the moan and the determination to “move on up a little higher.”

The people heard Mahalia at the same time they heard King. And they found the strength to march out and meet “the man.” Often in the name of their ancestors, always for the sake of their children. Eventually, a lot of white folks found the strength to join them. Some of them began to understand the hope inside the moan. The paths of some of the black folks, some of the white folks, led to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

The setting for King’s speech already resonated with a history that made Mahalia’s contribution that shining August day particularly appropriate. In 1939, black concert singer Marian Anderson had presented one of the most politically important concerts of the century from almost exactly the same spot. When the Daughters of the American Revolution denied her permission to sing at still-segregated Constitution Hall, Anderson moved to the Lincoln Memorial, where numerous political figures including Eleanor Roosevelt watched and endorsed her dignified protest. Challenging the nation to live up to its betrayed ideals, Anderson sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” When King introduced Anderson to sing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” twenty-four years later, he was acknowledging that he hadn’t made it there entirely on his own. When Mahalia moved to the microphone to sing, she was carrying on a tradition that placed black women and their voices at the center of the freedom struggle.

Between Montgomery and Washington, Mahalia had frequently warmed up crowds for King. The two had developed a kind of ritual where King would gauge the specific energy of a crowd and suggest a song to Mahalia. Before the march, King and Mahalia had tentatively agreed that she would sing Thomas Dorsey’s gospel classic “Take My Hand Precious Lord,” which Mahalia would later sing at her martyred friend’s funeral. But in Washington, just before she was to sing, King leaned over and asked for “I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned.” As deeply rooted in the moan as anything Mahalia ever sang, it reminded the crowd just what the price of the ticket had been and would continue to be. As Mahalia began to sing, a low-flying airplane threatened to drown out her voice. But, drawing the energy from her massive frame and from the history that surrounded her at the memorial, Mahalia’s voice surmounted its mechanical competition and rose up singing.

No better symbolic moment could have been imagined. As Mahalia’s triumph, the triumph of King and the march and the movement, became clear, the crowd began to wave white handkerchiefs. Although the plan had been for her to sing only one song, the crowd called out for more. Mahalia answered with a quietly joyous rendition of “How I Got Over.” If “I’ve Been ‘Buked” moans, “How I Got Over” shouts in celebration. The song has been performed by almost every major gospel artist, but it never sounds the same. Compare Mahalia’s best-known recording, which resembles “Move On Up” in style and feel, with the equally well-known version by the Swan Silvertones. Lead vocalist Claude Jeter turns the song into a high-energy expression of how individual brilliance can merge with a highly structured, polished background; change a couple of lyrics and the Swan’s version could have been a Motown hit. In contrast, Mahalia’s version tells of a very different path to the promised land; the slower tempo, the give-and-take between her voice and Mildred Falls’s piano, lets you know that movement doesn’t have to be feverish, that what’s important is to keep on moving. As in Montgomery, Mahalia grounded the experience in both the realities of the past and the belief in a better world to come.

There’s a story that credits Mahalia with another role in the success of the March on Washington. The written text of King’s speech did not include the “I Have a Dream” section. And, while the crowd was certainly with King throughout, it’s clear that without the “dream” section, an improvised version of a set piece he had used several times previously, the speech wouldn’t have gone down as a classic. A few days before the march, Mahalia had heard King invoke the “dream” in a speech at the Detroit church pastored by the Reverend C. L. Franklin, Aretha’s father. The story goes that, feeling the energy starting to slip away, Mahalia leaned forward to King and whispered, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” At the moment when it seemed most likely that the movement just might get all of us over, it was about Martin and Mahalia, the politics and the music. Most important, it was about the movement as a whole.

3

“The Soul of the Movement”:Calls and Responses

It wasn’t just Mahalia’s voice, any more than it was just Martin’s courage and determination, that gave the movement its strength. The power came from the community that responded so deeply to the songs that, as King wrote, “bind us together . . . help us march together.” The songs Mahalia sang were both a call for renewal and a response to her people’s courage. Like their ancestors who imagined themselves as Daniel in the lions’ den, the black people who made the movement real in the small towns away from the cameras had been turning the moan into music long before Mahalia and Martin forged their gospel politics.

The core of gospel politics lies in the “call and response” principle of African-American culture. The basic structure of call and response is straightforward. An individual voice, frequently a preacher or singer, calls out in a way that asks for a response. The response can be verbal, musical, physical—anything that communicates with the leader or the rest of the group. The response can affirm, argue, redirect the dialogue, raise a new question. Any response that gains attention and elicits a response of its own becomes a new call. Usually the individual who issued the first call responds to the response, remains the focal point of the ongoing dialogue. But it doesn’t have to be that way. During the movement, Charles Mingus, fascinated with the political and spiritual implications of call and response, explored ideas of community based on the constant redefinition of the relationship between group and leader in “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” and “Three or Four Shades of Blue.”

Similar experiments took place in the ranks of the freedom movement, especially in the local communities where the activities organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) often differed sharply from those planned by King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Most of the leaders recognized by the media were men, but SNCC organizers were often women who remained in the communities long after the television cameras had moved on to the next event orchestrated by the SCLC leadership from its Atlanta offices. Like the music itself, the grassroots organizing that made the movement happen was rooted in the local culture of the rural black South. And that gave the women who carried that culture a unique sense of the relative value of leadership and community, the balance of call and response.

After several decades of work with leadership-oriented civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC, which she said had too much of the “pulpit mentality,” Ella Baker committed herself to SNCC, saying, “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” For Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, the guiding spirit of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, it was about the “beloved community” as a whole: the women, the poor, the young. Reverend King was magnificent, but if the movement was going to work, it had to work in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and Barnwell, South Carolina, not just in New York, Atlanta, and whatever small town the SCLC chose for its stage.

While the SCLC focused on issues of political strategy, SNCC demonstrated a deeper appreciation of the role of culture, especially music, in the movement. Somehow, communities had to find a way to break the old patterns, transform fear into resistance. SNCC field secretary Phyllis Martin pointed to music’s crucial role: “The fear down here is tremendous. I didn’t know whether I’d be shot at, or stoned, or what. But when the singing started, I forgot all that. I felt good within myself. We sang ‘Oh Freedom’ and ‘We Shall Not Be Moved,’ and after that you just don’t want to sit around anymore. You want the world to hear you, to know what you’re fighting for!”

One of the original members of the SNCC Freedom Singers, Cordell Reagon, put it even more directly: “Without these songs, you know we wouldn’t be anywhere. We’d still be down on Mister Charley’s plantation, chopping cotton for 30 cents a day.” Bernice Johnson Reagon, then a member of the SNCC Freedom Singers, now presiding spirit of the black womanist group Sweet Honey in the Rock, recalls Ella Baker’s influence on her sense of the connection between music and politics: “She urged us as organizers to understand how to create structures that allowed others in our group to also be leaders as well as followers. Her power was in her wanting to increase others’ sense of their own power and their access to power.” Reagon describes the courage the songs gave to the Freedom Riders jailed in Hinds County, Mississippi; the students participating in SNCC’s voter education project in McComb, Mississippi; the marchers in Pine Bluff, Baton Rouge, Selma, Birmingham: “They sang as they were dragged into the streets. They sang in the paddy wagons and in the jails. And they sang when they returned to the Black community’s churches for strategy rallies.” One of those rallies took place in Dawson, Georgia, where, Reagon remembered, “I sat in a church and felt the chill that ran through a small gathering of Blacks when the sheriff and his deputies walked in. They stood at the door, making sure everyone knew they were there. Then a song began. And the song made sure that the sheriff and his deputies knew we were there. We became visible, our image was enlarged, when the sound of the freedom songs filled all the space in that church.”

Mahalia testified to the music’s power in her description of the Freedom Riders’ arrival at the Montgomery bus depot in 1961. Remembering how “gospel music had given the people courage and spirit when they were in danger” during the early days of King’s movement, Mahalia describes the community’s fear as “cars were set on fire and bombs were set off, but the Negroes kept right on coming. They filled up the church and began singing hymns and gospel songs.” Ultimately, music helped transform the burden into a movement. Mahalia describes Ralph Abernathy rising up and crying, “We don’t have to sweat and gasp in here! Those U.S. marshals are supposed to protect us. Open the windows! Let the fresh air in! Let those outside hear us singing a little louder!” No wonder King called music the “soul of the movement.”

As a man of the word, King attributed much of music’s power to the lyrics, but the local people usually echoed Bernice Johnson Reagon’s emphasis on the sound. The interlocking rhythms, the calls and responses, helped create a sense of the “beloved community.” If they marched alone, they could be isolated, picked off, made into examples of the futility of resistance. If they found a way to move together, then walking in Jerusalem could be, would be, real.

The words did help focus attention and spread the message beyond the beloved community. Bernice Johnson Reagon’s description of music’s importance anticipates Chuck D’s description of rap as “Black America’s CNN”: “With the need to gather supporters and disseminate information on the civil rights movement, the music gained increased importance as a means of conveying the nature and intensity of the struggle to audiences outside the geography of the movement.”

No one did more to bring the power of the words together with the underlying power of the music than Fannie Lou Hamer, SNCC field secretary from 1963 to 1967 and cofounder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the state’s segregationist delegation to the 1964 party convention in Atlantic City. At rallies, demonstrations, and SNCC meetings, Hamer used songs to bring her audience to a sense of connection. One of her favorites was “This Little Light of Mine,” another way of phrasing her best-known words: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” One MFDP member described the political impact of her songs: “When Mrs. Hamer finishes singing a few freedom songs one is aware that he has truly heard a fine political speech, stripped of the usual rhetoric and filled with the anger and determination of the civil rights movement.”

Both in its political contexts and its more strictly musical settings, call and response moves the emphasis from the individual to the group. For African American performance to work, the performer must receive a response, whether the rallying of the beloved community around the women who were redefining everyone as leaders, the chaotic participation of the crowd greeting the landing of George Clinton’s P-Funk mothership, or the intense concentration—punctuated by cries of “Yes Lord!” and “Tell it!”—that the Washington audience gave Martin and Mahalia. At its core, call and response is the African American form of critical analysis, a process that draws on the experience and insights of the entire community. The individual maintains a crucial role; a carefully crafted call can lead to the best, most useful insights. But the individual does not necessarily, or ideally, maintain control.

Mahalia linked her style with that of the pulpit, emphasizing the way both responded to their people’s moan: “It is the basic way that I sing today, from hearing the way the preacher would sort of sing in a—I mean, would preach in a cry, in a moan, would shout sort of, like in a chant way—a groaning sound which would penetrate to my heart.” When the preacher or singer shapes a call, it is already a response to the shared suffering of the community. If the members of the congregation or audience recognize their own experiences in the call, they respond. The simplest response consists of an “amen,” but responses can also call on the preacher to consider something he’s overlooked—the role of the sisters, for example—or challenge the singer to take it deeper, make it real. In its pure form, call and response can exist only in the interaction between people present with one another in the real world. But the underlying dynamic can be re-created in various ways. On many of Mahalia’s greatest records, Mildred Falls’s piano models the response of an aware congregation, walking at her side in the valley of despair, urging her up toward the mountaintop, letting her know, in good times and bad, that she isn’t alone. On record, background singers or choirs stand in for the community in the world. The best gospel records always sound live, because they capture the uncontainable energy unleashed by call and response, even if they were recorded in studios. The producers and musicians who turned gospel into Chicago soul and Motown never forgot the principle. The calls and responses between Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions came straight from the churches of Chicago’s South Side; Smokey Robinson and the Miracles re-created the dialogue between Claude Jeter and the Swan Silvertones. And those sounds had their origins in the slave songs and coded spirituals crafted in the centuries-old struggle for freedom. I second that emotion.

4

Motown:Money, Magic, and the Mask

The story of Motown is almost as familiar as the story of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s movement. And just about as trustworthy. The standard version goes something like this. A bunch of poor Detroit natives led by Berry Gordy, Jr., and Smokey Robinson decide it doesn’t make any sense that black folks aren’t making any money off their music. Paying careful attention to the most successful mainstream labels, they round up the local talent and put out about sixteen thousand number one singles. Motown helps realize the dreams of upward-bound black kids looking to get over like everyone else. White folks open their arms wide to embrace the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and the Jackson Five. Everybody gets rich and, having put an end to cultural segregation, moves to L.A. No one has to think too much about desolation row. Or, for that matter, look very far for a sound track for a nostalgic movie about the sixties. It’s the most compelling version of the American dream ever released in blackface.

Like the standard version of King’s movement, it’s not entirely wrong. Berry Gordy was certainly trying to cash in on the popularity of black music; the company slogan—”the sound of young America”—told a good bit of the truth. Some of the main players got rich, and most of them made a hell of a lot more money than anyone growing up in black Detroit could have reasonably expected. But if the public image of the movement misrepresents the deeper sources of its strength, the Motown myth obscures some hard truths about how money can undercut gospel politics.

In different ways, gospel and Motown exemplify the underlying drive of black culture in the fifties and sixties. Literary critic Robert Stepto labels the drive “ascent,” observing that ever since the days of folk tales and slave spirituals, black expression has placed a central emphasis on the interdependence of freedom and literacy. Black leaders from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Malcolm X and Jesse Jackson have said it over and over: No literacy, no freedom.

But literacy is more complicated than the basic ability to read and write. Becoming literate means learning to play the game by the real rules. You can’t believe what the white world says about how things work. You have to be smart enough to play the game within the game if you want to have any real chance of making it. Part of literacy involves knowing when to put up a good front, when to claim the moral high ground while you’re busy greasing palms. Not that ascent counsels cynicism. Handled carefully, the financial part of ascent maintains its link to communal freedom. The trick is to get paid without selling your people.

Stepto sets up a “symbolic geography” of black life based on the movement from the slavery of the “symbolic South” to the relative—but never absolute—freedom of the “symbolic North.” In slavery times, the movement was literal; Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad carried people up from the slave states to free soil. By the time Berry Gordy, Jr., and Martin Luther King, Jr., appeared on the scene, however, history had complicated the geography. Mississippi remained as far South as it had been a century before, but now it was clear that Harlem, Chicago’s South Side, and Boston’s Roxbury were North in name only. The cities that their parents had envisioned as “the promised land,” second-generation immigrants now laughingly referred to as “up South.” The North could be a seat in a classroom at Central High School in Little Rock or at the front of the bus in Montgomery. But it could also be a house in a redlined area of middle-class Chicago.

For Berry Gordy, the North was located in the Top 40 charts, just across the Jim Crow line from the “Race” or “R & B” charts. The North was where they kept the money. Describing the situation just before the founding of Motown, Gordy reflected on the record industry he was about to transform:

In the music business there had long been the distinction between black and white music, the assumption being that R&B was black and Pop was white. But with Rock ‘n’ Roll and the explosion of Elvis those clear distinctions began to get fuzzy. Elvis was a white artist who sang black music. What was it? (a) R&B, (b) Country, (c) Pop, (d) Rock ‘n’ Roll or (e) none of the above.

If you picked C you were right, that is, if the record sold a million copies. “Pop” means popular and if that ain’t, I don’t know what is. I never gave a damn what else it was called.

Although Gordy shared his awareness of money with numerous other black musicians, he had a unique ability to play the game as it’s really played. The stories of Mahalia Jackson and James Brown serve as cautionary tales concerning the costs of failing to master the unwritten rules. Mahalia’s obsession with money eventually alienated her from many of her closest friends. Throughout her career, she performed only after she’d been paid in cash. At times, she carried up to $15,000 in her bra, which led to some extremely tense moments when she was pulled over by Southern police. Her obsession with money was legendary among those who knew her, ultimately putting an end to her longtime collaboration with pianist Mildred Falls, whom Mahalia never paid more than a minimal fee. As Brother John Sellers, another of Mahalia’s friends alienated by financial problems, remembers: “We didn’t do right by [Mildred]. But you couldn’t talk to Mahalia about Mildred’s situation. She didn’t want to hear about her. When Mahalia had money, nobody could talk to her.”

James Brown dealt with the money problem by emphasizing the need for black economic self-determination. An ad Brown placed in New York City newspapers just before a 1969 appearance at Madison Square Garden proclaimed: “James Brown is totally committed to black power, the kind that is achieved not through the muzzle of a rifle but through education and economic leverage.” Brown’s embrace of “black capitalism” grew out of his experience on the “chitlin circuit”: the black theaters and clubs famed for presenting performers with the toughest audiences imaginable. Exercising total control over his creative product and enforcing band discipline with monetary fines for mistakes, Brown earned nearly universal recognition as the “hardest-working man in show business” and “the Godfather of Soul.” Even after he’d performed at the inaugural ball for Richard Nixon, another advocate of black capitalism, Brown steadfastly maintained, “I’d rather play for my folks at the Apollo than play the White House.” But he definitely cashed Nixon’s check.

Although Brown was delighted when his records crossed over onto the pop charts, he never surrendered the profound suspicions he’d acquired growing up in South Carolina, where it wasn’t any too clear the white folks had gotten word that slavery had come to an end. Brown never established a workable relationship with the mainstream economic system. For all his emphasis on black economic power, he simply didn’t take good care of the books. The IRS wasn’t buying his lack of formal education as an adequate excuse, a point it made absolutely clear in 1968 when it confiscated his files and billed him for $1,870,000 in back taxes. As a result, he spent a good part of the seventies struggling to clear his tax problems and extricate himself from disastrous record contracts.

Berry Gordy wasn’t about to make those sorts of mistakes, even if it meant relying heavily on experienced white accountants to take care of financial business. Motown’s rise presents a perfect parable of black capitalism in action. For Gordy, attention to economics was a family tradition. As Motown chronicler Nelson George points out, the Gordy family moved from Georgia to Detroit for the most unlikely of all reasons: Berry Gordy, Sr., “made too much money,” thereby attracting the envy of local white merchants who set about relieving him of the problem. The younger Gordy grew up in an atmosphere where capitalism’s primary virtues—competitiveness and a strong appreciation for the dollar bill—were articles of faith. It’s appropriate that Gordy’s first real success in the music business came when he wrote Barrett Strong’s hit “Money (That’s What I Want).” Looking back on his breakthrough, Gordy said: “I was broke until the time I wrote ‘Money’; even though I had many hits, and there were other writers who had many hits, we just didn’t have profits. And coming from a business family, my father and mother always talked about the bottom line, and simple things, and the bottom line is profit. You know, are you making money or not?”

Like Booker T. Washington, whom the family’s grocery business was named after, Gordy wore whatever mask suited his purposes. Where the masks of Mahalia’s music covered a political agenda, Motown’s masks were designed to bring the highest price on the open market. Gordy was aware that white folks wanted to get close to the aura of black sexuality, black danger, without putting their self-image at risk. He’d served his apprenticeship in the music world writing songs such as “Lonely Teardrops” and “To Be Loved” for Jackie Wilson, whose sexuality was just dangerous enough to keep him on the wrong side of the color line. At Motown, Gordy kept enough of the blackness—the churchy feel of David Ruffin’s lead vocals or the label’s signature tambourine—to set Motown apart from bland white pop. But he repressed the sexuality sufficiently to soothe the fears of uneasy parents. Motown worked hard to reassure America that the danger was safely under control, that the songs were about romance, not sex. Diana Ross and Tammi Terrell sounded like nice teenage girls; Eddie Kendricks, David Ruffin, and the young Marvin Gaye aspired to Las Vegas respectability. In a country conditioned to fear black females as Jezebels threatening the sanctity of white marriage, Motown promoted the Supremes as the quintessential “girl group.”

Gordy owed much of Motown’s success to the Artist Development Department. Under the guidance of etiquette expert Maxine Powers, choreographer Cholly Atkins, and musical director Maurice King, Artist Development transformed talented but unsophisticated teenagers into polished entertainers. If the opportunity to dine at the White House arose, Motown’s acts would know which fork to use.

Artist Development had an equally profound impact on the records released on the Motown, Tamla, Gordy, and Anna labels. Singers attended elocution lessons to help them with the press and to make sure white listeners unaccustomed to the sound of black voices could understand the words. Otis Williams of the Temptations recalled: “A producer or a singer might love a great, elaborate vocal riff, but we rarely put them on our records because we knew that most people who bought the records wouldn’t be able to sing along to those parts, especially not the white folks.”

For all the awareness of the mainstream audience, Motown singles spoke deeply to almost everyone who heard them, black or white. The obvious key to the success was that the label featured some of the most distinctive voices in popular music history. David Ruffin of the Temptations accented syllables that most other singers would have treated as throwaways; Smokey Robinson’s delicate lilt reconciled the choir loft and the malt shop; Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops expressed the darkest corners of the blues; Tammi Terrell radiated a girl-next-door sweetness; Martha Reeves added gospel depth to “Dancing in the Street” and “Nowhere to Run.” On almost any other label, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder wouldn’t have had serious competition.

But great as the singers were, the house musicians informally known as the Funk Brothers contributed at least as much to Motown’s success. The lineup varied somewhat, but the core consisted of Earl Van Dyke on keyboards; Robert White or Eddie Willis on guitar; Jack Ashford on vibes and tambourine; Eddie “Bongo” Brown on percussion; Benny Benjamin on drums; and James Jamerson, the least-recognized indisputable genius of soul music, on bass. Frequently playing off dramatic horn charts that established a compelling hook, the percussionists laid down a polyrhythmic foundation while Jamerson played bass lines that remain as stunning today as they were in the sixties. No one has ever matched his ability to improvise bass lines that define a song’s spirit. He seemed equally at home with the deceptively simple solo that opens “My Girl”; the dramatic runs that reconcile the pop verses with the gospel chorus of “Nowhere to Run”; the bouncy pop of “Stop! In the Name of Love”; and the intricate funk of “I Was Made to Love Her” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.” Jamerson attributed his style to influences that ranged from the arcane to the everyday call-and-response rituals of black Detroit:

My feel was always an Eastern feel, a spiritual thing. Take “Standing in the Shadows of Love.” The bass line has an Arabic feel. I’ve been around a whole lot of people from the East, from China and Japan. Then I studied the African, Cuban, and Indian scales. I brought all that with me to Motown. There were people from the East in my neighborhood. I’d run into Eastern musicians who liked the way I played and they’d keep in contact with me.

I picked up things from listening to people speak, the intonations of their voices; I could capture a line. I look at people walking and get a beat from their movements. . . . There was one of them heavy, funky tunes the Temptations did. . . . I can’t remember the name but there was this big, fat woman walking around. She couldn’t keep still. I wrote it by watching her move.

The Funk Brothers aren’t recognized by the general public in part because Motown’s emphasis on marketing stars kept the musicians’ names off the album covers. The label’s production strategy, a variation on Phil Spector’s “wall of sound,” made it easy to overlook their individual brilliance. The major Motown producers—Gordy, Smokey Robinson, the songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, Norman Whitfield—filled in all available sonic space. Instruments emerge from the mix briefly, but the richly orchestrated harmonies make it difficult to follow particular instruments or voices through entire songs. Yet almost every singer who worked with the Funk Brothers speaks of them in reverential tones. Seconding Otis Williams’s claim that the Funk Brothers “must go down in history as one of the best groups of musicians anywhere,” Martha Reeves writes: “These musicians were responsible for all of the success of the singers at Motown, because it was their music that inspired us to sing our best with excitement.”

Based in the unassuming Gordy house identified only by a carved wooden sign with blue letters reading “HITSVILLE U.S.A.,” the Motown production style expressed the communal dynamic that almost everyone who was there in the early years describes as “magic.” Musicians hung out at Hitsville at all hours of the day and night. When a song was ready to be recorded, whoever happened to be around chipped in. No one minded being called out of bed to contribute a riff or lay down another take. Major stars sang backup and provided handclaps on each other’s records. Disputes over billing, favoritism, and royalty payments eventually soured many of the original Motown artists, but at the start they cherished their own beloved community.

The best emblem of that community may have been the Motown Revue, which toured the South late in 1962, when memories of the vicious attacks on the Freedom Riders were fresh in everyone’s minds. A lineup including Mary Wells, the Supremes, the Miracles, the Temptations, Edwin Starr, Marvin Gaye, “Little Stevie” Wonder, the Marvelettes, and Martha and the Vandellas played a grueling itinerary of ninety one-night stands. With rare exceptions, the singers slept on the tour bus. Cautioned by Gordy that they were representing “not only Motown records but all of Detroit,” the musicians made it work in the face of difficulties, both grave and comic. Shots were fired at the tour bus; at one rest stop, a hostile gas station attendant refused to let the “niggers” use the toilets. On the other hand, tour participants laughed about the elaborate ruses they employed to get around the chaperons assigned to prevent private meetings between male and female singers; the chimpanzee Edwin Starr snuck onto the bus; and the incessant harmonica playing that led to good-natured threats to drop Little Stevie off at the next godforsaken roadside stop.

Remembering Gordy as a “very spiritual” man with “visions far beyond any of our imaginations,” Martha Reeves sums up Motown in the early days as “an exciting place where magic was created.” Otis Williams describes a community where everyone “was young and driven by the same dreams. You didn’t have to explain yourself. We all had that passion about music and success. You wouldn’t think twice about pitching in to help with whatever had to be done, whether it was singing backgrounds or mopping the floor. Joining Motown was more like being adopted by a big loving family than being hired by a company. This isn’t just nostalgia talking either. It really was a magical time.”

5

The Big Chill vs. Cooley High:Two out of Three Falls for the Soul of Motown

By the time Motown achieved cliché status with The 25th Anniversary TV Special and the Big Chill sound track, anyone who had trouble seeing past the glitter could be forgiven. By the mid-eighties, the entertainment industry had shrunk Motown to video size, turned Levi Stubbs’s agony into a condiment for yuppie angst.

Five Motown classics punctuate the sound track of The Big Chill alongside sixties classics by the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Band, the Young Rascals, and the Spencer Davis Group, which featured a young Stevie Winwood, the one white singer whose voice James Baldwin admitted misidentifying as black. In the world of The Big Chill, Motown provides the black part of a white mix. It’s not precisely a contradiction, more like a no-man’s-land of half-acknowledged emotional yearnings. Repeatedly, The Big Chill uses Motown cuts at moments of maximum emotional complexity. Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” sounds over the opening titles, which juxtapose the stark reality of suicide with a panorama of yuppie prosperity in the mid-Reagan era. Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears” underscores the characters’ agonized regrets over not having intervened to save their dead friend. “I Second That Emotion” fuels the celebratory catharsis of the morning after. As musical commentary on the characters’ psychological struggles, the cuts work well.

But they don’t communicate the gospel energy they carried for large parts of their original audience. In The Big Chill, black folk exist only in the past. Although the film takes place in a small Southern town, not a single black face appears on screen. Characters refer to blacks only when talking about what they’ve given up. When Mary Kay Place and Jeff Goldblum get into a conversation about Place’s experience in a public defender’s office, Place laments the fact that her clients usually deserve their punishments. When Goldblum asks, “Who’d you think your clients were gonna be? Grumpy and Sneezy?” Tom Berenger interjects, “No, Huey and Bobby.” Similarly, Goldblum acknowledges that he’s lost the part of himself that “made me want to go to Harlem and teach those ghetto kids.” But there’s no sense that gospel politics means anything at all in the mid-eighties. And there’s less sense that the characters or the filmmakers hear the Motown music that accompanies their personal predicaments as a call to engage in any ongoing struggle. For them, Motown looks backward through an affable haze. The label’s willingness to cash in with an avalanche of recycled “Greatest Hits” compilations during the eighties did nothing to resist the lucrative nostalgia.

Motown looks and sounds a bit different if you track it through Cooley High (1975), a very different movie. On the West Side of Chicago, and in the imagination of director Michael Schultz, Motown explodes with kinetic energy. Whatever the surface message, the underlying dynamic demands assertiveness. Cooley High tells the story of a group of high school students growing up in black Chicago during the mid-sixties. The movie pulses with an energy and hope recalling the gospel politics that energized the beloved communities of the South.

The connection wasn’t accidental. Most black Chicagoans had family roots in the South, most frequently Mississippi and New Orleans. When Chicago industries, especially meatpacking and the slaughterhouses, faced labor shortages, they recruited workers from the other end of the Illinois Central Railroad line. Robert Abbott, publisher of the nationally circulated black newspaper the Chicago Defender, did everything in his power to accelerate the exodus. Describing a place more myth than economic reality, the Defender presented Chicago as Mahalia’s Jerusalem, a respite from the lynching and poverty of the South. Investigate the family histories of almost any great Chicago musician and you’ll find roots in the Delta. Sam Cooke was born in Clarksdale, Muddy Waters in Rolling Fork, Howlin’ Wolf from just the other side of the river in Osceola, Arkansas. Mavis Staples was born in Chicago after her father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples, moved up from Winona.

Thousands of black Southerners streaming into Chicago during the Great Migration carried their music with them. Mahalia brought the sanctified singing of the New Orleans churches; Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters brought the Delta blues from the plantations and, given access to electricity, wasted no time plugging in their guitars. The Rolling Stones and Animals, as well as future Doors organist Ray Manzarek (who grew up in a white enclave on Chicago’s South Side), heard their call. Responding to the new experiences of a North that still maintained a romantic aura—a common rhyme declared “I’d rather be a lamppost in Chicago than the king of Mississippi”—the transplanted bluesmen bottlenecked Southern traditions into new forms that the Pullman porters carried back down the rail lines to share with the folks “down home.” When Chicago responded to the call of Mississippi, a new black voice was born.

Like its secular cousin, gospel was conceived in the South but some of its classic forms emerged in Chicago. Lifelong Southerners like Dorothy Love Coates and Clarence Fountain might disagree, but Southern-born Chicagoans like Sam Cooke and Mahalia made it clear that black culture could no longer be described solely as Southern. (And the folks who headed out west when the armaments industry needed workers for the Pacific campaign during World War II were already in the game. Specialty Records, the most important gospel label of the fifties, was based in L.A.) When Mahalia, Martin, and the beloved community used gospel to cement the foundation of a political movement, black Chicago, especially the older generation, was very much attuned to what was going on down home.

By the mid-sixties, however, a younger generation was coming into its own, a generation that had never lived in the Jim Crow South. Like the group setting out to fulfill Berry Gordy’s dream in Detroit, the young folks in Chicago harbored an expansive sense of possibility. Not that Chicago had turned out to be the promised land. The Windy City’s Black Belt, home turf for Sam Cooke and the Staples, not to mention the doomed protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son, was one of the most densely crowded areas in the country. During the postwar years, the population density of the Black Belt reached an incredible 300 percent of legal housing capacity. When Mayor Richard Daley welcomed delegates to the 1963 NAACP Convention by announcing that there was no longer a ghetto in Chicago, he was booed off the stage. Everyone who lived there knew better.

Preacher and Cochise, the central characters in Cooley High, experience Chicago in all its gospel and ghetto complexity; they share the promise and they hear the moan. And Motown provides the sound track. Set in 1964—although the sound track includes songs released as late as 1966—Cooley High opens with the Supremes’ “Baby Love” playing over a sequence that begins with the Chicago skyline across Lake Michigan and ends up in a ghetto apartment. Picking up on Holland-Dozier-Holland’s carefree lyrics and production style, which mirror the “girl group” formula of the Shirelles or the Crystals, these early scenes vibrate with the joy of young black men experiencing a world open to them in ways their parents would never have imagined possible. Energized by Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips,” Cochise, Preacher, and their friends hop a ride on the back of a city bus to the Lincoln Park Zoo, a public space of the sort that the movement was fighting to open in the South. In one crucial scene, Cochise organizes a minor theft by staging an argument with a white woman working at a hot-dog stand. In the South, a similar act might well have been fatal, as the citizens of Mississippi had taught Chicago native Emmett Till less than a decade earlier.

Throughout the first half of Cooley High, the teenagers live out their own version of the Young American Dream. They dance, joke, and make out to the sounds of the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself,” the Marvelettes’ “Beachwood 4-5789,” Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Ooo Baby Baby,” and the Temptations’ “My Girl,” which might as well be designated the official anthem of sixties teen lovers, black and white. But where The Big Chill uses Motown to endorse an eighties version of escapist personalism, Cooley High knows there’s something serious behind the pop mask.

One moment in Cooley High captures the depth of the gospel impulse about as well as anything in American popular culture. Cochise and his friends are getting ready to share a bottle of wine before heading to a party. When he opens the bottle, Cochise pours a few drops on the ground, saying, “This is for the brothers who ain’t here.” Defending himself against charges of wasting the wine, Cochise underlines the sense of community that connects Chicago, the black South, and the West African religious traditions he almost certainly doesn’t know much about: “There’s a lotta brothers who dead or in jail and we got to give them a little respect.” The gospel sense of community isn’t limited to the present; it reaches back into the deep past, remembers the moan, and helps the characters deal with the blues realities lurking within every Motown classic.

Even as they celebrate the communal energies of black Chicago, the hopes of the Great Migration, the Cooley High kids and their real-world counterparts hear the moan much more clearly than the characters in The Big Chill, who would have been almost exactly the same age. Where The Big Chill refers to political demonstrations and confrontations as part of a romanticized past, Cooley High portrays the violence just beneath the surface of everyday black life, even in its most hopeful moments. A party erupts into a free-for-all; Preacher’s mother collapses under the burden of her domestic work and her son’s unwillingness to do the right thing; a fight at a movie theater culminates in a stunning image of shadows bursting through the screen into reality; Preacher kneels in the twisted shadows beneath the El, calling out in despair over the body of Cochise, whose college scholarship is reduced to meaninglessness by black-on-black murder. As Preacher reenacts Cochise’s ritual by spilling whiskey into his open grave, Levi Stubbs’s anguished vocal on “Standing in the Shadows of Love” summons up a nightmare of abandonment from the middle of Motown’s optimistic pop mix. Whatever happy-talk the official company policy might have touted, Motown spoke to the full reality of black life in the sixties.

Today Coolidge High School, the real-life site of Cooley High, presents an emblem of urban hopelessness. The streets where the children hoped and played stand deserted. Mothers do their best to keep their kids off the block, to protect them from a violence unimaginable to the older generations. For a sense of how the Cooley High neighborhood appears today, look at the book Our America, a sobering and brilliant montage of photographs, interviews, and meditations assembled by two young black Chicagoans, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman. Like Our America, Cochise’s fate testifies all too clearly that The Big Chill’s lament for youthful idealism addresses the least of our losses.

Motown provided a sound track that was a whole lot more politically charged, more complexly moving, for young black Americans than it was for most of the white kids whose money helped realize Berry Gordy’s dream. Like gospel, Motown captured both the joy of connection and the pain that gave the joy its edge. But where gospel spoke to the black audience’s sense that the joy and pain couldn’t be separated, Motown played to the taste of a white audience conditioned to believe that, in James Baldwin’s timeless dismissal, “happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad.”

Although Motown accentuated the positive, Berry Gordy definitely understood the company’s success as part of the movement’s struggle against injustice. As part of the masking strategy, Motown avoided saying anything that might turn off record buyers or radio programmers. Where Sam Cooke and James Brown used their popularity to desegregate Southern theaters, however, the Motown Revue accepted racially separate seating areas in Memphis. Singers sang each song twice, once to the white audience on one side of the auditorium and once to the black audience on the other. Motown resisted its artists’ desires to create more socially explicit music until it became clear that politics, too, could pay.

And anyway, on street level, the songs had always communicated something fresher, more aggressive than Gordy had in mind. Gordy made generous donations to established civil rights groups and expressed respect for “all people who were fighting against bigotry and oppression.” His heart was clearly with King; in 1963, the Gordy label released two albums of King’s speeches, Great March to Freedom and Great March to Washington. “I saw Motown much like the world Dr. King was fighting for—with people of different races and religions, working together harmoniously for a common goal,” Gordy wrote. “While I was never too thrilled about that turn-the-other-cheek business, Dr. King showed me the wisdom of nonviolence.” Frequently, however, Motown provided part of a sound track for the new black generation that often rejected nonviolence with contempt When the Detroit ghetto exploded into violence in 1967, Martha and the Vandellas’ good-times classic “Dancing in the Street” rose up over the carnage. The thousands of Detroit residents who made the song into a call to arms were responding to Motown in ways that clashed strongly with Gordy’s interracial dream. Motown may have presented itself as a Negro enterprise, but it had a black soul.

One of the many things Cooley High gets right is that even those insiders—most but not all of them black—who heard the messages in the lower frequencies of James Jamerson’s bass and Levi Stubbs’s moan didn’t have to concentrate on them all the time. Even if you understood Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston’s “It Takes Two” as an endorsement of desegregation, you could still groove to it on a date. Responding to “The Tracks of My Tears” as a profound expression of the psychological cost of black masking didn’t keep you from singing it when you saw your lover with somebody else. The important point was that there was no dissonance between the personal and the political energies. The power of love you wanted to come down in your own life was the same power that energized Martin and Mahalia and Ella Baker’s beloved community. It was all about love and betrayal and the power of connection, which you felt as much when it was gone as when it was there. That was what the gospel impulse was all about

The Gospel Impulse

A Gospel Impulse Top 40

1.	Bob Marley, “Redemption Song,” 1980
2.	Mahalia Jackson, “Walk in Jerusalem,” 1963
3.	Aretha Franklin, “Spirit in the Dark,” 1970
4.	The Impressions, “People Get Ready,” 1965
5.	Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come,” 1965
6.	Staples Singers, “I’ll Take You There,” 1972
7.	Dorothy Love Coates and the Original Gospel Harmonettes, “No Hiding Place,” 1954
8.	Teddy Pendergrass, “You Can’t Hide from Yourself,” 1977
9.	Martha and the Vandellas, “Nowhere to Run,” 1965
10.	Swan Silvertones, “Mary Don’t You Weep,” 1959
11.	Jimmy Cliff, “Many Rivers to Cross,” 1975
12.	John Coltrane, “A Love Supreme,” 1964
13.	Charles Mingus, “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting,” 1960
14.	Marion Williams, “The Moan,” 1980
15.	Earth, Wind & Fire, “Devotion,” 1974
16.	Jackie Wilson, “Higher and Higher,” 1967
17.	Al Green, “Love and Happiness,” 1977
18.	Marvin Gaye, “Let’s Get It On,” 1973
19.	Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack, “Where Is the Love?,” 1972
20.	Ray Charles, “What’d I Say,” 1959
21.	Sam and Dave, “I Thank You,” 1968
22.	Neville Brothers, “My Blood,” 1989
23.	Edwin Hawkins Singers, “Oh Happy Day,” 1969
24.	Jerry Butler, “Only the Strong Survive,” 1969
25.	Stevie Wonder, “Higher Ground,” 1973
26.	Bruce Springsteen, “The Promised Land,” 1978
27.	The O’Neal Twins and the Interfaith Choir, “Highway to Heaven,” 1983
28.	Dianne Reeves, “Old Souls,” 1994
29.	James Brown. “Soul Power,” 1971
30.	Parliament, “Star Child (Mothership Connection),” 1976
31.	Sly and the Family Stone, “I Want to Take You Higher,” 1969
32.	Digable Planets. “Where I’m From,” 1993
33.	Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “I Second That Emotion,” 1967
34.	Ben E. King, “Stand by Me,” 1961
35.	Sister Sledge, “We Are Family,” 1979
36.	Jimmy Smith, “The Sermon,” 1958
37.	Abdullah Ibrahim, “Water from an Ancient Well,” 1986
38.	Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Breaths,” 1980
39.	Peter Tosh, “African,” 1977
40.	Kirk Franklin, “Why We Sing,” 1993

You’re unlikely to find CDs by the Temptations, Bob Marley, or Dianne Reeves in the gospel section of your record store alongside those by Mahalia Jackson, the Swan Silvertones, and God’s Property, but you should. Because all of them—along with countless other artists from Curtis Mayfield and Gladys Knight to Aretha Franklin and Earth, Wind & Fire—share a profound sense of the “gospel impulse”: the belief that life’s burdens can be transformed into hope, salvation, the promise of redemption.

At its best, the gospel impulse helps people experience themselves in relation to rather than on their own. Gospel makes the feeling of human separateness, which is what the blues are all about, bearable. It’s why DJs and the dancers they shape into momentary communities are telling the truth when they describe dance as a religious experience.

I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to “rock,” Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, “the Word”—when the church and I were one.

—James Baldwin

The gospel impulse half-remembers the values brought to the new world by the men and women uprooted from West African cultures: the connection between the spiritual and material worlds; the interdependence of self and community; the honoring of the elders and the ancestors; the recognition of the ever-changing flow of experience that renders all absolute ideologies meaningless. Scholars have traced the spiritual vision of African American culture from Africa through the Caribbean and American South to the dance floors of house clubs in Chicago. But there’s no question that the gospel impulse found its strongest American voice in the gospel churches, mostly poor and almost entirely black. In church, blacks were unlikely to encounter the prying eyes of potentially hostile whites. Here they could drop the mask. Of course the real people in the gospel churches had to deal with the same problems of hypocrisy, greed, and envy as their brothers and sisters out on the block. But even in its inevitable encounters with human frailty, the gospel impulse keeps alive a vision of spiritual community that echoes throughout the music of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, Bruce Springsteen and A Tribe Called Quest.

Gospel songs are the songs of hope. When you sing them you are delivered of your burden. You have a feeling that there is a cure for what’s wrong. It always gives me joy to sing gospel songs. I get to singing and I feel better right away. When you get through with the blues, you’ve got nothing to rest on. I tell people that the person who sings only the blues is like someone in a deep pit yelling for help, and I’m simply not in that position.

—Mahalia Jackson

The gospel impulse consists of a three-step process: (1) acknowledging the burden; (2) bearing witness; (3) finding redemption. The burden grounds the song in the history of suffering that links individual and community experiences. Black folks, like all human beings who let themselves know and feel it, have their crosses to bear. Less likely than whites to subscribe to the facile optimism of America’s civic ideology, most blacks maintain an awareness of limitation, of the harsh reality that the man goin’ round takin’ names doesn’t much care whether you’ve done your best to live in the light of the Lord. We don’t choose our burdens; we do choose our responses.

Gospel and the blues are really, if you break it down, almost the same thing. It’s just a question of whether you’re talkin’ about a woman or God. I come out of the Baptist church and naturally whatever happened to me in the church is gonna spill over. So I think the blues and gospel music is quite synonymous to each other.

—Ray Charles

Musicians grounded in the gospel impulse respond by bearing witness to the troubles they’ve seen, telling the deepest truths they know. The gospel singer testifies to the burden and the power of the spirit in moans or screams or harmonies so sweet they can make you cry. The testimony touches what we share and what we deal with when we’re on our own in that dark night of the soul. The word “witness” works partly because the burden involves history, power. There’s an evil in the world and, yeah, part of it’s inside us, but lots of it comes from the Devil. Call him sex or money, hypocrisy or capitalism, the landlord or Governor Wallace, but the Devil’s real. You deal with him or he, maybe she, will most definitely deal with you. If you stop right there, you’ve got the blues.

Music is healing. It’s all there to uplift someone. If somebody’s burdened down and having a hard time, if they’re depressed, gospel music will help them. We were singing about freedom. We were singing about when will we be paid for the work we’ve done. We were talking about doing right by us. We were down with Martin Luther King. Pops said this is a righteous man. If he can preach this, we can sing it.

—Mavis Staples

But gospel doesn’t leave it there. Marley, Aretha, Mahalia, and Al Green all testify to the reality of redemption. If the blues give you the strength to face another day but leave you to face it on your own, gospel promises, or at least holds out the possibility, that tomorrow may be different, better. With the help of the spirit and your people—in the church or on the dance floor—you can get over, walk in Jerusalem, dance to the music. But it takes an energy bigger than yourself, the wellspring of healing that South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim called “water from an ancient well.” For the classic gospel singers, the source is God; for soul singers, it’s love. Bob Marley calls it Jah. George Clinton envisions Atlantis, the mothership. Arrested Development imagines a tree in Tennessee. Whatever its specific incarnation, gospel redemption breaks down the difference between personal salvation and communal liberation. No one makes it alone. If we’re going to bear up under the weight of the cross, find the strength to renounce the Devil, if we’re going to survive to bear witness and move on up, we’re going to have to connect. The music shows us how.

6

Sam Cooke and the Voice of Change

J. W. Alexander of the legendary gospel quartet the Soul Stirrers remembered the precise moment Sam Cooke found his voice. Recalling the difficulties Cooke faced in trying to match the virtuosity of R. H. Harris, whom he had replaced as the group’s lead vocalist, Alexander described the moment of discovery, which occurred in a California auditorium one night in 1953: “in trying to dodge one of those high notes . . . he did a whoa-whoa-whoa type of thing. . . . He just floated under.” It was a voice that possessed a unique ability to call forth strong responses from the black folk attending the gospel show that night in California and from the teens, black and white, who heard it on their transistor radios. A pioneer on the path that led from the gospel highway to the top twenty, Cooke envisioned a world where the two audiences might merge into one, where black singers could sing what he called “real gospel” and still get paid.

The circumstances surrounding Cooke’s death from gunshots in a South Central Los Angeles motel in December 1964 have never really been explained. He’d gone there with a woman, later identified as a prostitute, who’d stolen his clothes. When he burst into the motel office angrily demanding their return, he was shot by the motel manager, who claimed that she had acted in self-defense. Many in the black community believed he’d been set up. The only sure thing is that his death changed the world of American popular music in ways that delayed the fulfillment of his dream.

Cooke mapped the paths available to singers trying to bring the gospel impulse into the interracial marketplace. He had begun his career in gospel during the formative years of the freedom movement. Beginning in 1953 when “Jesus Gave Me Water” sold sixty-five thousand copies, an extraordinary performance in the all-black gospel market, Cooke’s voice floated the Soul Stirrers through a series of hits that confirmed them as a major force in gospel. Moving to the popular marketplace, he recorded a series of seemingly innocuous pop hits including “Cupid,” “Wonderful World,” and “You Send Me.” By the end of his life, he had begun to merge his approaches in the “gospel pop” of “Bring It on Home to Me,” “Soothe Me,” and the breathtaking “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

Born in the heart of the Mississippi Delta and raised in Chicago’s Bronzeville, Cooke got a firsthand look at the transition from Southern to Northern forms of African American culture. A preacher in the socially conservative but musically vibrant Holiness Church, Cooke’s father, Charles Cook—Sam added the e as a none-too-effective disguise when he moved from gospel to pop music—had moved to Chicago and found work in the stockyards. Joining over a hundred thousand other black migrants from the South, he worked alongside many of the fifty thousand whites who belonged to the twenty Chicago-area Ku Klux Klan “klaverns.” Despite de facto integration on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, social life and housing in Chicago remained nearly as segregated as they had been in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Like their counterparts in the South, Chicago’s black churches provided centers for community activity. Young Chicagoans raised in the church—among them Cooke, Jerry Butler, and Curtis Mayfield—saw how music could bring their people together. The gospel soul they created succeeded in communicating something of the movement’s feel to a surprisingly large white audience. As historian Taylor Branch observed, their achievement carried major political significance. Describing a 1963 concert in Atlanta’s Ponce de Leon Park where Cooke performed alongside the Drifters, Solomon Burke, Dionne Warwick, Jerry Butler, and numerous others, Branch writes that the park was “jammed not only with Negro fans but also with young white people, for whom the best Negro pop music reached beneath formal and worldly preoccupations to release elemental emotions of sex, frivolity, love, and sadness.” Underscoring the political significance of the music, Branch concludes: “The stars of soul music and the blues stood with King as exemplars of the mysterious Negro church—nearly all of them had been gospel singers—but they were still ahead of him in crossing over to a mass white audience. They unlocked the shared feelings, if not the understanding, that he longed to reach.”

Cooke reached that audience with a string of hits beginning with “You Send Me” and culminating in “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which was released eleven days after his death. The song expresses the soul of the freedom movement as clearly and powerfully as King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” The opening measures verge on melodrama: a searching French horn rises over a lush swell of symphonic strings accompanied by tympani. But Cooke brings it back to earth, bearing witness to the restlessness that keeps him moving like the muddy river bordering the Delta where he was born. Maintaining his belief in something up there beyond the sky, Cooke draws sustenance from his gospel roots. He testifies that it’s been a long, long time—the second “long” carries all the weight of a bone-deep gospel weariness. Then he sings the midnight back toward dawn. The hard-won hope that comes through in the way he uses his signature “whoa-whoa-whoa” to emphasize the word “know” in the climactic line—”I know that a change is gonna come”—feels as real as anything America has ever been able to imagine.

James Baldwin reached for something similar in his classic story “Sonny’s Blues.” Thinking of his uncle’s death by mindless racial violence, his brother Sonny’s struggle with heroin addiction, his young daughter’s illness and death, Baldwin’s narrator turns to music for something that’s not quite consolation and even less understanding. Creole, the bass player in Sonny’s band, brings the jazz explorations back home: “He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

When he tried to shine some of that light on pop audiences in the late fifties, Cooke encountered cultural dissonances that demanded extraordinary skills of translation and negotiation, as well as some masking. The interracial rock and roll explosion ignited by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Elvis a few years earlier had run up against serious resistance. Hypersensitive to the threat of international communism, mainstream politicians painted any challenge to American “normalcy” as part of an all-encompassing communist plot. Even when their methods attracted some timorous and belated criticism, J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy did not defy the mainstream in their ideology. John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in large part because his anti-communism was more extreme. In this political climate, any agitation on social issues, including any challenge to conventional racial or sexual roles, drew sustained fire. In the South, where most whites colored King’s movement dark red, that wasn’t a metaphor.

The new “mongrel music” provided an inviting target. In the mid-fifties, rock and roll rattled a staid McCarthy-era America with disconcerting images of unfettered sexual energy that frequently brought blacks and whites together on suddenly integrated dance floors. Pictures of Little Richard, eyes rolled back underneath a distinctly bizarre mountain of hair, confronted cold war–era America with images from one of its worst nightmares. It didn’t help that he seemed at least as interested in the white boys as the sisters they were supposed to be protecting. The hysterical tone of the attacks comes through clearly in a pamphlet distributed to white parents: “Help save the youth of America! Don’t let your children buy or listen to these Negro records. The screaming, idiotic words and savage music are undermining the morals of our white American youth.”

The authorities cracked down on the interracial music scene. Chuck Berry went to jail; Little Richard “retired” to the ambiguous safety of the church, throwing his diamond rings in the river—”they never would tell us what river,” laments Solomon Burke—and denouncing rock and roll as the devil’s music after he dreamed of his own damnation. Pioneer disc jockey Alan Freed, who made little distinction between rock and roll and rhythm and blues, was hounded into exile in a payola scandal that somehow let clean-cut pop impresario Dick Clark escape unscathed. Sanitized teen idols like Fabian and Frankie Avalon—many of them Italian Americans dark enough to remain exotic without presenting a threat to “racial purity”—channeled the uncontained sexual energy of the pioneers into chaperoned romance guaranteed not to move more than a few steps past first base.

Enter Sam Cooke with a “crossover” vision that helped redefine American popular music. By the time “You Send Me” reached number one in 1957, Cooke had almost a decade of mileage on the gospel highway, first with Chicago’s Highway QCs and then with the Soul Stirrers, where he replaced the legendary R. H. Harris as lead vocalist. Like blues guitarists, jazz instrumentalists, and hip-hop vocalists, gospel quartets often fought it out head-to-head for audience approval. A singer had to be on his game or he wasn’t going to hold the stage. Just that simple. Never able to stand toe-to-toe with the raw power of gospel veterans like Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones, Ira Tucker of the Dixie Hummingbirds, the incomparable Clarence Fountain of the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, or Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, Cooke finessed the issue. Moving away from Harris’s combination of raw power and down-home phrasing, Cooke developed the personal style described perfectly by Daniel Wolff in his definitive biography, You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke: “When Sam took hold of a note . . . it wasn’t the traditional nonverbal moan that Holiness congregations were used to. It wasn’t a cry of pain. Instead, he decorated the note, embellishing the melody till it hung, fragile as lace, in the air over the congregation.”

Cooke’s new approach resulted in the kind of competitive stalemate that might emerge in a one-on-one game between Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Jordan. Each star kept his supporters, but each had to refine his style. Those who watched Cooke with the Soul Stirrers remembered that for the younger members of the audience, especially the women, he was the man. Cooke’s audience heard his voice as a response to the power of the moan and the redemptive vision. “Come Go with Me” revives the vision of the promised land while “Pilgrim of Sorrow” testifies to the reality of the burden. But the key to Cooke’s success, even within the gospel world, lay in his provocative blending of sex and spirituality in “Jesus Gave Me Water” and “Touch the Hem of His Garment.” Mostly Cooke pretended to stay just—and only just—this side of the line from Ray Charles’s frankly sexual “I Got a Woman” and “What’d I Say.” But, as Willie Dixon, Cooke’s contemporary on the blues side of Chicago’s musical tracks, put it: “The men don’t know but the little girls understand.”

The black girls in the gospel audience, the same teenagers who listened to Little Richard and Chuck Berry, understood Cooke’s star potential clearly. So did Sam. During his five years of gospel stardom, he developed an ideal crossover style: delicate, almost ethereal, but with enough of Harris’s and Fountain’s power to provide a clear alternative to pop crooning. He also had the advantage of seeing what had happened to the crossover rock and rollers when they let the mask slip too far. Cooke’s foray into the mainstream established the approach refined by Berry Gordy’s Motown. There were three basic principles: innocent (if sometimes masked) lyrics; arrangements (frequently built around strings) that emphasized hooks; and smooth background harmonies (often provided by white studio singers).

The call and response on the crossover dream connected singers from Memphis to Manhattan. Recording for New York’s Atlantic Records, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters transformed their gospel roots into a sweet soul style that anticipated Cooke’s on hits such as “Such a Night,” later covered by Elvis Presley, and “Honey Love.” At the same time Cooke was recording “Cupid” and “Only Sixteen,” the girl groups, often produced by studio genius Phil Spector, were exploring parallel approaches. The powerful bass line and softly strumming guitar in Jerry Butler and the Impressions’ “For Your Precious Love” anticipate the gospel soul of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” a secularized remake of the gospel standard “Stand By Me Father.” Against a deceptively beautiful orchestral backdrop, King’s lyrics ride the power of a soul-deep bass line. Looking out on a darkened landscape where “the moon is the only light we’ll see,” King searches for the strength to overcome his sense of isolation. “I won’t be afraid, no I won’t be afraid,” he repeats, “Just as long as you stand by me.” It’s a classic case of political masking. Listeners unaware of the violence facing the beloved community can hear the song as a plea for romantic connection. But if you visualize a lone SNCC organizer on a Southern back road, the song grows deeper.

Even while he was appealing to the integrated teen audience of Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Show, Cooke continued to play one-nighters for predominantly black audiences in the South. On New Year’s Eve 1962, as he was preparing a musical assault on Las Vegas, he more than held his own at a gospel concert in Newark, New Jersey, where he appeared alongside the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Caravan Singers, and the latest incarnation of the Soul Stirrers. Cooke explained his continuing connection with his roots: “When the whites are through with Sammy Davis, Jr., he won’t have anywhere to play. I’ll always be able to go back to my people ‘cause I’m never gonna stop singing to them. No matter how big I get, I’m still gonna do my dates down South. Still gonna do those kind of shows. I’m not gonna leave my base.” James Brown—and Ella Baker—would have understood.

If you listen to Cooke’s crossover hits with an awareness of masking, some wonderful moments, otherwise invisible, come into focus. One of Cooke’s biggest hits, “Wonderful World” (later covered by soul legends Herman’s Hermits and James Taylor) opens with what seems to be a high school cliché: “Don’t know much about history / don’t know much biology.” The cliché’s worth a second thought. Because, if there are two things that a black man in pop music needed to encourage the white audience to forget, they were history and biology, at least the parts involving skin color and sexuality. If you could do that, who knows? The world just might turn out to be as wonderful as Leave It to Beaver and Camelot promised.

7

Solid Gold Coffins:Phil Spector and the Girl Group Blues

Even when Cooke was creating his pop hits, he remembered his gospel roots. That wasn’t easy in the pop world, where the connection was sometimes lost, with tragic results. The girl groups produced by Phil Spector are a case in point. Spector recognized great singing when he heard it, and there’s never been a producer who could get denser, more breathtaking sound out of a studio. Many of the singers he recruited for his groups had been trained in the call-and-response traditions of the gospel church.

But when the deal went down, Spector’s records were Spector’s records. Ronnie Bennett, lead singer of the Ronettes before she married Spector in 1966, recalled “how fanatical Phil was about every detail of what went on in the studio.” Spector controlled every aspect of the Ronettes’ classic singles, “Walking in the Rain,” “Baby I Love You,” and “Be My Baby,” which provides the title for Ronnie’s memoir of her life with Spector. Both in the studio and when the Ronettes performed live, Spector insisted they follow his orders concerning clothes, hair style, movement, and vocal inflection.

Spector’s desire to dominate Ronnie wasn’t limited to music. The scenes of violence and abuse recounted in Be My Baby are overwhelming. Right before Ronnie summoned the courage to break out of the marriage, Spector threatened to kill her and told her mother: “I’m completely prepared for that day. I’ve already got her coffin. It’s solid gold. And it’s got a glass top, so I can keep my eyes on her after she’s dead.” After the divorce, he made the first $1,300 alimony payment in nickels.

Ronnie Bennett wasn’t the only one with that kind of story to tell. Almost every female singer of the early sixties had, at the very least, suffered through a series of difficult romantic relationships. Tina Turner accepted Ike’s beatings in part because she preferred them to life in the cotton fields where she had grown up. “Cotton, I hated it,” said Tina, “picking cotton and chopping it, the sun was so hot. I dreaded those times. That’s the only thing that made me change my life. I knew I couldn’t do that. As a child, I knew the beginning of hate and can not do and don’t want to do and will not do.” Ike may have provided an alternative to Nutbush, Tennessee, where Tina grew up as Anna Mae Bullock, but the price of the ticket was high. You can hear it in Tina’s voice on “A Fool in Love.” After the deep gospel moan that opens the record, Tina and a female chorus engage in a wrenching call and response on a situation that Ronnie would have understood: “You know you love him / you can’t understand / why he treat you like he do when he’s such a good man.” About all you can say is that if Phil Spector and Ike Turner are the working definition of a good man, we’re in a world of hurt.

Not even Motown, determined to avoid the slightest hint of anything white Americans could stereotype as “niggerish” behavior, avoided the problem. Sharing none of Spector’s tendencies toward violence and disrespect, the Gordy family did its best to provide a positive model. While there’s no question that Berry Gordy, Sr.’s mantle as family patriarch passed down to his son, women were deeply involved, as equals, in the family’s decision-making process. Before Berry Gordy, Jr., could borrow the $800 he needed to found Motown from the credit union the family funded with required donations from all members, he had to convince the family council he was worth the risk, and that required the support of his mother and sisters. Women made the financial decision that made Motown happen.

But none of that could save Tammi Terrell. Briefly married to boxer Ernie Terrell, who once fought Muhammad Ali for the heavyweight crown, Tammi embodied Motown’s ideal of the (black) “girl next door.” The duets she recorded with the young Marvin Gaye—“If I Could Build My Whole World Around You,” “You’re All I Need to Get By,” “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing”—told a story of fresh and innocent love, and helped Motown establish a presence in the teen magazines. When Tammi collapsed into Marvin’s arms on stage during a performance at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, the magazines presented her hospitalization as part of a tragic romance.

Real life was quite a bit different. One of many singers attracted to her vibrant energy, James Brown remembered Tammi as “a kid that people ran too fast and took advantage of.” Others who knew her described her romantic life as a nightmare of violence and abuse. The problem, according to Marvin Gaye, who never actually had a sexual relationship with his fantasy partner, was that “Tammi was the kind of chick who couldn’t be controlled by men.” And when men feel control slipping away, they often resort to their fists. Although no legal charges were ever filed, almost everyone who knew her believes the “brain tumor” that finally killed her—she underwent eight brain operations in the year and a half after her collapse—resulted from physical battering. “Tammi was the victim of the violent side of love,” Gaye said. “At least that’s how it felt. I have no first-hand knowledge of what really killed her, but it was a deep vibe.” Although no one at Motown has ever publicly admitted it, the vocals on the “comeback” albums released by “Marvin and Tammi” to capitalize on Tammi’s “recovery” and the revitalization of their fantasy romance were actually sung by Valerie Simpson. Tammi Terrell died at age twenty-four.

Closer to the chaos of the blues than the gospel celebrations their records suggested, the experiences of Ronnie Bennett, Tina Turner, and Tammi Terrell point out the unresolvable tension between the gospel energy of their best records and their blues experiences as women in a world where Spector could oversee the Crystals’ horrifyingly beautiful “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)”; Courtney Love’s devastating mid-nineties cover hammered home the horror and let the beauty be. With the possible exception of the great records he made with the Righteous Brothers and Tina Turner’s 1966 classic “River Deep Mountain High,” there wasn’t much real call and response between Spector and his singers. In the end, that left Spector himself isolated and blue. When Spector’s musical genius passed over the borderline into paranoid silence and isolation, no one was in a position to call him back.

8

SAR and the Ambiguity of Integration

Always a realist, Sam Cooke shared James Brown’s belief that success predicated on the goodwill of white Americans couldn’t be trusted. That was why he went out of his way to keep his connections with his original audience. And it was part of the reason why, in the last years of his life, Cooke developed close friendships with Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, the two black men who accounted for many of white America’s worst nightmares. Moments after the then Cassius Clay stunned Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight championship, he called on Cooke to join the celebration in the ring, introducing him as the world’s “greatest rock and roll singer.” Depending on how you looked at it, it either was or was not a long way from the Copa, where earlier that year Cooke had donned a tux to sing not only “Bill Bailey” and “Tennessee Waltz” but movement standards “If I Had a Hammer” and “This Little Light of Mine.”

Cooke’s politics were complicated. Even as he endorsed the movement’s demand for the removal of all barriers keeping blacks from full participation in the public world, Cooke resisted the idea that, once the walls came tumbling down, blacks would abandon their homes and rush inside. A dedicated desegregationist willing to enter the mainstream to replenish his supply of dollar bills, Cooke insisted that any meaningful concept of integration required an equal amount of white movement toward the black world.

For years before he met Malcolm and Ali, Cooke had willingly used his performing skills to support King’s goals. Jerry Butler recalls how Cooke supported student protestors in the South by forcing whites to enter traditionally black spaces, a situation that highlights the difference between integration, which assumes a white norm, and desegregation, in which cultural exchange can flow both ways. In 1959, Cooke forced promoters in Norfolk, Virginia, to open black seating areas to whites attending his performance. Butler assigns soul singers a place “at the vanguard of the movement” and stresses that “Young people like us, we were at A&T in Greensboro and Johnson: that whole corridor of black schools that starts at Baltimore. The entertainers would go in with the kids because we knew better than anybody that it wasn’t about money. It was about color. ‘Cause we had the money!” Cooke expressed his commitment to desegregation in a column published in numerous black newspapers in 1960: “I’ll never forget the day I was unable to fulfill a one-night singing engagement in Georgia because I wouldn’t sit in a Jim Crow bus and because no white taxicab driver would take me from the airport to the city—and Negro cabdrivers were not permitted to bring their cabs into the airport. . . I have always detested people of any color, religion or nationality who have lacked courage to stand up and be counted.”

For Cooke, the concept of desegregation allowed connection, but it didn’t require it. It was cool to share your music with white folks, and it definitely paid better than the chitlin circuit, but you didn’t have to give up the grits to have the gravy. Even though whites had a disturbing tendency to think that all that history just kinda vanished once they’d changed their own personal minds, Cooke, Malcolm, and Ali knew it didn’t. Malcolm inspired Cooke to read widely in what was just beginning to be called “black studies.” Cooke’s longtime guitarist Cliff White recalls him reading W. E. B. Du Bois and whatever he could find on black history: “Sam was deep, deep into that business.”

Bobby Womack, whose career Cooke helped launch, remembers: “Sam was always into reading. He read black history a lot, he read Aristotle, he read The New Yorker and Playboy magazine, I mean he read all the time. Everywhere he went he would look and see where he could get a book—he didn’t care what it was about, he would get something.” Womack remembers Cooke telling him, “That’s the only way you can grow. Otherwise you’re going to write love songs for the rest of your life. But everything ain’t about love. If you in a situation that you thought was supposed to be a certain way, you can write in a way where it’s like an abstract painting.”

While he maintained an active interest in “white” culture, Cooke never passed, as black novelist Julian Mayfield phrased it, “into the mainstream, and oblivion.” His commitment to black culture and black people culminated in his work with the SAR record label, which he founded with Soul Stirrer manager Roy Crain and gospel singer J. W. Alexander of the Pilgrim Travellers. Once Cooke established a solid financial base with his crossover hits, he worked to realize his vision of bringing real gospel music to a pop audience. His brother L. C. remembers Sam insisting that “Real gospel music has GOT to make a comeback.” According to Bobby Womack, Cooke was also determined to bring the political meanings masked by his pop lyrics closer to the surface: “He said, ‘Bobby, let me tell you something. People will buy the news if it’s sung with a melody.’ He said, ‘News is cold. Only bad news makes the press. But if you sung it with a melody, it would lighten the burden a little bit, and people would understand.’ ”

At SAR, Cooke sought to help both new talent and established gospel acts reach a mixed audience. As Alexander recalls, the label consciously applied Cooke’s formula for negotiating the larger culture: “We knew because of our background, it was just a matter of different lyrics.” The results were frequently brilliant. On the sides cut by the Valentinos (originally the Womack Brothers) and the revived Soul Stirrers with Johnnie Taylor and Paul Foster sharing lead vocals, the potential of a blacker pop sound shines through clearly. The Soul Stirrers’ “Wade in the Water” and “Stand by Me Father” hold their own with most of Cooke’s pop hits.

It’s something of a mystery why SAR never really connected with a white audience. Maybe it was the distribution problems that constantly plague small labels. Or maybe Cooke simply let the mask slip too much. The Soul Stirrers’ “Mary Don’t You Weep” doesn’t really pretend the Pharaoh who got drowned lived three thousand years ago in Egypt. And the soaring “Free At Last” recasts Cooke’s pop composition “Just for You”—which can also be heard as a love song to the Lord—as an explicit tribute to Martin Luther King.

Although the mass white audience wasn’t ready for the gospel side of Cooke’s vision, the music world was. Smokey Robinson acknowledged that “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” later covered by the Beatles, was inspired by Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me,” which features a soulful call and response between Cooke and Lou Rawls, who sang lead for the Pilgrim Travellers before embarking on a solo career. Billy Preston, who did his first recording for SAR, would later play keyboard for both the Beatles and the Stones. His straight-out-of-church organ helps make the Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down” one of the greatest soul songs ever recorded by a “white” group. John Lennon wasn’t stretching things when he told Beatles manager Allen Klein: “If you can understand Sam Cooke’s music, you can understand mine.”

Cooke’s impact on soul was equally powerful. The Simms Twins’ SAR cut, “Soothe Me,” pointed the way toward the call-and-response duets of Memphis soulmen Sam and Dave, who cut their own version of the song; Otis Redding frequently covered Cooke’s songs while developing his own style of secular testifying. Curtis Mayfield, who perfected Cooke’s style of gospel soul, recalls Cooke as an inspirational model when he was growing up in Chicago’s Black Belt: “Oh yeah, I was a Sam Cooke fan. With the Northern Jubilees [Mayfield’s first gospel group] we admired the Soul Stirrers so much and tried to duplicate some of their sounds, but of course Sam Cooke was Sam Cooke. When ‘You Send Me’ came out, man, we thought it was just a fantastic piece of music.” An incident described by Soul Stirrer Le Roy Crume concerning the group’s recording of “Lead Me Jesus” highlights the complicated relationship between gospel and soul:

Sam told me, “Le Roy, I got a hit coming out, ‘Soothe Me.’ ” And he said, “I want you to write a gospel to it” I said, “You’re not going to let your r&b number come out first?” He said, “Oh, no, I’ll hold it.” Man, that r&b came out before our record, and I said, “Sam, why you do that?” Man, we played Atlanta and the promoter was standing out on the steps, and he didn’t say hello or nothing, he just said, “Crume, why in the world did you guys do that?” I said, “What, man? What are you talking about?” He said, “This rock ‘n’ roll song. You all recorded a rock ‘n’ roll song.” I said, “No, man, we didn’t record a rock ‘n’ roll song. He said, “Well, it’s just like a rock ‘n’ roll song. It’s not going to work, man.” He said, “You guys used to be #1 in here, but you can forget it. Man, you might get booed off the stage.” Oh man, I was so scared. That was the one time I took Jimmie in the dressing room and said, “Jimmie, let’s don’t even touch that song.” I said, “Just sing one line, and let’s walk.” Well, that’s what we did, and, man, the crowd just went crazy, and the promoter came to me and said, “Damn, you guys can do anything you want!”

Cooke was acutely aware that the benefits of a desegregated music scene flowed both ways. When Bobby Womack expressed his anger over the Rolling Stones’ cover of “It’s All Over Now,” Cooke calmed him. “This will be history,” Cooke told his protégé. “Bobby, man, this group will change the industry. They ain’t like the Beatles, they’re the ghetto kids. They gonna make it loose for everybody.” Despite the Stones’ hard-edged image, the Beatles were a whole lot closer to being real ghetto kids. But Cooke’s cultural analysis holds. Just as the Stones, Beatles, and Righteous Brothers drew on black traditions to enrich their music, Cooke was learning something from what the white folks were doing. Modeling “A Change Is Gonna Come” in part on Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Cooke was intrigued by the ragged sincerity of the folk revival. The folk singers “may not sound as good,” he observed, “but the people believe them more.”

“There’s something coming,” he told Bobby Womack, “and it’s coming fast.”

9

“The Times They Are A-Changin’”: Port Huron and the Folk Revival

Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” heralded the new world coming with a warning that tripped quickly from clarion to cliché. But for a brief time in the early sixties, a cluster of mostly white, mostly middle-class students seemed determined to forge a new politics attuned to the ideal of the beloved community. Armed with acoustic guitars and an earnest belief in interracial brotherhood, the musicians connected with the folk revival brought the movement’s basic values as close to the pop culture mainstream as they’ve ever been, before or since. In the early sixties, their energies coalesced around the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Media-fed memory has reduced SDS to a cluster of chaotic images: Tom Hayden endorsing guerrilla warfare in the streets of Newark; the Weathermen rampaging through the Days of Rage; students seizing the administration building at Columbia University, angry hecklers drowning out Ted Kennedy at the University of Wisconsin; the whole world watching blood flow in the streets of Chicago outside the 1968 Democratic Convention. Even when distorted by revisionism and nostalgia, those images nonetheless reflect the passion, confusion, and profoundly misguided ideological romance of the late sixties. Sometimes it seemed that no one, not even the people who wrote it, remembered the founding document of SDS, the Port Huron Statement.

The Port Huron Statement bears disquieting signs of its academic origin: turgid prose and telltale indications of the ideological hairsplitting that would tear the New Left apart. But its vision of a living political community dedicated to economic accountability, world peace, and racial justice remains vital in a time when a “liberarl” president has overseen the dismantling of the welfare state and widened the yawning chasm between rich and poor. Seen by its framers as an attempt to make America live up to its own betrayed ideals, the statement celebrates the concept of participatory democracy. It envisions politics as a way of “Bringing people out of isolation and into community,” helping them find “meaning in personal life.” Addressing a political context in which Southern “Dixiecrats” and conservative Republicans controlled Washington, the statement endorses what in retrospect seems a fairly conventional, if unusually hopeful, liberal agenda. Although its calls for nuclear disarmament and corporate reform were never seriously considered, large parts of the statement read like a rough draft of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

Expressing an urgency foreign to a Kennedy administration unwilling to risk its shaky power base, the introduction concentrates on two “events too troubling to dismiss”: the reality of “human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry” and “the enclosing fact of the Cold War.” As New Left historian James Miller observes, the students who founded SDS drew their political theory primarily from “the tradition of civic republicanism that links Aristotle to John Dewey.” At the same time, they were acutely aware of how much they owed to the freedom movement, which was “exemplary because it insists there can be a passage out of apathy.”

Like King’s wing of the movement, the Port Huron Statement maintained a cautious hope that the Kennedy administration might be convinced to play a substantial role in addressing “human degradation.” Released several months before Kennedy reluctantly committed federal force to the integration of the University of Mississippi (thereby abandoning all hope for further support from the white South), the statement damns the administration with the very faintest of praise:

It has been said that the Kennedy administration did more in two years than the Eisenhower administration did in eight. Of this there can be no doubt. But it is analogous to comparing whispers to silence when positively stentorian tones are demanded. President Kennedy leaped ahead of the Eisenhower record when he made his second reference to the racial problem.

Calling for an aggressive alternative to Kennedy’s gradualism, the statement emphasizes the need for voter registration, pointing toward the collaboration with black activists that culminated in the Freedom Summer of 1964. Earlier, during SNCC’s 1962 voter registration campaign in McComb, Mississippi, SDS leader Tom Hayden had met Bob Moses, whose political philosophy exerted a major impact on the Port Huron deliberations later that year. Transmitted through mimeographed copies of the Port Huron Statement, the vision of participatory democracy fueled the moral imaginations of the students who founded local chapters of SDS in Boston, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and Madison.

Many of those same imaginations had been attracted to the movement by the political songs on the 1963 folk revival classic The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Dylan dealt directly with both of SDS’s main concerns: “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” focused on the cold war; “Oxford Town” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game” on racial justice. Several other political songs that elicited a strong response when Dylan performed them in concert were omitted from the album: “The Ballad of Emmett Till” and “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” which Columbia Records vetoed for fear of lawsuits from right-wing lunatics.

Thousands of college students streamed south to help register voters in Mississippi. Often romantic in their politics, sometimes naive about the depth of white supremacy, almost all shared a conviction of righteousness. They were responding to King’s plea to let freedom ring and to the folk songs they took with them to the base camps dotting the Mississippi Delta, “looking like a strange mixture of kids going to camp and soldiers off to war,” one of them wrote home.

Many of the students looked to the folk revival for perspectives and information excluded from the nightly news. The framers of the Port Huron Statement belonged to the first generation raised on television; many of them were enthralled by the moral dramas the SCLC constructed for the nationwide audience. In the early days of the movement, TV coverage usually placed viewers in a position closer to the demonstrators than to the authorities resisting their demands. White middle-class viewers in the North gazed into the steely eyes of state troopers snatching American flags out of the hands of schoolchildren in Jackson, Mississippi, shared the tension as the Freedom Riders—white ministers wearing clerical collars and well-dressed young black men—were swept away by the hurricane of violence in the Birmingham bus station. In her autobiography, Joan Baez describes King’s constant awareness that the whole world was watching his every move. Walking beside King during an SCLC-sponsored campaign in Grenada, Mississippi, Baez responded angrily to the crowd harassing the marchers:

They looked particularly pasty, frightened, and unhappy on this day, not at all like a “superior race.” I whispered to King, “Martin, what in the hell are we doing? You want these magnificent spirits to be like them?,” indicating the miserable little band on the opposite curb. “We must be nuts!” King nodded majestically at an overanxious cameraman, and said out of the corner of his mouth, “Ahem . . . Not while the cameras are rollin’.”

The SCLC’s most effective use of the media strategy occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, where fire hoses and police dogs deployed against black schoolchildren made a clear moral statement in living rooms and dens throughout white America.

However biased in favor of the movement TV coverage might have seemed to George Wallace or Spiro Agnew—the godfathers of Rush Limbaugh’s “liberal media” hallucination—white students seeking the meanings behind the SCLC’s carefully orchestrated morality plays found television useless. Many of them turned to folk music, to Baez, Dylan, Phil Ochs (“Talking Birmingham Jam,” “Too Many Martyrs (The Ballad of Medgar Evers),” and the devastating satire “Love Me, I’m a Liberal”) and Peter, Paul & Mary (“Very Last Day,” “If I Had a Hammer,” and the hit version of “Blowin’ in the Wind”). The folk singers provided the kind of insight the students sought.

But there were limits to the folk revival’s political vision. Especially after the catharsis of Freedom Summer, the folkies had trouble building bridges to ordinary black people. Despite the presence of Odetta, Josh White, and a few other black folk singers, the folk revival was mostly a white thing. If the goal was brotherhood, this wasn’t a problem that could be ignored. The black presence at folk concerts was pretty much limited to the small group of black Bohemians who had decided to check out what was happening over on the newly accessible white side of town. Amiri Baraka, who had been one of them, observed that most of those Bohemians preferred to listen to the R & B on the jukeboxes in the black taverns where they went to loosen up and relish a less contrived sense of community. Part of the problem with the folk revival was that it failed to attract the black listeners who preferred Motown, Sam Cooke, or even less “historically correct” versions of gospel or the blues.

The folk revival’s sense of the blues reveals the core of the problem. For the vast majority of the folkies, the blues were something strummed on the front porches of picturesque Southern shacks by grizzled old men descended directly from Mark Twain’s Jim. They’d suffered, but they endured, and cool stuff like that. Given the number of humanities majors and aspiring writers in the crowd, the echo of the literary noble savage shouldn’t come as any surprise. What the folkies didn’t want in their blues was electricity, drums, any tinge of the fallen modern world. Which was a real problem since by 1960, a good three quarters of those grizzled old black men were hanging out in Chicago, Detroit, or other points north, trying to get paid while they set out the basics of rock guitar for the more attentive if less earnest rock and rollers. The Folkways record label, probably the definitive source of material for the folk movement, shunned all contact with urban blues, thereby isolating Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and John Lee Hooker from the American white folks with the greatest theoretical interest in black culture. Anyone getting his or her sense of black life from Folkways liner notes would have been hard-pressed to guess that black folks had ever encountered electricity.

10

Woody and Race

Woody Guthrie spent damn little time worrying about authenticity. If the concept meant anything at all to him, it was backing up the words he’d written on his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.” The folk revivalists who looked to Woody as a mythic hero could certainly have learned some things from taking a closer look at how he dealt with race. By the time Woody recorded “This Land Is Your Land,” which Lyndon Johnson suggested should be made the national anthem, his concept of America included blacks, Mexicans, and Indians as well as the sometimes virulently racist white folks of the Oklahoma hills where he was born.

The voices Woody heard as a boy in Oklahoma came from all over America’s racial map: the black town of Boley lay ten miles down the road from Okemah, where he grew up in what had been called Indian Territory until the white folks developed an interest in the oil pooled beneath what they’d mistaken for a barren wasteland. But like his white companions, Woody was taught to hear the phrase “people” as “white people”; a part of the local Democratic political machine, Woody’s father at least condoned and probably participated in several lynchings. One of the turning points of Woody’s political development came in 1937, when he received a letter protesting his use of a racial slur on the Los Angeles radio broadcast where he played the role of the naive hillbilly. The listener wrote: “You were getting along quite well in your program this evening until you announced your ‘Nigger Blues.’ I am a Negro, a young Negro in college, and I certainly resented your remark. No person . . . of any intelligence uses that word over the radio today.” Rather than downplaying the situation, Woody admitted his upbringing had blinded him to the issue; he simply hadn’t thought about it. He apologized and promised not to do it again.

And he didn’t. Which no doubt helped him build friendships such as the one described in the first chapter of his autobiography, Bound for Glory, which opens with the line “I could see men of all colors bouncing along in the boxcar.” Strains of the old spiritual “This Train”—“This train is bound for glory, this train”—echo through the chapter, which focuses on Woody and a black companion as they attempt to avoid the railroad bulls.

Like his descendants in the folk revival, Woody wrote dozens of message songs including “Hang Knot,” a blistering condemnation of lynching, and “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportees),” written after he’d read a newspaper story about the crash of a plane carrying migrant farmworkers back to Mexico. The news report identified the Anglo crew members by name but cloaked the migrants in anonymity. Adapted by activists working for immigrant rights in the nineties, the chorus of “Deportees” redresses the dehumanization. Guthrie bids farewell to his “amigos”—Juan and Rosalita, Jesus and Maria—and laments the white world’s refusal to value them as anything other than disposable labor: “You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane. / All they will call you will be deportees.”

Woody consistently backed up his songs on racial justice with action. Recounting his experiences as Woody’s shipmate in the merchant marine during World War II, Jimmy Longhi told a story about his friend’s confrontation with segregation in the military. Midway through a particularly perilous Atlantic crossing, their ship came under heavy attack. Jimmy, Woody, and Cisco Houston ventured belowdecks to sing for the troops, hoping to take their minds off the depth charges exploding all around them. During a pause in their performance, Woody heard the sound of a “glorious Negro chorus.” Seeking the source of the sound, Woody discovered fifty black soldiers crowded into a toilet room. Longhi described entering the room to encounter an energetic call and response between the group and its commanding officer, Daniel Rutledge. Reaching deep into the shared images of the gospel tradition, Rutledge sang out his sermon on the coming “Judgement Day” and the soldiers responded with cries of “Free! Free!”

Accepting Rutledge’s invitation to sing for the troops, Woody surprised them by singing “John Henry,” initiating an exchange of songs. When Woody offered to let Rutledge play his guitar, the black officer noticed Woody’s slogan and improvised a sermon on the connection between the war against Hitler and the struggle against American racism. Rutledge called out, “An’ we know that after we win this war, when the king of slavery is dead, when the king of slavery is dead, things is gonna change for the people of Israel!” When the men responded “Change! Change!,” Rutledge held Woody’s guitar “above his head like a weapon” and hammered home the main point of the movement that returning black veterans would help define and carry through: “An’ the walls will come tumblin’ down!”

The most immediate wall, Longhi recalls, was the one separating the black and white troops on Woody’s ship. Hearing the commotion in the toilet, a white officer arrived to summon Woody back to the white soldiers waiting for him to resume his performance. Woody refused to return unless the black soldiers could come with him. Refusing to accept the officer’s insistence that segregation was a policy he didn’t support but was powerless to change, Woody insisted on seeing higher and higher ranking officers until he found himself face-to-face with the ship’s commander. Determining that the commander was a fan of Benny Goodman’s swing band, Woody pointed out that Goodman’s group included black musicians Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton. Although many of the clubs Goodman played in banned integrated “dance bands,” Goodman circumvented the Jim Crow laws by defining Wilson and Hampton as “concert performers.” When the commander acquiesced, Woody and Rutledge proudly led the black troops back to the “white” area of the ship, where Woody’s “no dancing” pledge lasted about as long as it did in the clubs where Goodman played.

But the part of Woody’s life that most directly relates to the folk revival’s race problems was his admiration for and work with black musicians including Leadbelly and the duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Woody’s music shared the rough edges, intensity, and immediacy of Leadbelly’s “The Midnight Special” and “The Bourgeois Blues.” Neither Woody nor Leadbelly produced commercially successful popular music, perhaps because neither held a nostalgic ideal of returning to an “authentic” music located in some mythic rural past. While Woody thought of his music as a voice of, from, and for the people, he knew the people’s voices changed as their experiences changed. As a committed leftist, he welcomed any change that would reduce the violence and poverty beneath the nostalgic images.

Until Huntington’s disease muffled his voice, Woody struggled to make musicians on the American left understand how crucial race was to that change. Once, Woody arrived in North Carolina to perform for a strike fund in the textile mills only to find the union segregated. He refused to play for an all-white audience. As a result, he played for an all-black one when the white union boycotted his “open” performance.

Woody was distressed when folk music began to move toward the mythic notion of authenticity. The first folk group to enjoy major mainstream success was the Weavers, whose lineup included Woody’s old leftist friends Pete Seeger and Ronnie Gilbert. Paving the way for the even greater popular success of the even less political Kingston Trio, best known for their version of the Appalachian ballad “Tom Dooley,” the Weavers had major hits with Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene” and Woody’s “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You.” The traditional melodies remained but the politics and the polyrhythmic drive that connected Brownie and Sonny with the South and, at second remove, the electric blues, faded away along with the black presence in the folk scene.

The Weavers’ triumph marks the real beginning of what music critic Dave Marsh calls the “rhythm problem” in the folk scene. Woody saw it coming and tried to resist. In response to the Weavers, he announced plans to form an integrated group with Leadbelly, Brownie, and Sonny. But when his illness silenced him, no one pursued the vision of an interracial folk group, maybe because some of the fifties folksingers felt compelled to downplay their leftist pasts in response to McCarthyism. After all, this was an era in which FBI agents were trained to spot “communists” by their comfort around Negroes. Or maybe black/white groups didn’t match the folk revival criteria for authenticity. Whatever the cause, by the early sixties not many of the politically serious folk revivalists were willing or able to get down with the sounds coming out of Sam Cooke’s Chicago or Berry Gordy’s Detroit. And even though folk drew on black sources, it had precious little appeal among young blacks. Which was a shame because the folkies and their black contemporaries really did share a commitment to freedom and dignity. But they were living in different worlds.

11

“Blowin’ in the Wind”:Politics and Authenticity

A well-known image from the closing concert of the 1963 Newport Folk Festival sums up the folk revival’s sense of its political mission. The concert culminated with Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, the SNCC Freedom Singers, and Peter, Paul & Mary joining together to sing ”We Shall Overcome” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” A widely circulated photograph of the performers, arms linked, testifies to the movement’s ideal of interracial solidarity. Like so many images from the sixties, the image tells only part of the story.

Although “Blowin’ in the Wind” inspired real political activity, its lyrics carried an undertone of romantic passivity that contrasted with the increasingly aggressive approach of the black movement. “How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man? / How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?” For black singers like Sam Cooke and Stevie Wonder, who covered the song after Peter, Paul & Mary made it a hit, the last line expresses the yearning for rest after a long and bitter struggle. When King called out “How long?,” his black supporters responded “Not long.” Even so-called moderates demanded “Freedom Now!” The black SNCC members who would soon ask whites to leave the organization were rapidly losing patience with what they saw as a white willingness to answer Dylan’s question with sorrowful resignation to the universality of injustice. For black participants in the Southern movement, moving forward was a matter of life or death. And while the white students who went to Mississippi put themselves at real risk—witness the murders of civil rights workers Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner—the difference in urgency showed up daily in the sound of the folk revival.

Especially in the years before Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village and announced himself as the second coming of Woody Guthrie, folk music often turned away from the present to gaze back on a half-imagined rural past. John Jacob Niles, a formally trained singer who specialized in reviving traditional music, observed at Newport in 1960 that “My audiences thank all folk singers for comfort, for assurance, for the nostalgia that seems to connect them with times past.” For many listeners in those early days, Joan Baez exemplified folk. When she made her national debut at Newport in 1959 singing “We Are Crossing Jordan’s River,” it’s doubtful whether anyone in the audience was particularly attuned to the masked meanings that would have been obvious at movement rallies in Mississippi or South Carolina. There’s something mournful, haunting, in the sound of Baez’s early albums, which consist almost entirely of traditional ballads lamenting lost love. Her voice filigrees the edges of emotions, evoking a past dimly seen through the mists rising up over the Scottish hills and English moors. Baez’s music almost requires silence, freeing listeners for inward-looking reveries that have little in common with either the explosive responsiveness or the expectant silence of a gospel congregation. As folk revival historian Robert Cantwell observes, despite Baez’s personal ideals, her ethereal voice and repertoire of what the Newport festival program called “utterly pure, nearly sacrosanct folk songs” was widely received as a “residue of authentic Anglo-American identity.”

It wasn’t something Baez, who grew up in a pacifist Quaker family and passionately supported the freedom movement, sought. Along with Ochs, she was the most consistently political of the folk revival singers. After Baez met Dylan, her concerts featured movement standards “Oh Freedom” and “We Shall Overcome” alongside Dylan’s most piercing political songs “With God on Our Side” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Inspired by the idealism of the Port Huron Statement and the moral heroism of the Southern movement, she encouraged the folk revival to assume a more aggressive political stance. But Baez could never really overcome the barriers her musical form and voice set up between her and the black listeners whose cause she espoused.

It wasn’t just a problem of aesthetics. Even as it highlights the folk revival’s commitment to racial justice, Baez’s autobiography reflects its somewhat romantic sense of the movement. Her description of a concert she presented at all-black Miles College just outside Birmingham at the height of the SCLC campaign there points to the revival’s strengths and its problems. Baez remembered her surprise when whites, who had obviously never been on the Miles campus before, began arriving for her performance. Imagining the spiritual connection between her music and the demonstrators who were being jailed and beaten just a few miles away, Baez writes: “Images of the kids gave me courage, and the concert was beautiful. It ended with ‘We Shall Overcome,’ and the audience rose and held hands, swaying back and forth while they sang. The singing was soft and tentative and many people were crying.”

That was what the folk revival did best. Star performers like Baez and Dylan could bring people who would otherwise have been content with escapist popular entertainment into at least momentary contact with the larger political world. For a few years in the mid-sixties all but the least aware Top 40 fans knew a few movement standards. Despite being banned by numerous Top 40 radio stations, Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” reached number one on the pop charts with a lyric that demanded listeners concerned with the “hate there is in Red China” wake up and “take a look around at Selma, Alabama.” No doubt, many of those listeners shed a few tears over violence and injustice and left it at that. But a handful marched out and put their lives on the line.

Within a few years of the Freedom Summer, as the folk revival faded, things had changed in ways very few of the students who’d gathered at Port Huron could have imagined. A Southern president elected on a peace platform solemnly intoned “we shall overcome” while SNCC expelled its white members. A new wave of English bands inspired by R & B and the electric blues forged new connections between black and white music. For the students of Port Huron, the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off of My Cloud,” the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” and the Beatles’ “Help” were more authentic than anything the musicologists might recover from old black men toiling in the Delta sun.

12

Music and the Truth:The Birth of Southern Soul

The South was at least half myth to the Bob Dylan who carefully placed a copy of Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues in the background on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. But it was something very real to the homegrown musicians who made Southern soul into something harder, grittier than the sweet sounds coming out of Detroit and Chicago. No doubt it had something to do with the fact that most Southern whites didn’t even pretend to accept integration, a word which the Klan used to conjure up visions of bestial black men defiling the flower of Southern womanhood. George Wallace said it about as clearly as it could be said: “Segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.”

Almost forty years have passed since Wallace’s ringing declaration made him the symbol of Southern white supremacy and lifted him to national prominence in a series of telling presidential campaigns. Few Americans recall that Wallace won 90 percent of the white vote on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1964, or that he consistently polled more than 20 percent of national support during most of the 1968 presidential campaign. The amnesia concerning everyday life under Jim Crow, encouraged by white indifference to racial problems and a growing tendency among some blacks to see segregation as a golden age of self-sufficiency, is even more disturbing. In his biography of black activist Robert Williams, Radio Free Dixie, historian Tim Tyson rips away the veil of nostalgia and forgetfulness cloaking the realities of daily life under segregation:

The power of white skin in the Jim Crow South was both stark and subtle. White supremacy permeated daily life so deeply that most people could no more ponder it than a fish might discuss the wetness of water. Racial etiquette was at once bizarre, arbitrary and nearly inviolable. A white man who would never shake hands with a black man would refuse to permit anyone but a black man to shave his face, cut his hair, or give him a shampoo. A white man might share his bed with a black woman but never his table. Black breasts could suckle white babies, black hands would pat out biscuit dough for white mouths, but black heads must not try on a hat in a department store, lest it be rendered unfit for sale to white people. Black maids washed the bodies of the aged and infirm, but the uniforms they wore could never be laundered in the same washing machines that white people used. It was permissible to call a favored black man “Commodore” or “Professor”—a mixture of affection and mockery—but never “mister” or “sir.” Black women were “girls” until they were old enough to be called “auntie,” but could never hear a white person, regardless of age, address them as “Mrs.” or “Miss.” Whites regarded black people as inherently lazy and shiftless, but when a white man said he had “worked like a nigger,” he meant that he had engaged in dirty, back-breaking labor to the point of collapse.

Jim Crow and white supremacy weren’t abstract to the black singers and white musicians who collaborated to make Rick Hall’s Muscle Shoals, Alabama, studio one of the two most influential locations in Southern soul. Muscle Shoals wasn’t all that far from Birmingham, which may have been the most deeply entrenched bastion of white supremacy. New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury described the city in the early sixties: “Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, enforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police, and many branches of the state’s apparatus.” Telephones were routinely tapped, mail intercepted and opened—”the eavesdropper, the informer, the spy has become a way of life.”

Contact between blacks and whites, in private homes or musical studios, was subjected to intense scrutiny. In his invaluable Sweet Soul Music, Southern soul chronicler Peter Guralnick describes the dangers and tensions that went along with making music that redefined racial conventions. Songwriter Donnie Fritts remembered traveling with white organist Spooner Oldham and black soul singer Arthur Alexander to play a date in Birmingham. “Birmingham was dangerous back then, and I mean dangerous, son. As best I can remember the show was for some high school graduation, and it seems to me like it was at the Jewish Community Center. Which was two strikes against us right there. It wasn’t long since those three little colored girls had been blown away, and we got some bomb threats that night. . . . Arthur was scared to fucking death. He wouldn’t get out of the car.”

Fritts recalled another time when Alexander, Oldham, guitarist David Briggs, and a couple of black friends went over to Birmingham. Briggs wanted to stop off and visit a friend in a white section of town. Fritts remembered “waiting on him, and me and Spooner got out and went into this cafe, and the lady behind the counter said, ‘Are you guys with those niggers out there?’ I said, ‘Yeah. Why?’ She said, ‘Look, it’s none of my business, but I been watching this car that’s circled the block twice with some guys in it, and if I was you, I wouldn’t be here the next time they come around.’ I said, ‘Nuff said, ma’am.’ ”

Wallace’s words echoed clearly throughout the mid-South—a loosely defined region incorporating northern Alabama, and Mississippi, western Tennessee, and eastern Arkansas. They were in the heads of the white supremacists who used dynamite and guns without a second thought to enforce racial divisions. They thundered beneath the declarations of the Alabama White Citizens Council, which established a committee “to do away with this vulgar animalistic nigger rock and roll bop.” The executive secretary of the council declared: “The obscenity and vulgarity of the rock and roll music is obviously a means by which the white man and his children can be driven to the level of the nigger.”

That was the racial backdrop for the unlikely group of musicians who came together to mount a challenge to segregation that was less ideological, but more far-reaching, than what the folk revival had in mind. As deeply grounded in the gospel impulse as anything coming out of Chicago or Detroit, Southern soul had no tendency to downplay the harsh realities at the heart of the blues. That might have been because the Southern soul singers stuck closer to their black audiences. Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Sam and Dave always did much better on the R & B than on the pop charts. Redding, for example, never placed a record in the pop top twenty during his lifetime. Careful not to stray from their core audience even when they experienced mainstream success, the Southern soul singers felt much freer to deal with the places where it was hard to tell salvation from damnation than the singers who made Motown’s upbeat sound a constant presence in the top ten.

Both the black audiences and the local white folks had their impact on the sound of Southern soul. No one was about to mistake the mid-South for the promised land. When Wilson Pickett, who was born in Alabama but moved to Detroit as a teenager, arrived in Muscle Shoals looking for producer Rick Hall, he was shocked by what he found: “I couldn’t believe it. I looked out the plane window, and there’s these people picking cotton. I said to myself, ‘I ain’t getting off this plane, take me back North.’ This big Southern guy was at the airport, really big guy, looks like a sheriff. He says he’s looking for me. I said, ‘I don’t want to get off here, they still got black people picking cotton.’ The man looked at me and said, ‘Fuck that. Come on, Pickett, let’s go make some fucking hit records.’ I didn’t know Rick Hall was white.” Recording at Hall’s Fame Studio, Pickett laid down the classics “Land of 1000 Dances,” “Mustang Sally,” and “Funky Broadway.”

The history of Southern music contains hundreds of similar scenes involving the sometimes friendly, sometimes tense contact between black and white musicians. Carl Perkins provides the archetypal version of the story when he credits his musical education to a black sharecropper, “Uncle John” Westbrook, who worked in the same cotton fields as Perkins’s poor white family. “He used to sit out on the front porch at night with a gallon bucket full of coal oil rags that he’d burn to keep the mosquitoes off him, and I’d ask my daddy if I could go to Uncle John’s and hear him pick some.” When Perkins began developing his version of the rockabilly style he shared with the young Elvis Presley, he took Uncle John’s style to heart. “I just speeded up some of the slow blues licks,” he remembered. “I put a little speed and rhythm to what Uncle John had slowed down. That’s all. That’s what rockabilly music or rock ‘n’ roll was to begin with: a country man’s song with a black man’s rhythm.” Two decades later Dan Penn, one of the real aces of both Muscle Shoals and Memphis, echoed the point: “We didn’t know nothing until black people put us on the right road. I never would have learned nothing if I’d have stayed listening to white people all my life.” Putting a slightly sardonic spin on the situation, Memphis drummer Jim Dickinson commented, “Everybody learned it from the yard man.”

Which doesn’t alter the reality that Southern soul, like early rock and roll, really was an interracial collaboration. Soul singer Solomon Burke, whose country/R & B hybrid “Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)” predated Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music by a year, summed up the underlying connection between the musics of the black and white South: “Gospel is the truth. And country music is the truth.”

In some ways, what happened musically in Memphis might have happened almost anywhere in the South. Several of the central figures in Southern soul—Booker T. Jones, Duck Dunn, Aretha Franklin—were Memphis natives. But most grew up elsewhere: Otis Redding in Macon, Georgia; Sam Moore in Miami; James Brown in South Carolina and Georgia; Wilson Pickett in Alabama. Aretha, Pickett, and Al Green all moved north with their families before they were adults. The same pattern held for the white musicians who helped build the city’s musical tradition. Elvis was born in Mississippi, Jerry Lee Lewis in Louisiana, Carl Perkins in rural Tennessee, Steve Cropper in Missouri. Sam Phillips, whose Sun Studio became the magnet for the musicians who established Memphis as the cradle of interracial rock and roll in the fifties, didn’t arrive until he’d spent his first sixteen years in northwest Alabama, a hundred miles north of Greenville, where a black street singer named Tee-Tot (Rufus Payne) had taught a young Hank Williams to sing the blues. And the hard truths of Williams’s “Six More Miles (to the Graveyard)” and “A Mansion on the Hill” responded to the example of Jimmie Rodgers, the first star of country music, whose “Waiting for a Train,” “In the Jailhouse Now,” and “T for Texas” echoed the blues and gospel traditions of Louisiana and Texas. Rodgers frequently traveled with black sidemen.

The pieces that came together in Memphis were available elsewhere, in part because the black and white Souths were closer culturally than anyone wanted to admit. In a slightly different universe, you can imagine rock and roll or Southern soul developing out of the Piedmont blues Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry played for the black and white crowds who thronged to the Carolina tobacco markets every fall. Or as a part of Atlanta’s never-ending effort to establish itself as the capital of a “New South” that never quite seemed to arrive. Or in New Orleans, where it kind of did happen. Or Macon, home to both Little Richard and Otis Redding.

But the historical fact is that it happened in Memphis. Sam Phillips’s description of his entry into the city in 1939 suggests one of the main reasons. Following a path blazed by thousands of young men growing up in the backwoods South, the sixteen-year-old Phillips “went to Memphis with some friends in a big old Dodge. We drove down Beale Street in the middle of the night and it was rockin’! It was so active—musically, socially. God, I loved it!”

If you were looking for good times, Memphis offered plenty. Suspended midway between brutal reality and regional hallucination, Memphis occupies a strange place in the psychic landscape of the region. The Mississippi Delta, it is said, begins on Catfish Row in Vicksburg and ends in the lobby of Memphis’s Peabody Hotel. In the semifictional geography created by William Faulkner, who grew up just down the road in Oxford, Mississippi, Memphis provides a safety valve for the tensions created by the hard-shell religious fundamentalism and white supremacist orthodoxy of the small-town white South. When they aren’t running off to the wilderness to arm-wrestle enormous mythic animals, Faulkner’s Mississippians love nothing better than road-tripping up to Memphis for a few days in the brothels and gambling dens. Like the Harlem where a young Malcolm X made his living guiding whites to whatever sexual adventures they could imagine, Memphis revealed the white obsession with segregation as a pious mask over a moral vacuum. As in Harlem—and Berry Gordy’s Detroit for that matter—the bottom line was the dollar bill.

Memphis had a different sort of appeal for the black musicians who brought the musical forms from their Delta homes to the big city. Although black Memphis as a whole was never affluent, it offered far more opportunity than the even poorer rural places most of them came from. Providing semipublic interracial spaces that just weren’t available in Sunflower County, Mississippi, or Osceola, Arkansas, Beale Street gave black musicians a chance to cash in on the white folks’ desire to walk on the wild side.

The comparatively open racial atmosphere that brought black musicians together with both black and white audiences on Beale Street hadn’t happened by accident. Unique in the Jim Crow South, the white power structure in Memphis depended on black votes and black money. The central figure in Memphis politics from 1910 until his death in 1954 was E. H. “Boss” Crump, head of a machine as powerful as Richard Daley’s in Chicago or Fiorello La Guardia’s in New York.

When Crump arrived in Memphis just after the turn of the century, the city’s politics followed the classic Southern pattern: aristocratic white planters manipulated racial animosities to set blacks against poor whites, who were only too eager to be manipulated. Often the aristocrats relied on sanctimonious appeals to religious purity, invoking the ideals of “pure white womanhood” and the “white Christian nation.” Such appeals deflected attention from the Delta’s economic system, which enabled Mississippi to rank near the top of the list of millionaires per capita at the same time it held a firm grip on its status as the poorest state in the nation.

Recognizing the economic reality of the city’s underground economy—based on gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging—Crump organized a coalition of white and black businessmen with Beale Street interests. Whatever their color, the entrepreneurs were sick of the periodic crackdowns ordered by politicians seeking to maintain their standing with the good Christian voters. The respectable black citizens of Memphis, every bit as dedicated to their churches as their white neighbors, viewed Beale Street with Godfearing suspicion. They most definitely wanted to keep their daughters as far as possible from its dens of sin. But they knew that Crump was preferable to the Klan. If nothing else, he needed their votes to maintain political control. It probably didn’t hurt that W. C. Handy, the “Father of the Blues,” had written Crump’s campaign song.

Rising to power with the support of this bizarre coalition, Crump guaranteed tolerance of the black- and white-owned businesses—mostly bars and brothels—that operated side by side, drawing a mixed crowd to the two-block free zone just off the Mississippi waterfront. Although segregation remained nominally in effect, there was plenty of crossing of racial lines. The Memphis whorehouses were the only ones in the South which condoned black men’s access to white prostitutes, though only after three a.m., by which time white men had presumably had sufficient time to exercise their racial privilege. In the Beale Street clubs, Sleepy John Estes, Furry Lewis, and Memphis Minnie took the blues songs from the Delta and reshaped them into something new while playing for customers of all races. It was a perfect workshop for Handy, who deserves his title only in the sense that he wrote down and marketed a form that was taking shape all around him.

If Handy’s claim was ambiguous, Memphis had certainly earned its designation as the “murder capital of America.” In part because Crump’s police tolerated the open sale of cocaine, drug addiction was epidemic. Plenty of dark corners were available for anyone eager to explore the night side of the Southern psyche. Beale Street simmered and sometimes exploded. The 1938 murder of eight prominent white citizens by three black men in a Beale Street turf war precipitated a public outcry that closed down the old wide-open Beale Street. But Memphis musicians never quite forgot the vibrant interracial scene that would resurface at Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio in the fifties.

However exhilarating Beale Street could be, black folks recognized its limits. If Faulkner’s Memphis signified an ambiguous sort of freedom for small-town whites, black novelist Richard Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy portrays the city as something more like purgatory, a halfway house for Delta blacks on their way to Chicago. If moral or sexual lines blurred in Memphis, a black man or woman had to be a fool to trust it very far. For anyone paying attention, Memphis history provided plenty of warnings against accepting white fantasies at face value. In 1892, the white citizens of Memphis responded to black journalist Ida B. Wells’s antilynching campaign, during which she suggested white women might conceivably be sexually attracted to black men, by destroying the offices of her Free Speech newspaper and driving her out of the city.

A half century later, the civil rights movement consistently avoided Memphis, preferring to deal with white supremacy in the small towns of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Martin Luther King’s advisers expressed grave reservations about his decision to engage the garbage collectors’ strike, a decision that took him to the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. There was no shortage of whites who thought James Earl Ray was a hero, many of them the same ones who, angry over the Kennedy administration’s role in the desegregation of Ole Miss, had cheered the news of JFK’s death in Dallas. They had company, of course, throughout the nation.

In Memphis, then, white supremacy coexisted with the most fluid interracial musical heritage in the South (with the complicated exception of New Orleans). The blues were a way of life, not just a musical form. Despite the money black businesses made under Crump, many black citizens simply kept their distance from Beale Street and everything it represented. Holding firmly to the church that provided their rock in a weary land, they tried their best to keep their families and communities together. It wasn’t easy: prostitution was by far the most lucrative employment available to black women; their brothers often preferred to take their chances on the street rather than scrambling for manual labor in an economy that didn’t pay white folks much. The black community was all too familiar with lost souls; it knew that every minute of every day someone you loved was standing at the crossroads, wondering which way to go.

That’s one of the reasons why the blues and gospel have such a complicated relationship in Southern soul. When Southern singers strike out to make some money, they’re more likely to sing about sex than salvation, violence than the promised land. They don’t always bother to distinguish love from hate or sex from death. But almost all of them learned to sing in church. When Wilson Pickett testifies to that moment in the midnight hour when his love comes tumbling down, he’s remembering the savior waiting for the sinner in the dark night of the soul. When Sam Moore and Dave Prater whipped their listeners into a frenzy of call and response, the energy came right out of the sanctified church.

Describing the source of Sam and Dave’s appeal, Moore pointed to their direct connection with Marion Williams and Mahalia Jackson. “Nobody up to that had never done that kind of stuff,” he said, referring to the R & B singers who had adapted gospel to the pop marketplace. “People had taken the gospel harmonies and some of the gospel melodies, gospel songs, and gospel chord progressions and gospel singing inflections—but to actually bring the C. L. Franklin preaching style, no one had done that the way that, in a show, the Stirrers with R. H. Harris or Sam Cooke or whoever, or the Highway QCs would do,” Moore continued. “All of them—even Wilson Pickett, when he was in the Violinaires—would preach, evangelize onstage. We incorporated that into soul music. It was really, as the people used to say, ‘messing with the Lord. You’re messing with God, boy. What are you doing?’ ”

Where Mahalia and Sam Cooke kept their eyes on the prize, Stax’s interracial house band, Booker T. and the MGs, like Sam and Dave in their “messing” mode, worried mostly about keeping the party hot. Listening to them, you couldn’t always tell how much of the fire came from the devil and how much from the Lord.

It was a problem Robert Johnson knew well.

13

Down at the Crossroads

If you were white and honest, the blues revealed things the upbeat America of the early sixties assured you didn’t exist. That’s why so many mid-South white boys—Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn of the MGs, songwriter-producers Dan Penn and Chips Moman, even Elvis before the velvet paintings filled in the blank spaces—fell in love with music that made desegregation sound like something more than an empty dream. Then again, if you were just white, the blues could make you swear off mirrors, never mind music with a harder edge than Perry Como. Dozens of white musicians bear witness to how black music helped them escape the suffocating communities they grew up in.

But for most black musicians, the blues evoked a deeper, more agonized relationship between the individual and the community. The crucial difference is that, in the black blues, evil retains its religious significance. Every note Robert Johnson played as he wandered the dark highways of America during the Great Depression reverberates with the reality of exile from a gospel community he knows is real. Widely honored as the most profound of the Delta bluesmen, Johnson wrote songs that testify to his anguished connection with a spiritual force. Johnson’s titles resonate with apocalyptic biblical images: “Stones in My Passway,” “If I Had Possession over Judgement Day,” “Hellhound on My Trail,” “Crossroads Blues.”

For white rockers like Eric Clapton, the crossroads mark a place of existential decision; for Johnson, they stretch over an abyss that’s both theological and social. Like most black Southerners, he knew the choice you make at the crossroads can determine everything. For a fugitive slave or a black man running from the Klan, every crossroads presented a choice of direction that could make the difference between slavery and freedom, life and death. Johnson’s anguished blues place the listener at one of the crossroads. You can hear the wind howl; you can’t quite be sure whether it’s covering the patroller’s baying hounds. No question that “Crossroads” points to the grounding of the blues in American racial realities. But there’s also no question that the sense you’re about to take an irrevocable step is something everyone feels sometime, somewhere. It’s the sense, as Robert Penn Warren’s narrator in All the King’s Men puts it, “that you are alone with the Alone, and it is His move.” One more cry from the guitar string, one more twisting chord from the gutbucket, and there’s no going back.

It’s a place where white folks have a choice of getting past white, of understanding something about what it means to live in a world without options other than the ones you can figure out for yourself right now. And you’ve got no time to think about where that step might take you, to weigh implications. The blues say you do what you have to do, your act’s what you are. It’s why Bob Dylan titled his greatest album Highway 61 Revisited after the road that carved crossroads through the heart of the Delta. “Like a Rolling Stone” wasn’t named for Mick and Keith. Dylan’s at least got a sense of what Johnson and Ma Rainey and Muddy Waters were talking about, of what it means to walk down the road that bends back to where black and white came to pretty much the same thing. If only on Beale Street. And only between three a.m. and dawn.

But there’s another dimension of “Crossroads” that remains obscure even to the Dylan of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” stranded in a place where “gravity fails and negativity don’t see you through.” If Dylan maps the existential wasteland, Johnson’s “Crossroads” remembers the routes connecting West Africa with the Delta. For many West African tribes, the crossroads were the place where the spirit world and the material world converged, where you went when you needed spiritual energy. For the Yoruba, the crossroads were a place of power and danger. They were dedicated to and ruled by the spirit, or orisha, Esu-Elegba, who walks with a limp, revels in chaos, and carries messages between the material and spiritual worlds.

Like all orisha, Esu-Elegba combines strengths and weaknesses. When the Yoruba tell stories about the orisha, they’re initiating discussion, not presenting role models. Unlike the stereotypical Sunday sermon that reveals the meaning of a biblical passage, the Yoruba process requires call and response. Esu’s strength lies in his mastery of language and codes, his verbal facility, his literary intelligence. His weakness lies in his amorality. He loves confusion just because he feels at home with it. He’s perfectly capable of tearing a community apart because it’s interesting, to see what happens. This brother has clearly got to be watched.

But if you need to get closer to the divine presence, to learn the inner meaning of the incomprehensible messages that come in dreams or moments of awe-ful awareness of the spirit, you’ve got no choice but to deal with Esu. One way or another, Esu—a.k.a. Legba, Papa LaBas, the Signifying Monkey, Brer Rabbit, the Nigga You Love to Hate, Richard Pryor, and Flava Flav—is gonna deal with you.

So you go down to the crossroads. And maybe you meet a man with a limp. Which, legend has it, is how Robert Johnson learned to play the blues. Laughed off the stage at a Delta juke joint, he vanished for a year, some say three. When he returned, he spoke the blues in tongues his elders had never even imagined. Some say he traveled from New Orleans to Chicago, mastering his craft; others say he sold his soul to Beelzebub.

Black Christians had strong reasons for renaming Esu the “devil.” They’d seen what happened to folks who chose the wrong road. If Esu bestows creative brilliance, he exacts a price. He brings chaos to a community in desperate need of stability. Esu embodies the spirit of Beale Street: drugs, sex, violent death. All in the name of a good time, good music. Pure deviltry.

Maybe the most basic crossroads for a black Southerner led one way to Beale Street, the other way to church. Robert Johnson made his choice, but his music never lets you forget it was a choice. That somewhere a Sunday-morning sister was singing him back home. Or that she was more than half likely to follow him into the woods when she heard that dark blue moan some lonely Saturday night.

The Blues Impulse

A Blues Impulse Top 40

1.	Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “The Message,” 1982
2.	Robert Johnson, “Hellhound on My Trail,” 1937
3.	Ike and Tina Turner, “A Fool in Love,” 1960
4.	Bessie Smith, “Downhearted Blues,” 1923
5.	Muddy Waters, “The Same Thing,” 1964
6.	The Four Tops, “Bernadette,” 1967
7.	Aretha Franklin, “Chain of Fools,” 1967
8.	Stevie Wonder, “Living for the City,” 1973
9.	Wu-Tang Clan, “C.R.E.A.M.,” 1994
10.	Temptations, “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” 1972
11.	Bob Marley, “Them Belly Full,” 1975
12.	Sly and the Family Stone, “Family Affair,” 1971
13.	Bruce Springsteen, “Backstreets,” 1975
14.	Marvin Gaye, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” 1968
15.	Clarence Carter, “Makin’ Love (At the Dark End of the Street),” 1969
16.	Ray Charles, “Unchain My Heart,” 1961
17.	Billie Holiday, “God Bless the Child,” 1941
18.	Howlin’ Wolf, “I Asked for Water,” 1956
19.	Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Run Through the Jungle,” 1970
20.	Prince. “Sign of the Times,” 1987
21.	Run-D.M.C., “It’s Like That,” 1983
22.	KoKo Taylor, “Insane Asylum,” 1967
23.	Mary J. Blige, “My Life,” 1994
24.	Tupac Shakur, “Holler If Ya Hear Me,” 1993
25.	Ann Peebles, “I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down,” 1973
26.	Missy Elliott, “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” 1997
27.	B.B. King, “The Thrill Is Gone,” 1969
28.	Luther Ingram, “If Lovin’ You Is Wrong,” 1972
29.	Derek and the Dominos, “Layla,” 1970
30.	Ma Rainey. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” 1923
31.	James Brown, “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” 1966
32.	Nina Simone, “Four Women,” 1966
33.	Ice Cube, “Endangered Species (Tales from the Darkside),” 1990
34.	Elvis Costello, “Two Little Hitlers,” 1982
35.	O’Jays, “Backstabbers,” 1972
36.	Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “The Tracks of My Tears,” 1965
37.	War, “Slippin into Darkness,” 1972
38.	Sylvester. “Sell My Soul,” 1979
39.	The Band, “The Weight,” 1968
40.	Little Walter, “Dead Presidents,” 1963

The blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man feelin’ bad. Hard to beat the definition for clarity, except to note the obvious flip side: the blues ain’t nothin’ but a good woman feelin’ bad. Lord knows, there’s a temptation to leave it there. After all, the blues are mostly about what you’re feeling here and now.

But, however much the blues resist abstraction, there’s a bit more to say. The blues force you to deal with the man with the knife, your lover’s wandering eyes, the fact that when the devil comes calling, plenty of good respectable folks are waiting at the door. If you really hear the blues, you know you’re one of them, that life’s a hell of a lot more complicated than those lines between saints and sinners, or the black and white sides of town, let on.

Sad as the blues may be, there’s almost always something humorous about them—even if it’s the kind of humor that laughs to keep from crying.

—Langston Hughes

Blues guitarist Eddie Kirkland breaks down the blues about as well as they can be broke: “What gives me the blues? Unlucky in love for one, and hard to make a success is two; and when a man have a family and it’s hard to survive for.” If there isn’t enough money in the house, all those little things—the hole in the window screen, the third straight meal of beans—grow real big real fast. By a conservative count, 180 percent of blues deal with sex or money. The extra 80 percent accounts for the times sex and money are the same damn thing. Once the spiral starts—once your man doesn’t bring home enough money for the rent, once your woman puts on that red dress and goes out the door—there’s no stoppin’ it. All you can hope for is the strength to face another day. On the good days, you can laugh about some of it. As bluesman Furry Lewis, who worked as a Memphis street cleaner, recalled: “You know, old folks say, it’s a long lane don’t have no end and a bad wind don’t never change. But one day, back when Hoover was president, I was driving my cart down Beale Street, and I seen a rat, sitting on top of a garbage can, eating a onion, crying.” Or, as B. B. King commented, “Singing the blues is like being black twice.”

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

—Ralph Ellison

For Ralph Ellison, the blues present a philosophy of life, a three-step process that can be used by painters, dancers, or writers as well as musicians. The process consists of (1) fingering the jagged grain of your brutal experience; (2) finding a near-tragic, near-comic voice to express that experience; and (3) reaffirming your existence. The first two steps run parallel to the gospel impulse’s determination to bear witness to the reality of the burden. But where gospel holds out the hope that things will change, that there’s a better world coming, the blues settle for making it through the night. As Ellison’s friend Albert Murray wrote, they deal with “the most fundamental of all existential imperatives: affirmation, which is to say, reaffirmation and continuity in the face of adversity.”

No wonder Hamlet came to debate with himself whether to be or not to be. Nor was it, or is it, a question of judging whether life is or is not worth living. Not in the academic sense of Albert Camus’s concern with the intrinsic absurdity of existence per se. Hamlet’s was whether things are worth all the trouble and struggle. Which is also what the question is when you wake up with the blues there again, not only all around your bed but also inside your head as well, as if trying to make you wish that you were dead or had never been born.

—Albert Murray

Perhaps I love them because the attitude toward life expressed in blues records—that everyone has troubles but they can be endured, that happiness is not lasting, so don’t be fooled by your good times—is truly the essence of “blackness.” Blues do not promise that people will not be unhappy, but that unhappiness can be transcended, not by faith in God, but by faith in one’s own ability to accept unhappiness without ever conceding oneself to it. Blackness is not an Afrocentric lesson, nor a coming together of the tribe in fake unity. It is this: a fatalistic, realistic belief in human transcendence, born in the consciousness of a people who experienced the gut-wrenching harshness of slavery, of absorbing the absolute annihilation of their humanity, and who lived to tell the world and their former masters about it. And it is about how they reinvented their humanity in the meanwhile.

—Gerald Early

The blues deal with the unavoidable problems that come with being human. You wake up in the morning and they’re waiting for you all around your bed.

It’s not a question philosophy can answer. All you can do is reach down inside the pain, finger the jagged grain, tell your story and hope you can find the strength to go on. You never really get away, transcend. If you’re lucky, though, if the song’s call gets some sort of response, some echo in the parts of your head that believe it may be worthwhile, a smile from that woman at the dark end of the street, that’s all you can hope for. Reaffirmation, the strength to say, yeah, I’ll be. Chicago blues master Willie Dixon stated the blues answer to Hamlet’s question with irreducible clarity: “I’m here, everybody knows I’m here.” Knowing all that time that tomorrow morning the blues’ll be right there beside his bed. Good morning, blues.

Murray’s rephrasing of Ellison’s “transcendence” as “reaffirmation” clarifies the meaning of “near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” Sometimes the blues make you laugh, but the real “comedy” resembles Dante as much as Richard Pryor, who, we might note, had his own “inferno” and used it as a source for much grim humor. If tragedy describes a world in which loss is inevitable and irrevocable, comedy describes one where balance, however tenuous, wins out. Dante’s point was that hearing the harmony behind the screams required a perspective close to God’s; that’s why the comedy’s “Divine.”

And why human life, as Richard Pryor can testify, mostly isn’t. On the human level, evil’s not something you can change, just something you have to deal with. Singing the blues doesn’t reaffirm the brutal experience, it reaffirms the value of life. The blues don’t even pretend you’re going to escape the cycle. You sing the blues so you can live to sing the blues again. A lot of times the blues are mostly about finding the energy to keep moving. That’s why they’re such great party music and that’s why you hear them echoing through rock and through rap.

The blues tell you that as long as you can hear your voice, as long as you can find even a little bit of the laughter in the tears, you can most likely find the strength to wake up in the morning and deal with the fact that you messed it up again, that the devil’s back at the door and you’re putting on your shoes, humming his song.

14

Soul Food:The Mid-South Mix

Wilson Pickett called it “grits music.” King Curtis gave his amen, introducing “Memphis Soul Stew” by announcing, “We sell so much of this, people wonder what we put in it.” He went on to serve up a hit single concocted from “a half tea-cup of bass,” “a pound of fatback drums,” “four tablespoons of boiling Memphis guitar,” “a pinch of organ,” and “a half pint of horns.” “Now place on the burner and bring to a boil,” the Texas-born sax man called out. “Beat well.” Add a vocalist with the down-home intensity of Otis Redding or the aching soulfulness of James Carr and you have the recipe for the funkiest, grittiest soul music of the sixties. Steve Cropper observed that “It wasn’t Chicago, and it wasn’t New York, and it sure wasn’t Detroit. It was a Southern sound, a below-the-Bible-Belt sound. It was righteous and nasty. Which to our way of thinking was pretty close to life itself.”

According to James Brown, who provided most of the ingredients for the Memphis recipe, you couldn’t separate Southern soul from gospel: “Gospel is contentment because it’s spirit, and you feel that spirit when you sing it. It’s the same spirit I feel when I’m on stage today. I feel it when I sing. Period. I make people happy, and they feel it.” Brown, who’d placed nine songs on the R & B charts before Carla Thomas’s “Gee Whiz” and the Mar-Keys’ “Last Night” established Stax as a major force in soul music, reflected that “The word soul . . . meant a lot of things—in music and out. It was about the roots of black music, and it was kind of a pride thing, too, being proud of yourself and your people. Soul music and the civil rights movement went hand in hand, sort of grew up together.”

It may seem like something of a contradiction that what was almost universally received as the blackest of the soul styles had by far the largest amount of white participation. Cropper and bass player Duck Dunn, both white, joined black organist Booker T. Jones and black drummer Al Jackson to form Booker T. and the MGs, the Stax house band that backed Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, and countless others. Frequently, they were joined by the Memphis Horns, led by white trumpeter Wayne Jackson and black sax man Andrew Love. The top tier of Southern songwriters included Redding, the black team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter, and good old boys Chips Moman and Dan Penn, whose credits include “The Dark End of the Street,” “Do Right Woman,” “Cry Like a Baby,” and “Sweet Inspiration.”

Although it was created by Southerners and remained very much rooted in the region, Memphis soul transformed the entire pop music scene. Black singers from the North who’d had trouble adjusting to crossover styles frequently found the Southern approach liberating. Even though Aretha Franklin walked out of the Muscle Shoals Studio after a white session musician used a racial slur with her husband, the song she recorded there—“I Never Loved a Man”—ignited her career, which had floundered for a half decade up North. Having decided she didn’t much like recording in the South, Aretha brought the South to Atlantic’s New York studios. All of the hits that established her as the “Queen of Soul”—”Respect,” “Natural Woman,” “Think,” “Chain of Fools”—feature white Southern musicians, including bass player Tommy Cogbill, organist Spooner Oldham, drummer Roger Hawkins, and guitarists Jimmy Johnson and Joe South.

Memphis’s impact on white pop music was equally profound. Penn and Moman’s American Studio became a Mecca for a range of singers that have little in common except that they made their best records in Memphis: Neil Diamond, Dionne Warwick, Lulu, the Box Tops, the Sweet Inspirations, Dusty Springfield, Bobby Womack, B. J. Thomas, James and Bobby Purify, jazzman Herbie Mann. For a sense of what Memphis contributed, listen to Diamond’s “Holly Holy,” Womack’s “Woman’s Gotta Have It,” the Box Tops’ “Soul Deep,” or Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis, highlighted by a beautiful rendition of “Son of a Preacher Man.” The sessions Elvis recorded at American are by far the best music he made during the last two decades of his life; they produced the hits “Suspicious Minds,” “Kentucky Rain,” and “In the Ghetto”—Elvis’s single foray into explicit message music. But the real high points are soul standards—”True Love Travels on a Gravel Road,” “Only the Strong Survive,” and, most tellingly, Percy Mayfield’s “Stranger in My Own Home Town.” The Memphis sessions justify James Brown’s sincere praise of the “strong spiritual feeling” in Elvis’s music.

Penn summed up the interracial complexities of the scene when he told Memphis chronicler Robert Gordon: “There were a lot of white people and black people who had tried to bring the R & B and the white side together. It became a white/black situation, you had white players and black players together. The mixture, who knows what that does to us, but it does something. There was so much respect.” Penn went on to contrast the sixties with the eighties. “Now we get all these white people in the studios. Everybody respects each other but it’s like you ain’t bringing anything different to ‘em. We’re trying to make a painting here, what color did you bring? You’re orange and he’s orange and we need some red, we need something different, and back then black people brought so much to the whole thing. . . . That cross-color respect was a wonderful thing. It carried a lot of power. We don’t seem to have much of that now.”

The interracial scene of the sixties originated in the forties and fifties. After Boss Crump closed down Beale Street, musicians continued to participate in interracial networks without public sanction. If whites in fifties Chicago were extremely unlikely to see “real” gospel music live, aspiring white musicians such as the members of the Royal Spades (later the Mar-Keys) attending all-white Messick High School could slip across the river to West Memphis. Royal Spade alumni Cropper and Dunn were among those who learned their approach to music from B. B. King and bandleaders like Ben Branch and Willie Mitchell, who would later help shape the music that lifted Al Green to the top of the soul world. Mar-Key sax player Don Nix remembers sneaking over to the Plantation Inn, “where all the black bands played. And all the black bands had horns. So while everybody else was playing Elvis Presley songs with two guitars and a bass or whatever, we had baritone, tenor, and trumpet, and we played all rhythm and blues music.”

When “Last Night” went to the top of the R & B charts in 1961, the white Memphis high school band went out on the road. Black audiences were shocked to discover the band’s racial makeup. Wayne Jackson recalls: “We worked the chitlin circuit—black—that’s why there weren’t any publicity pictures of the group. One place in Texas I remember in particular, we rolled up and they were barbecuing a goat, and you could stand on one side of this club and look through the cracks in the wall to the cotton patch on the other side, and they didn’t believe we were the Mar-Keys. ‘You can’t be the MarKeys!’ ‘Well, we are,’ we said. ‘Here’s our agent’s number; you can call him.’ Well, at first they were a little hostile. This was before integration, you know, before a lot of things. But then, when we started playing, they loved us.”

While Cropper, Dunn, and Jackson were developing their intimate knowledge of the black musical world, black singers were nurturing the multiracial audience for Southern soul. Even as the white South went to war to maintain the racial purity of its college classrooms, the fraternities of Ole Miss and the University of Alabama encouraged what amounted to cultural miscegenation. Solomon Burke, Percy Sledge, and Otis Redding were among the soul artists who joined salacious novelty acts like Doug Clark and His Hot Nuts and the Thirteen Screaming Niggers as regulars on the fraternity circuit. Rufus Thomas, the grand old man of Memphis soul, fondly remembers playing the college circuit: “I must have played every fraternity house there was in the South. When we played Ole Miss, they’d send the girls home at midnight, and then we’d tell nasty jokes and all that stuff. Oh, man, we used to have some good times down there in Oxford. When something was coming, some kind of show, I mean, they’d build themselves up to it, and then, when we got there, they were ready for it. I’d rather play those audiences than for any other.”

Not everyone involved with the scene sounds as upbeat about its racial elements as Thomas or Jackson. Sam Moore of Sam and Dave isn’t alone in his belief that Stax—at least before black executive Al Bell became a major figure in 1965—amounted to a new kind of plantation where the black singers did the work while the white management made the decisions. White drummer Jim Dickinson underlines the tension between the music’s challenge to racial boundaries and the situation outside the studio: “The Memphis sound is something that’s produced by a group of social misfits in a dark room in the middle of the night. It’s not committees, it’s not bankers, not disc jockeys. Every attempt to organize the Memphis music community has been a failure, as righteously it should be. The diametric opposition, the racial collision, the redneck versus the ghetto black is what it is all about, and it can’t be brought together. If it could, there wouldn’t be any music.”

Even if it failed to resolve the oppositions, Memphis music certainly helped develop an audience that was at least interested in listening to the arguments. Along with the chitlin and fraternity circuits, radio played a crucial role in the changes that took place in American pop music during the postwar years. As late as 1945, radio DJ’ing remained an all-white occupation. In 1947, Ebony magazine could identify only sixteen black DJs among the three thousand with regular shows, noting that most of those had been hired in the last couple of years. Memphis-based WDIA played a major role in changing that picture. Unsuccessful in the white market and perhaps inspired by the popularity of Sonny Boy Williamson’s King Biscuit Blues Show, which was broadcast through the mid-South on KFFA from Helena, Arkansas, WDIA switched to an all-black format in 1948. A year later, all the DJs on WDIA were black. Combining gospel, blues, and jazz with what black cultural historian Nelson George calls its role as “bulletin board” for black Memphis, WDIA’s fifty-thousand-watt transmitter carried the voices of DJs B. B. King and Rufus Thomas into over a million black homes.

And who knows how many white ones. If the material that went out on WDIA was black, the picture on the receiving end was more complicated. There’s a consensus among the pioneer black DJs that whites constituted at least half their audience, especially during the nighttime hours. The implications for the development of American popular music in the fifties and sixties were immense. Previous generations of white children encountered relatively segregated musical worlds. To get access to the types of black music that were considered too rough or dangerous for crossover audiences required some serious effort. But when “white” radio stations began imitating the successful black formats, blues- and gospel-based sounds could be heard in even the most remote corners of America.

Still, teenagers growing up in the mid-South had an advantage over those in Nebraska, for example, because they could follow up on what they’d heard by riding that well-worn path from the small-town South to Memphis. The Southern soul they helped create differed clearly from the sounds created by black musicians working in the more intensely segregated musical environments of Detroit and Chicago. Memphis soul grew out of a much freer, improvisational process.

The typical Stax session involved building a record out of scraps of lyrics, the idea for a melody, a few chord changes. The MGs, sometimes supplemented by the Memphis Horns, would lay down a groove, talk about what worked and what didn’t, incorporate the resulting changes in another version, and repeat the process until they were ready to cut a record. Perhaps the most striking difference between Stax and Motown is the recognition given to the Memphis musicians. From “Last Night” through “Green Onions” and “Memphis Soul Stew,” instrumentals played a crucial role in Stax’s image. Stax production style gave equal weight to instrumental and vocal tracks, emphasizing distinct voices rather than a wall of sound. When the Stax-Volt Revue toured Europe, Booker T. and the MGs played their own set before backing up the headliner singers. In England, Cropper received almost as much attention from the press as Otis Redding or Sam Moore.

Many Southern soul classics incorporate “mistakes” that Motown would have edited out. The horn section on “Hold On, I’m Coming” gets lost on the second chorus. On Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” the horn section is hopelessly out of tune. Peter Guralnick reports that when Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler bought the rights to distribute the single, he specified that he wanted to remaster it in New York; the Atlantic producers spent several weeks working with the master tape. When the song hit the charts, Wexler called Quin Ivy, who had produced the original session, and said: “Aren’t you glad you recut it?” Ivy replied, “Jerry, you used the original, out-of-tune horns and all.”

There’s a temptation to reduce sixties soul music to a competition between Memphis and Detroit for the hearts, minds, and dollars of young America. You can set it up as a paradox: the interracial Memphis scene asserts an uncompromising blackness while the almost-all-black Motown studious play to the taste of the white marketplace. Stax singer William Bell expressed the core diference when he said, “We were basically raw energy, raw emotion. Motown was more slick, more polish.” Variations on this approach, which usually treat Chicago as an outpost of Detroit when not ignoring it altogether, circulate freely through many histories of rock and soul.

But they don’t have much to do with the truth. Call and response provides a more accurate framework than “battle to the death.” For all the differences between the musical approaches of Memphis, Detroit, and Chicago, the musicians associated with each location expressed support and admiration for the “other side.” David Porter acknowledged that he and Hayes modeled Sam and Dave’s hits on a formula they learned from the Temptations’ “Don’t Look Back”: “Part of what eventually evolved into the magic of Hayes and Porter’s writing was my study of the Motown catalogue. That was an ongoing process.” Down the road in Muscle Shoals, Penn and Fritts were doing the same thing. As Penn said, “We’d play a Temptations record, we’d write a Temptations song.”

Curtis Mayfield echod Porter’s sentiments: “It wasn’t really a rivalry. Those guys at Motown were just so much admired and they were so big, there was no need. The best I could do was learn something from them. What with Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, they had fantastic writers over there and all you could do was admire those folks for the contribution they made to America.” Carla Thomas considered Mayfield one of the “most beautiful guitar players in the world.” Mayfield’s friend Jerry Butler reached across the mostly imaginary regional lines when he collaborated with Otis Redding to write the Southern soul classic “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” Redding, who idolized Sam Cooke, filled his albums with songs from Chicago (Butler’s “For Your Precious Love,” nearly a dozen Cooke songs including “Chain Gang,” “Wonderful World,” and “A Change Is Gonna Come”) and Detroit (the Temptations’ “My Girl” and “It’s Growing”).

Many Motown artists reciprocated the admiration they received from their peers. Marvin Gaye saw the growing popularity of Southern soul as a harbinger of larger changes: “The era was changing the music. Gutbucket soul – like Aretha and Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding – had gotten popular . . . Anyway, the white kids wanted a different kind of music. They wanted to hear about something besides love.” By the mid-sixties, Motown’s response to Southern soul could be heard in the funk rhythms and the uncompromising lyrics of the records produced by Norman Whitfield for Gaye, Gladys Knight, and the Temptations. Sam Cooke’s onetime protégé Johnnie Taylor was only one of the Northern singers who capitalized on the changing scene; his number one hits, “Who’s Making Love” and “I Believe In You (Believe In Me),” were both released on Stax.

Part of the black community’s broader struggle to redefine the ground rules of American society, the dissonant harmonies emanating from Memphis drew on and spoke to the beloved community. Like gospel, Southern soul spoke to the burdens of life and the need to reach for something higher. The rough edges reflect something fundamental about life in a place where rednecks and the children of the ghetto shared enough of a comon culture to challenge everything they’d been taught about race. It wasn’t smooth, but neither was the life outside the studio. And, for a while, there was reason to think that the dialogue that began in Memphis might spread across the world.

15

Bylan, the Brits, and Blue-Eyed Soul

When he wrote the blues classic “Rolling Stone,” Muddy Waters wasn’t overly concerned with Hibbing, Minnesota, where Bob Dylan was setting out on a journey that would eventually take him down Highway 61 into the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Muddy certainly didn’t lose much sleep over the London School of Economics, where Mick Jagger was studying the Chicago blues as seriously as the Chicago school of economics. At first glance, it’s hard to imagine anyone with less in common than the Delta-born bluesman and the young rock and rollers who responded to his call in ways that threatened to change the world.

Which tells you something about the blues impulse: it isn’t confined to one musical form, and it isn’t, at least literally, about race. The best work of Dylan and the Rolling Stones doesn’t suffer when you listen to it back to back with Howlin’ Wolf and Tina Turner. The strongest white blues—Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, the Stones’ great run of singles from “Satisfaction” through “Paint It Black,” the Animals’ “It’s My Life” and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”—hold the promise of a conversation built on a more trustworthy foundation than the earnest liberalism of the folk revival. The fact that it didn’t work out doesn’t mean it was a bad idea.

Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” responds to the blues on levels that have nothing to do with liberal politics or nostalgic authenticity. The song returns obsessively to the most fundamental blues question: “How does it feel?” It isn’t about the consolations of philosophy or the dodge of ideology. It’s about how it feels to be existentially adrift, a broken piece of a fallen world. Muddy knew the feeling well, and about all he had to say in words was “oh well.” But his guitar, and the way he bent the syllables around the words that never quite told the whole story, expressed with killing precision how the world felt to a black man who was about to head up Highway 61 toward a Chicago that he knew damn well wasn’t the promised land. Dylan reversed the motion, headed down into the mythic heart of darkness, and unleashed a flood of imagery about how it felt to be “on your own with no direction home / a complete unknown / like a rolling stone.” As in Muddy’s call, the blues intensity of Dylan’s response lies in the music, in the things that couldn’t quite be said. Devils as real as the ones that stalked Robert Johnson haunt Al Kooper’s gospel-organ drone, Mike Bloomfield’s Chicago-bred guitar, Dylan’s moaning harmonica. Kooper, who’d never played organ before the Highway 61 Revisited session, described the sound of “Like a Rolling Stone” as his “twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel” mixed with Dylan’s “primitive, twisted equivalent of rock and roll.”

You can hear “Like a Rolling Stone” as a blues cry out of the singer’s own brutal experience. Or you can hear it as cutting social satire, a classic put-down of a shallow chick who doesn’t share the poet’s superior insight into the human condition. I hear “Like a Rolling Stone” as pure, deep blues: Dylan’s confession that he’s as lost as the rest of us. The closest thing to a political message on Highway 61 Revisited is from “Ballad of a Thin Man”: “There’s something happening and you don’t know what it is.” When asked for a statement opposing the Vietnam War, Dylan sardonically bounced the question back at the interviewer: “How do you know that I’m not, as you say, for the war?”

Defying the pious condescension of the folk audience that booed him throughout the 1965-66 tour where he plugged in his guitar and waved good-bye to authenticity, Dylan forged a music that challenged his audience to finger the jagged grain of the blues. Like “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” probably the least ideological of the great political rock songs, “Like a Rolling Stone” casts the listener into a vortex of political paranoia where the good guys and the bad guys exchange clothes and read from the same scripts. Dylan’s lyrics affirm the tradition of rock poetry that originates with Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business,” “Nadine,” and “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” Social satire, the blues impulse, and straight-out rock and roll collide, releasing a burst of poetic energy that would inspire John Fogerty’s mythic bayou, Jim Morrison’s archetypal apocalypse, and Jimi Hendrix’s voodoo soup.

While Dylan was changing the way musicians thought about the possibilities of rock, the British bands that invaded the United States in 1964 and 1965 played an equally crucial role in preparing the audience for the new take on the blues. Much more consciously immersed in the Chicago blues and Southern soul than their contemporaries in the colonies, the Animals, Rolling Stones, and Yardbirds introduced black music to multitudes of white Americans who didn’t know John Lee Hooker from John Hope Franklin. However often Dylan called his songs blues—”Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Outlaw Blues,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “Tombstone Blues,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”—his electric music wasn’t about race. At least explicitly.

By the time Highway 61 Revisited redefined American rock in the fall of 1965, the Rolling Stones had paid homage to both Chicago and Memphis, the sacred cities of their racially aware genealogy of rock and roll. At least in the early days, the British response to black music took on near-religious overtones. Van Morrison, who began singing with a Belfast blues band when he was fourteen, sounded the dominant note when he said simply, “The blues are the truth.” Morrison’s pursuit of that truth brought him to something like an Irish version of the gospel impulse. Astral Weeks, Moondance, and the underrated Period of Transition may not be washed in the blood, exactly, but they are awash in blues and gospel spirit.

At times, the British reverence for Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker resembled the folk revival’s sense of the Delta blues. But there were some crucial differences, most notably an underlying belief that the blues addressed shared experience. The Animals’ lead singer, Eric Burdon, observed: “If I heard John Lee Hooker singing things like ‘I been working in a steel mill trucking steel like a slave all day, I woke up this morning and my baby’s gone away,’ I related to that directly because that was happening to grown men on my block.” Equally important, the British bands felt none of the aversion to rhythm and volume that drove pacifist Pete Seeger into a violent rage when he threatened to cut the electric cords plugged into Dylan’s guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Every British group with a harder edge than Herman’s Hermits traced its roots to modern black American music; and even the Hermits had hits with the Rays’ doo-wop classic “Silhouettes” and Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World.”

A quick survey of early albums by British bands highlights their role in introducing white American teens to black material. Their songs hit hardest in the vanilla suburbs and cream-of-wheat heartland, where American teens lacked exposure to the real thing. The Stones’ first American album included Rufus Thomas’s Stax classic “Walking the Dog,” Chuck Berry’s “Carol,” and Muddy Waters’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You”; the Dave Clark Five had big hits with energetic covers of Chris Kenner’s “I Like It Like That,” Bobby Day’s “Over and Over,” and Mary Johnson’s “You Got What It Takes”; the Searchers rendered the sexual comedy of the Clovers’ “Love Potion #9” fit for the top twenty. The Yardbirds popularized the purist approach of the British blues movement led by Alexis Korner and John Mayall; any guitarist who masters the licks on the John Mayall’s Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton has memorized the Dictionary of the Chicago Blues. Even the Beatles, whose love for Carl Perkins’s rockabilly and Buck Owens’s country made them the whitest of the first-line British invasion groups, were originally distributed in the United States by Chicago’s black-owned and -operated Vee Jay label. They covered the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman,” Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” Arthur Alexander’s “Anna,” and Barrett Strong’s “Money.” The low point of British obsession with black American music came on the near-comic near-tragic cover versions of James Brown’s “Please Please Please” and “I Don’t Mind” that clutter the Who’s first album.

Black music defined British groups in ways that were unusual in the United States. John Fogerty remembered the playlist of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s predecessor the Golliwogs—who got their name because it sounded “British” to the PR men in the front office at Fantasy Records—as a typically eclectic American mix in which “Mustang Sally” and “Green Onions” showed up alongside “Wipe Out” and “Louie Louie.” In contrast, many of the British bands prided themselves on playing nothing but black music. Burdon remembered the English R & B scene as “a genuine underground. It was amazing to find out that what we were doing in Newcastle, which we thought was strictly our thing, was being done in other places by other people.”

In London, the Rolling Stones established their reputation with an approach almost identical to the Animals’. The Stones got together as a direct outgrowth of their shared interest in black music. Keith Richards described the crucial moment: “I get on this train one morning and there’s Jagger and under his arm he has four or five albums. I haven’t seen him since the time I bought an ice cream off him and we haven’t hung around since we were five, six, ten years. We recognized each other straight off. ‘Hi, man,’ I say. ‘Where ya going?’ he says. And under his arm, he’s got Chuck Berry and Little Walter, Muddy Waters. ‘You’re into Chuck Berry, man, really?’ That’s a coincidence. He said, ‘Yeah, I got a few more albums. Been writin’ away to this, uh, Chess Records in Chicago.’ ”

Unlike Dylan, whose acid-etched meditations were as likely to concern Ezra Pound as Howlin’ Wolf, most of the English bands went out of their way to pay honor to their sources. Ten days into their first U.S. tour in 1964, the Stones took a break to record at Chess Studios, where they met Chuck Berry, Willie Dixon, and Muddy Waters, who, Stones bass player Bill Wyman remembered, “helped us carry our gear inside.” He helped them do a lot more than that. The Stones’ early records were filled with Chicago blues, and Muddy’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You” was their first U.S. single. They felt equally at home in Memphis. In addition to recording Southern standards like Otis Redding’s “Pain in My Heart,” the Stones went out of their way to see every Southern soul star playing in the cities where they performed, expressing particular admiration for Wilson Pickett.

The relationship between Jagger and James Brown reflects the nature and the tone of the interactions between the British rockers and their black idols. Brown took genial glee in reporting the origin of Jagger’s “distinctive” stage mannerisms. The Stones were scheduled to follow Brown at the filming of a TV special, The T.A.M.I Show. Never one to underestimate the competitive elements of performance—he once booked Solomon Burke as an opening act and then paid his “rival” for the title “King of Soul” to sit and watch his show—Brown remembered:

The Stones had come out in the wings by then, standing between all those guards. Every time they got ready to start out on the stage, the audience called us back. They couldn’t get on—it was too hot out there. By that time I don’t think Mick wanted to go on the stage at all. Mick had been watching me do that thing where I shimmy on one leg and when the Stones finally got out there, he tried it a couple of times. He danced a lot that day. Until then I think he used to stand still when he sang, but after that he really started moving around. . . . Later on, Mick used to come up to the Apollo and watch my shows.

Brown didn’t resent the interest. He described the Stones as “brothers” rather than “competitors” and emphasized that the British groups—he specified the Animals, Kinks, and Beatles as well as the Stones—”had a real appreciation for where the music came from and knew more about R&B and blues than most Americans.”

It wasn’t that white American bands were totally ignorant of what was happening in black music. Some pockets of American popular music remained interracial even after the collapse of the first generation of rock and rollers. From the start, white groups in the ethnic enclaves of the East Coast played an active part in the doo-wop scene. The list of doo-wop classics includes records by black groups such as the Penguins (“Earth Angel”) and the Five Satins (“In the Still of the Night”); white groups such as the Mystics (“Hushabye”) and Dion and the Belmonts (“I Wonder Why”); and integrated groups such as the Dell Vikings (“Come Go with Me”) and the Crests (“Sixteen Candles”). The Four Seasons’ “Let’s Hang On” combines doo-wop harmonies and R & B intensity; their ability to place two singles—“Sherry” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry”—at the top of the R & B charts anticipates the “blue-eyed soul” of the mid-sixties. Although no white soul singer came anywhere close to the appeal or power of Otis Redding or James Brown, a somewhat incongruous group of white musicians have succeeded on Billboard magazine’s “black” charts—which have variously been labeled “Harlem Hit Parade,” “Race Records,” “Soul,” and “R & B,” which, Little Richard always joked, stood for “real black.”

The success over the years of distinctly “black”-sounding singers like Teena Marie, Hall and Oates, Bobby Caldwell, or even the young Elvis Presley, who had six number one R & B singles, comes as no real surprise. The Righteous Brothers (“You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration”) and the Rascals (“Groovin’,” “People Got to Be Free”) fit in easily with the soul mix of the mid-sixties. Righteous Brother vocalist Bill Medley credits black audiences with helping the duo overcome the resistance of white programmers who considered their sound “too black.” “One thing we’re most proud of,” Medley said, “is that the black audience accepted us point blank and they didn’t have to, they just didn’t have to. The great thing about the black audience is that if you are emotionally cuttin’ it, that’s what it’s all about.”

But it’s anyone’s guess why the Beach Boys enjoyed as much “R & B” success as the Rolling Stones. Part of the reason may be that the Stones—whose biggest “crossover” hit, “Satisfaction,” peaked at number 19—began to record during the fourteen-month period when Billboard eliminated the separate black chart. The magazine explained the decision by observing that the pop and R & B charts had become so similar that there was no point in publishing both. Primarily a testament to Motown’s crossover success, the decision suggests a belief that the nation was on the verge of a fundamental change. Three decades later, the idea that race may soon be irrelevant seems as remote as it must have in the 1850s, when Abraham Lincoln argued that the only solution to the race problem would be to return emancipated slaves to Africa. The music of the sixties offered a tantalizing promise of a world where blacks and whites could live together, work out their differences without denying who they are. But the glimpse proved fleeting.

16

The Minstrel Blues

The British Invasion illuminated some shadowy corners of America’s multiracial culture. As Ralph Ellison suggests, many black-white cultural exchanges can be understood as an elaborate minstrel show. Even as it perpetuates stereotypes and exploits blacks economically, Ellison argues, the cultural imitation across racial lines reveals connections we usually prefer to deny. Contemplating the minstrel show, Ellison writes: “It was as though I had plunged through the wacky mirrors of a fun house, to discover on the other side a weird distortion of perspective which made for a painful but redeeming rectification of vision.”

The early history of minstrelsy anticipates both the painful and redemptive dimensions of the sixties cross-racial musical dialogue. In 1828, a white man named Thomas “Daddy” Rice saw a black man performing a strange but compelling song and dance on a street in Charleston, South Carolina. Rice bought the man’s song, dance, cart, and clothes for fifty dollars. Within a decade, Rice had parlayed his imitation of the original into a lucrative show business career, creating a sensation in New York, touring London, and scattering the cultural landscape with land mines that continue to go off on a weekly basis. Already well known as an “Ethiopian Delineator” when he met the black man who would make his fortune, Rice participated in one of the most popular forms of nineteenth-century American popular culture. Groups such as “The Six Original Ethiopian Serenaders” painted themselves in blackface and presented grotesque cartoons of black life. Advertisements for the “Congo Melodists” promised authentic renditions of the “Nubian Jungle Dance,” the “Virginia Jungle Dance,” and the “African Fling.”

Audiences lacking direct contact with African Americans typically confused the parody with the real thing. Visions of comic dandies, childlike Uncles, and sex-crazed ape-men erased the complex black humanity of Frederick Douglass and the grandfathers of the Delta bluesmen. Ida B. Wells and the grandmothers of Mahalia Jackson and Ella Baker were reduced to coal-black Mammies and high yella Jezebels. The situation got so far out of hand that black performers were forced to don blackface and alter their speech because they failed to accord with the “reality” defined by white minstrels. No surprise that many blacks recoiled in anger and disgust from any imitation of black culture by white performers.

The economic impact of minstrelsy was even worse. Rice’s ability to parlay the fifty dollars he paid his source into a fortune wouldn’t have surprised many of the black musicians of the fifties or sixties. The long-standing segregation of the record charts encouraged white artists to release sanitized “cover” versions of black hits. Pat Boone became a star on the basis of mummified covers of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” the Charms’ “Two Hearts,” and the Flamingos’ “I’ll Be Home.” His hit versions of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti” make a significant contribution to American humor.

On many occasions, the black/white minstrel dynamic amounted to something like pure theft. One of the most notorious cases concerned the Beach Boys’ rip-off of Chuck Berry. Riding a wave of hits that began with “Surfer Girl,” the Beach Boys (whose business affairs were run by the Wilson brothers’ father, Murry) released “Surfin’ USA.” The song’s infectious rhythms, sweet harmonies, and celebration of teenage fun as American myth established the group as uncontested rulers of surf music. The only problem was—despite a record label crediting the song to Brian Wilson—it’s Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” note for note. It took a lawsuit to get Berry songwriting royalties and credit as Brian Wilson’s “collaborator.”