Article Response: Everything They Say About Soul Is Wrong

This isn't just football as most of the world uses the term: first Superbowl I ever watched was apparently the first with a black quarterback, Doug Williams for the Redskins: commentators had been doubting that black people would have the mental strength and capacity for such a pivotal, controlling role!

also, funk = black prog. cf. parliament-funkadelic and yes or zappa circa roxy and elsewhere.

Exactly. I remember reading an utterly infuriating think piece on the supposed "mainstreaming" of glitch, where the writer implied that much of the new soul music was "stealing" ideas from the IDM scene. All I could think was "No, you fucking philistine, you've got it all backwards. Go buy a Roger Troutman record and educate yourself - he was using drum machines and vocoders when most of these IDM acts were still in diapers."

Well done, and as noted above, it is "Guralnick."

In a similar vein, it's occurred to me that the elevation of the Beatles' later albums over their earlier (better) work has to do with the relative lack of r&b influence in the later stuff. At the time especially, with Sgt Pepper, their music could finally be hailed as high art -- once all those nasty black elements had been removed.

People who listen to jazz (particularly bop and post-bop)seem to be more prone to point out the technical achievements of a piece alongside or more than the idea of "emotion", so I think it might just boil down to the presence of recognizably black vocals to cloud the minds of your typical "Bob Gibson relies on pure velocity more than knowing when to throw the changeup" types.

ditto for the black prog thing, i read someone in echoes magazine write that very same thing a while back.

Yes did indeed have some badass grooves. Chris Squire is one of the baddest bassists in rock history.

* I didn't address the gospel connection at all - it seemed sort of beside the point, but I think it may be part of both the reason why people assume it's about deep feeling, and concomitantly one of the excuses for not noticing there are other things happening.

Thanks for all the kind words here, and sorry for the Guralnick misspelling. I was very nervous about submitting a music article to as great a music writer as Tom, so I'm relieved and happy that it's gone down well. Perhaps especially with Eddie Hurt, whose opinions on soul I have loads of respect for - yeah, Tate is another very good example. I don't think there are any better examples than the one I'd chosen, but it partly suited me because I probably know Hi, Green, Mitchell and those musicians better than any other collective in soul. Had I wanted to be brave I might have gone for something more obviously fiery and passionate, but I didn't really see the point in trying to stretch it - I do think the same things apply, that Otis's records are made by masterful musicians (obvuiously one of the same ones, in Al Jackson) who knew exactly what they were doing, but Otis is a less obviously thoughtful singer, as you can tell when he sings "sock it to me tenderly," for instance.

In fact perhaps the worst.

the thoughts abt soul have prompted many musings on my part that I'm trying to tease out and will post later abt them

really nice Martin

Oh, this is beautiful.

"Say, God!"

"Yeah?"

"TIME TO GET PEGGED."

I think Otis/Al is a good opposition. I think Redding's great and would have done more and different stuff had he lived. "Dock of the Bay" is such a huge leap forward in songwriting, so much more reflective than most of his music. But he's just so repetitive and as such not what I'd consider the prime example of soul music. Of course I love "Dictionary of Soul" and Otis is always fun to listen to, but I think Green, Franklin, Brown and Tate (whose catalogue is, sure, so much smaller than Redding's) beat him. And even though I love Tate, I do think that it's the production and Ragovoy's overall conception of uptown soul that makes the records really great--not to take away from his singing but he's got his mannerisms just like Redding. Whereas I don't think Green really lives by his mannerisms. Sam Moore, whose obscure '70 "Plenty Good Lovin'" album I recently got, has the same problems. I mean when you listen to Sam Moore do "Get Out of My Life Woman" and then to Lee Dorsey's, you see how oversouling kinda doesn't compare to the real personality and restraint of Dorsey and Toussaint's great recording. Another great example is Phillipe Wynne's singing, which is in many ways similar to that of Al Green's (and Bell's production similar in many ways to Willie Mitchell's). He transcends mannerism.

There's always been a corollary to the soul myth you address that says that white musicians usually don't have soul, because they either just aren't born with it or didn't grow up in the black church.

I've long had a hypothesis that, to whatever extent it is true that some white bands miss the mark when trying to play soul (or blues), it's in fact because they fall prey to this idea of "raw emotion" and fail to adequately study the nuances of the music.

Eddie, you are preaching the bass player gospel. Maybe somebody should start a new thread or dig up an old one. In any case, check out The Bass Player Hall of Fame

Martin, your article really nailed it and you picked the perfect song to prove your point. For one thing, it's difficult to play drums that slow without screwing up, speeding up, sounding bad, or just being boring, but Al Jackson was a master of making the music exciting even at those tempos (especially at those tempos?), even in a six minute song.

I think you're also right about the patronizing attitude of some fans and critics. The best description of this "You Noble Savage, Me Anthropologist Come To Explain What You Do So Naturally" I ever saw was in a short story by Julio Cortazar, "The Pursuer," about a Charlie Parker-like figure, told from the point of view of his music writer friend.

corollary to the soul myth you address that says that white musicians usually don't have soul
Yup. And I don't know if people ever accuse him of not having soul, but another victim of the soul myth is Steve Cropper, who is often pigeonholed as 'just' a rhythm guitar player. Which is problematic for a few reasons, one of them being that if you've seen Booker T and the MGs live, you'll see him do a lot more than play rhythm guitar.

Oh, can I say how pleased I am that you managed to get "serious Yahoo" together in a sentence - in a paragraph mentioning Australia nonetheless. I applaud your bold use of subliminal messages to draw attention to this undervalued genius.

Back to the Soul Myth. One time I went to see Tommy Flanagan and his trio play at Sweet Basil and after the show this Italian tourist at the next table said to me "Do you think that Tommy Flanagan has the true blues feeling?" All I can think is "you've just seen one of the greatest pianists ever, sideman to Ella Fitzgerald, master of the lyrical bop style, in one of the greatest trios ever, and you've gotta ask me a question like that. Were you even listening? Did you you want him to play 'Spoonful' or something?" Of course, I probably just said "Yeah, I think so." Sorry for the rant.

I would have punched him in the face
It was a woman. I just felt sorry for her. Let's be honest: I felt sorry for myself.

I thought of another manifestation of the topic under discussion. One time we went to Manny's Car Wash to see Hubert Sumlin, who was so great on those Howling Wolf records. When we were outside the club we heard the worst, most generic, hackneyed bar band blues soloing ever, but then when we looked inside, it was Hubert Sumlin playing it! We couldn't believe it, and in fact we decided to go do something else and we never went in. Much later we talked to some friends who knew one of those Fat Possum guys, R.L. Burnside, I think, and Burnside, if it was him, told them that yes, there were certain gigs where he hammed it up for the audience like that, but luckily there where others where he played the real stuff. I wish I were making this up.

Soul was a largely black form, and not that many white people had a go at it, so the fact that most of the greats were black is unsurprising - also it grew out of black forms (jazz-blues-R&B etc) so that explains why black people were the ones doing it. Steve Cropper, as has been said, was white, as was Duck Dunn, but I'd also mention the great Eddie Hinton, who was a major session guitarist and also made his own terrific records - I think he was the greatest white singer who was properly part of southern soul.

Humbert (almost typed "Humbert") Sumlin is a case of a somewhat limited musician who was able to add what he could do to those Howlin' Wolf records. I mean I think five notes by Sumlin equal any twenty from almost anyone else.

I still stand by my comment about Chris Squire. He's not terrible, and I admit when it comes to many things I'm somewhat conservative. It's bass playing as guitar playing. In my dreams, I'd like to think about Steve Howe and Bill Bruford using, oh, Bernard Edwards on bass. Might've taught those two a little something.

And when it comes to soul, I grew up with that stuff here in Tennessee, so I never even worried about any of that bullshit Martin refers to in his article. To me, something like the JBs or Lee Dorsey or, name it, just seemed like the way to play, bedrock stuff, and once I got over my adolescent need to hear ELP and Jethro Tull and Yes I got the message. Of course, I overreacted and it took me more time to realize that prog shit had some value.

Hell, I was IN a funk/soul band, and some of the guys IN THE BAND had to be disabused of the notion that we actually had to do stuff like listen closely to records and learn new playing and arranging techniques.

someone posted this text here too, not that anyone has much to say on it.

I think that black Americans as a whole are pretty talented at improvisation and that is one reason why they tend to dominate in fields that require the skill. I have seen no studies to back this up (nor would I know how you could do one) so it's only a personal observation(!) but I think that when you are an oppressed race you have to learn to do without proper training and education that many of the more privileged people get and so you learn how to pick things up as you go along and play by your own rules. While I agree with you that soul music's technical/production aspects are often times played down unfairly I do think that there is a reason people equate the music with a "feeling" and about "emotions" and that has to do with the freewheelin' nature of black culture (just compare black religious services with white ones) and how it isn't so much about articulated rationality and intellectualizing things. It requires a great amount of intelligence to play both something that is free and improvised and something that is very calculated. The fact Al Green can say so much by singing so little is part of the brilliance. Like an actor who doesn't have to say anything to perfectly articulate an emotion or a thought.

if they are African, it's all defensive naivety and innate exuberance, and you keep half-expecting the commentators to start talking about natural rhythm. I keep feeling as if the pundits are watching a different game from me, one in which the shambolic Germans I can see are replaced by the disciplined, technically superb team being talked about, and the hard-working, technically excellent, well-organised African side have been swapped for this bunch of naive - but naturally talented! - athletes.

I don't watch soccer so I may be unfit to comment here but for all I know there may be a great difference in the attitudes and approaches brought by both the German players and the black ones. Germany has always been one of the most educated places in the world and so it'd make sense if articulated rationality and discipline were one of their strengths. The popular mistake people make and I think your column really hits it on the head when discussing it is the mistake in thinking that calculated and disciplined music/thinking is by nature smarter than improvised and seemingly less articulated music/thinking. That XLIIX x CIV is smarter than 48 x 104 (hope I got that right) because it goes over more people's heads and is longer. That Kraftwerk is better than Stax because it's all been seemingly thought out beforehand.

I tend to ramble when I'm tired. Hope this makes some sense in the morning.

Link in the original post is broken so I have copied one over from the RIP thread: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2004/11/everything-they-say-about-soul-is-wrong.