A big fan of soul since his teens, Bowie first incorporated soul elements into his own music on Diamond Dogs (“1984,” “Sweet Thing”). As the US tour for that album trundled on, it grew progressively blacker, mutating into a full-on soul revue augmented by black singers such as Luther Vandross and Bowie’s then girlfriend, Ava Cherry. Bowie’s guitarist of choice for decades, Carlos Alomar, was astounded by Bowie’s huge knowledge of African American music. One of the singer’s favorite albums was James Brown’s 1963 Live at the Apollo, so he was thrilled when Alomar, who played in the Apollo’s house band and had toured with Brown as well as Wilson Pickett and Ben E. King, took him there after the pair met at a recording session for Lulu in April 1974. Alomar was the main wrangler for what became Young Americans, mostly recorded at Sigma Sound in Philadelphia. Bowie was one of the first white artists to use the studio.
Young Americans made Bowie a star in the US. In interviews from the period he sounds ambivalent about the record, on the one hand dismissing it self-loathingly as “plastic soul,” on the other conceding that it has an emotional honesty that isn’t present in his earlier work. Up until Young Americans, Bowie told Melody Maker, he had used “science fiction patterns because I was trying to put forward concepts, ideas and theories.” But Young Americans is different—“just emotional drive.”
The source of this emotional drive is music historian Peter Guralnick’s quarry in Sweet Soul Music, a gripping, deeply researched portrait of the era and milieu that gave rise to soul. This Guralnick defines very specifically as a secular iteration of gospel—mostly produced in the “southern soul triangle” of Memphis, Tennessee; Macon, Georgia; and Muscle Shoals, Alabama—which became popular from 1954 onward after the success of Ray Charles, reached its peak in the early 1960s in tandem with the civil rights movement, and was spent as a creative force by the 1970s when the innocent, chaotic enthusiasm that had powered labels like Stax ebbed away.
James Brown, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke … Guralnick profiles each diligently, though he’s especially drawn to Cooke, tragically cut down in his prime—“the best singer who ever lived, period,” in the opinion of Jerry Wexler, the journalist turned producer who coined the term rhythm and blues and who, with Ahmet Ertegun and a little help from Franklin, Wilson Pickett, et al., made Atlantic one of America’s most formidable record labels.
Sweet Soul Music is scholarly and illuminating, then, if rather male in its outlook, unlike Gerri Hirshey’s similar but more joyous Nowhere to Run (see p. 176), which expands its remit to include Motown and therefore Diana Ross, Mary Wells, Gladys Knight, the Marvelettes, etc. Guralnick is something of a purist, scornful of Motown for what he thinks of as its craven courting of a white audience, even as he describes the writing of Sweet Soul Music as a process of unlearning some of his more naive, romantic assumptions about black musicians.
Guralnick is at his best when focusing on individual songs, for example the Orioles’ 1953 hit “Crying in the Chapel,” which blurs the line between gospel and R&B. And there’s a lovely account, courtesy of a local newspaper, of Otis Redding and guitarist Steve Cropper in the studio whipping up “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” the Beatles-inspired song that became a posthumous US number one for Redding in 1967. This would likely have delighted Bowie, who in 1974 had a UK hit with the Stax standard “Knock On Wood,” originally performed by Eddie Floyd but covered to thrilling effect by Redding and Carla Thomas on their 1967 album King & Queen.