Growing up, I wanted to be a Pip. Not in the sense of something small or insignificant, but rather one of the Pips, spinning and singing behind Gladys Knight while she sang He’s leavin’—on that midnight train to Georgia. Even at the time it was clear to me I wanted some of what soul music provides: a sense of praise even among the heartbreak; to hold your head up high and bow only when dancing; or, as pip can mean, “to break through in hatching.”
Choreographed yet spontaneous-seeming, stylish and sating, soul learnt me that blackness could mean an afro in a tuxedo. To riff off one of the other definitions of a pip, soul turns what might otherwise be tragedy into a “minor, unspecified human ailment.” Taking its cue from the blues, seeing beauty among the bittersweet, soul can make even heartbreak look good.
Could the Pips be short for “pippin,” which can mean both “apple” and “something admired”? I admired the Pips in large part because of my sense early on that they were family—Knight’s brother and cousin and, if I recall correctly, a family friend who might as well have been kin. Soul music insists on community, one filled with calls that you could respond to. Whoo-whoo.
Drylongso, when Knight takes her own “Midnight Train,” singing I’d rather live in his world—the Pips behind her echoing (live in his world)—than live without him (long pause for effect) in mine, we know full well where she’s been and where she’s headed. This living in two worlds is also a condition we’ve seen before, whether in Du Bois’s double consciousness or in the spirituals’ claiming an otherworldly future: the midnight train journeys between here and there, the midnight special between there and Elsewhere. People get ready, there’s a train a-comin’.
There are always “two trains a-running.” In soul music the dueling trains of heaven and hell become the Love Train or Friendship Train. (They will go on in hip-hop to be “bombed” subway cars and then “Trans-Europe Express” retrofitted to reach “Planet Rock,” a funk steam punk.) In “Midnight Train,” capitalize the “His” in the phrase I’d rather live in his world, than live without him in mine and you can see how close we are to the holy roll. In Knight’s song—indeed, in her very singing—we see up close the ever-present tension between the spiritual and the secular, not just as two competing parts of culture, but within each of us.
“Midnight Train to Georgia” conveys us not just with its chug-chug rhythm, but also, like so many blues and folk songs before, with train imagery; its blues correlative is surely part of the song’s persistent popularity. Of course all the correlative in the world would mean little without Gladys Knight’s emotional delivery, touched with restraint—yet, in the eternal battle between emotion and restraint, restraint here is chiefly performed by the Pips themselves, who serve as a chorus commenting on the first-person action, the wrenching decision that Knight enacts and helps us to know. Their Black Greek chorus not only echoes but predicts the action: All aboard, they sing, and soon Knight is singing it too, saying I got to go—I got to go—and, boy, do we believe her. We realize suddenly we have been listening to someone convincing herself to leave all along—in this case, to find her way to what must feel like home. This is all the more powerful because it appears the singer is not coaxing forth the song, but that the song itself is convincing the singer. Knight ain’t singing; the song is singing her.
Such singing is hard to do—at least without having the song overwhelm you, as many lesser singers might. I recall a too-young singer on television’s American Idol doing just that, taking the song as a lighthearted romp, an upbeat number more reminiscent of “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy.” The other risk is there too: many a “good” singer, from Whitney Houston to Mariah Carey, faced with such a song, rather than trusting it—take your time now—will overpower the thing, oversing it, blow it out. You can hardly blame them: it is scary to let the song sing you.
But soul insists not so much on perfect pitch as a perfect ear to find the heart of the song in all senses. This is what I call inner form. You could call it a song’s soul.
The blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll. Gospel had a child and nicknamed it Soul.
Soul music is to gospel what the blues were to the spirituals: a secular, earthbound, and earthy expression of an older religious counterpart. While suffused with transcendence, soul music’s emphasis on rhythm and expression—as in jazz or early blues—marks a recognition of the rhythms and realities of daily life. Such daily livin’ is not contradictory to spiritual life: for soul musicians such as Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Curtis Mayfield forward, the church is just a short drive or long Saturday night away. It is a midnight train after all. The willingness of—or the call for—the soul artist to travel between soul music and saving one’s own soul is crucial to understanding the role of spirituality and duality in black art, not to mention continuing the extended argument over existence found in the blues.
Soul music don’t mean pleading, or preening, as too many singers seem to think today given their whiny delivery: instead it is that churchy mix of restraint and overwhelming emotion. One requires the other. It isn’t what you say but how you say it, soul knows, seeking the song within the song. It charts another kind of Elsewhere, one as internal as it is eternal.
Where jazz is double-voiced in its playing, whether Louis Armstrong or Albert Ayler, soul requires a doubleness in our listening to fully understand its expression. You might say that because of the nature of seemingly dominant culture, black expression requires this “veiling”; I would say that this underground meaning is part culture and part condition of the African American desire to mask not just defensively but ritualistically. Through veiling, African American music is multivalent, its meanings many, inveighing against those massed against black culture.
Yet too often soul gets read as a “pure” form of black expression, an essentialism that obscures its roots—even if we properly see in these roots the black ones of gospel, early rhythm and blues, or its combination with country music by Chuck Berry and others to make rock and roll (a black phrase, after all). In fact, soul represents two unified yet seemingly contradictory impulses that soon would contribute to the Black Arts movement it helped give rise to: the rough secularization and improvisation of soul (and bebop) on one hand; and the polish and integrationism of Motown (and what became cool jazz) on the other. I want to stress that this is a false distinction—in our experience of the music and of life we are not divided, but whole. Even Amiri Baraka, early on highly suspect and critical of things deemed assimilationist, knew this. “Baraka interpreted the popular preference [for R & B] as part of a dialectical process that would help create the new black world,” Craig Werner notes in discussing Baraka’s “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music).” “The gospel moans and blues cries, Baraka wrote, carried a musical energy that transcended their capitalist and Christian origins. He praised Motown, the Impressions, and James Brown for providing ‘a core of legitimate social feeling, though mainly metaphorical and allegorical.’ Soul music represented a stage in a larger revolutionary process: ‘the song and the people is the same…. the songs, the music, changed, as the people did.’”1 No wonder Werner’s book is called A Change Is Gonna Come, named after the sublime Cooke composition.
This “change” gets complicated by the Black Arts movement’s emphasis on overt politics, instead of the often-subtle rebellion found in the music they grooved to. Record companies wouldn’t release Cooke’s “Change,” after all. While James Brown sang “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” others, like Mayfield and Franklin, said “Keep on pushin’” or demanded “respect,” politicizing the popular. If Coltrane “murdered the popular song,” as Baraka had it, deconstructing “My Favorite Things” until it is one of Baraka’s and our favorites, then soul insists we need not murder to transform. Such symbolic murder courses throughout the work of Baraka and Black Arts, from Dutchman on. Yet despite the macho claims of gangsta rap and agitprop, soul knows that to find freedom we need only claim it—reach out, I’ll be there—which, soul insists, ain’t the same as begging.
Soul is not necessarily an “all-black” production but a black means of transforming material, whether traditional or “white.” In this way, soul’s genius is related to jazz and to bebop’s return to the blues tone of the music. Listen to the late Isaac Hayes covering “Walk on By” by Burt Bacharach or Mayfield singing The Carpenters’ vanilla-seeming “We’ve Only Just Begun,” and you realize soul’s insistence on transformation: Mayfield in particular makes the song not just about love but the start of revolution. You might even argue, as soul does, that these are one and the same.
In his recorded, onstage introduction to the Carpenters’ cover on his essential Curtis Live!, Mayfield puts it this way: “A lot of folks think this particular lyric is not appropriate for what might be considered underground. But I think underground is whatever your mood or your feelings might be at the time so long as it’s the truth.”2 Just as we understand Mayfield means a kind of soul music when he says “underground,” listeners must grasp how soul always seeks and sends its meanings underground like a railroad—“so long as it’s the truth.”
The dominant mode of the soul era is metonymy, a word or phrase standing in for something else. “Metonymy moves attention from thing to thing; its principle is combination rather than selection,” Language poet Lyn Hejinian reminds us. “Compared to metaphor, which depends on code, metonym preserves context, foregrounds interrelationship.”3 You are the sunshine of my life. The word, from the Greek, means “name change.”4 In the case of soul, from Mayfield to Franklin, sexual and romantic freedom stands in for a broader one; relationships and situations, while seemingly those of love, are actually bigger. If we don’t understand this, we cannot fully comprehend that while Cooke, inarguably the first soul singer, croons “Wonderful World,” he is talking not just about personal love but political possibility.
Let’s take Aretha’s “Respect,” a definitive soul song. Just give me my propers when you come home. Most any listener rightly intuits that the “respect” spoken of is not just personal—a lover demanding respect and “propers”—but more broadly political. Like the term propers itself, Franklin’s demands are a metonym understood by the audience, a stand-in for black political demands of and for respect from the nation; they also are also a demand for gender equality. The song’s continued popularity is a sign of its timeliness, and the ways in which its struggle is neither simple nor complete.
“Respect,” of course, was penned by Otis Redding. In his version, the song does have its double and even multiple meanings, though arguably not as many as Rea-Rea’s,5 whose cover could be said to be definitive. This transformation of seemingly simple material, the personal into the political, is one aspect of soul—even if it is an aspect often provided by the listener. The audience for “Dancing in the Street” (1964), as Craig Werner reminds us, understood that it was a song that captured and coded the unrest at home in those same streets.6 Those who heard “Tracks of My Tears” (1965) grasped that the lover addressed might as well be the country that didn’t dare look in the collective black face, unable to face the despair that might be written there. Oh yes, I’m the great pretender. In instance after instance, from Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Tears of a Clown” (1967) or “I’ve Been Good to You” (1961), soul singers were speaking for a feeling behind the veil no less powerful than Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask.”
Take Redding’s version of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”: in the Stones’ original, called by many the best rock-and-roll song of all time,7 “Satisfaction” speaks to a generation’s dissatisfaction, the hedonist, ironic, even angry side of the hopefulness found in the time’s protest songs. Yet, famously, Keith Richards said that in Redding’s version he heard the song like it sounded in Richards’s head, how he meant it to sound.
In seeking and finding the soul of the song, Redding’s version of “Satisfaction” is an original of a kind only possible in the postmodern world of multiple versions, and the postwar world of the cover—a concept charged with race, if only because it typically meant the absence of race. (Race here being ascribed only to blacks—not “raceless” whites. This “race” designation is not always unequal, though always segregated, as in “race records” being synonymous with black records sold to black audiences.) Covering black records held a multiple purpose for the white artist (or for Pat Boone, hardly an artist): most obviously, making money with a proven original; and, secondly and more subtly, also implying that the black original is merely raw material best consumed when premasticated for the masses. Whether copied (as in the Stones) or covered over (as in Boone), both actions imply black culture is an unfinished original: for the former this “rawness” is its best quality; for the latter, rawness is exactly why we need a white version.
For the Rolling Stones or the millions whom they stand in for who have at least taken black culture seriously in taking from it,8 the cover provides a way of providing authenticity—a case of not whitewashing an original, but blacking up the copy. In this, the cover operates much like blackface, providing the same freedoms as the black mask; more important, it also reverses the all-too-typical view, found in even our best critics, of authenticity only sought or required by blacks from white sources that allowed them to speak (or confirmed they could write). The cover song reveals the ways white folks quite often require black originality and authenticity, ironically through their “white” copy. Brown sugar, how come you taste so good? Not just much of their music, but the Rolling Stones’ very name is part love, part theft, taken—like the name of both the magazine and the Bob Dylan hit—from a Muddy Waters song.9
Just as anxiety over slavery required the exorcism of blackface, the cover song reenacted and reacted to the schism of segregation. Love and Theft, Eric Lott’s tremendous study of blackface minstrelsy—whose title Bob Dylan borrowed for his record by that same name—describes the ways “minstrelsy is claimed as the completion of black culture, its professional emergence.” Minstrelsy comes about in two ways: through “absorption (in both senses)” or “a transfer of ownership, through theft (or occasional payment). … Both paradigms, it is safe to say, share an anxiety over the fact of cultural ‘borrowing,’” Lott says. Further, both paradigms “have as their purpose the resolution of some intractable social contradiction or problem that the issue of expropriation represents. That of the first is miscegenation; that of the second slavery itself.”10
The white cover, in turn, represents an anxiety over the inequality that threatened white and black alike (if also unequally); and a sinking suspicion that black culture was richer and more varied than its counterpart, and, while hemmed in on all sides, represented a form of freedom. A rolling stone.
The postwar fascination with the “White Negro” is nothing less than this, a dissatisfaction with America expressed through black culture. Never mind that this fascination often mistakes black culture for blackface, confusing fun for the funhouse mirror where black people were distorted, mimicked, and often outright mocked.
Redding’s “Satisfaction” reverses this process, stealing back an original from the band who, especially in their origins, copied black music and its irrepressible style. Redding’s version becomes about “satisfaction” in the broadest sense, a sense not just “underground” but foregrounded in soul music: in a word, yearning. It would be a mistake to see this yearning as less ironic than in the Stones’ version—instead, the song’s irony comes from Redding’s larger desire for social change, hinted at in the Stones but brought front and center by his delivery.
The difference between the two is the difference between indirect complaint and direct protest: both versions walk the line between the two, tightroped in part by the famous guitar riff. But it is in Redding’s own “No no no” that we see the full feeling of soul—and a recognition that soul is not simply a feeling, or a form, but an idiom uniting the two.
Or does it explode? Redding’s repeated Nos—as in his famous whistle in “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” as in Franklin’s Re-Re-Re-Re’s, riffing off her name and “Respect”—are a way to speak beyond even speech, a poetics of refusal to rival that of Langston Hughes.
From struggle, style. Like its kissing cousin black talk, black style proves a crucial if subtle kind of resistance. Some have even suggested that the black strut is a holdover from the walk of slaves wounded by the lash, or recaptured runaways hobbled to prevent further escape. Black style is itself a form of escape.
It is for this reason, apart from its economic and colonizing questions, that the borrowing and debasing of black style have proved so troubling. Whether homage or covers, love or theft, these white borrowings are fraught not just with the history of black folks literally being stolen themselves but also with the failure on the part of certain whites to acknowledge the struggle behind style, mistaking nonchalance or cool or a seeming effortlessness—letting the song sing you—for a lack of mastery.
If the classic mistake with the blues is confusing the music with the feeling it fights—mistaking pain’s performance for unmediated rawness and despair—and the misconception with bebop is that it is merely expressionistic improvisation, with soul the misapprehension is that the music is all-out emotion. While both bebop and soul certainly depended on or deepened feeling—a standard of emotion depicted and shared by the musician—both were so dependent on coolness and seeming effortlessness, however ecstatic, that many never saw soul’s formal qualities. No matter how understated or overblown, soul’s strict expressionism depends less on raw emotion than on restraint, woodshedding, and tradition. Only the strong survive, singeth the Iceman, Jerry Butler.
What for jazz was going to the woodshed becomes in soul music “going to church”—not just as a place to learn how to sing but the moment in the soul song where the singer lets go, and loose, the song overtaking you, and not vice versa. I got to go, I got to go is not so much a departure as an arrival.
It may help to see soul not as style but idiom, a crucial vernacular that provides a counterpart and counterpoint to bebop. For even as it is about transformation, soul remains untranslatable. “Soul music is more than either secularized gospel or funkified jazz,” Cornel West reminds us. “Rather, it is a particular Africanization of Afro-American music with intent to appeal to the black masses, especially geared to the black ritual of attending parties and dances. Soul music is the populist application of bebop’s aim: racial self-conscious assertion among black people in light of their rich musical heritage.”11
Such “Africanization” is also at work in Redding’s taking black culture back from the Stones, making “Satisfaction” his original; or in Mayfield’s turning the Carpenters’ song “We’ve Only Just Begun” into an undeniable statement about the larger promise of black liberation. The transformative “we” of soul is almost always larger than the you or I, the moan or falsetto that it may use to say so. With it we see not the metaphoric “we” of the blues or the allegorical “us” of the spirituals but the metonym of the postmodern moment.
Yet why don’t folks know how to sing soul music no more? Where all the soul singers gone?
Where storying enters is by defining excellence not as borrowing or even elusive originality but “telling your own story.” Pleasure in soul does not deny, but combats, pain. For at its best soul is not simply style, or struggle, but strategy.
The very origin of soul as a secular version of gospel speaks to transformation—gospel music could accurately be said to be soul’s true original, as the very name soul implies.
In the noteworthy case of Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman” (1954), soul’s transformation is literal, with Charles changing the lyrics from gospel ones to secular (and sexual) ones, rendering the distance nonexistent—or more accurately, harking back to the secular blues music that influenced gospel in the first place. The career of Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of gospel music, is indicative of the porousness of the barrier between the musics: a former player with Bessie Smith and others in the tent shows, Dorsey wrote “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” after the death of his wife and child in childbirth, converting his blues experience into gospel expression and initiating a new sacred form.
In soul, the conflict lies not so much in the tension between the worldly and the otherworldly—in the blues and the spirituals, respectively—as in the conflations and tensions between romantic love and a religious One. In this, soul music ain’t too far from Dante. We can practically hear this conflict in the music, and it is at stake in the lives of the soul musicians themselves—most all, from Green to Franklin, have been conflicted over their religious origins, often abandoning the worldly world for the sacred one. And usually back again. This is my lover’s prayer.
To hear soul music fully, we must listen for this almost-religious longing, and its relation to romantic yearning. Listening to Sam Cooke sing That’s the sound of the men / Working on the chain ga-ang, who doesn’t hear the yearning of the black prisoners and their work songs? “Chain Gang” merges the folk tradition of work song—as recorded by Lead Belly and Sterling A. Brown, Bessie Smith and Zora Neale Hurston—with a popular one. In the process, Cooke does not demean the “sound of the men / working on the chain ga-ang” but returns them to the realm of pleasure, linking our pleasure in hearing the music to their struggle. This in fact mirrors the folk tradition, descended from African song, wherein African Americans turned their struggle (on the gang, say) into some small yet significant, even pleasurable, form of self-expression (the work song). One of soul music’s key pleasures is how easy it makes our difficulties look.
The fact that there is a distance between the actual sounds of a work or gospel song and their transformation into soul is exactly the point. By recontextualizing the black oral tradition of work or the Word, by emphasizing pleasure in the midst of pain, by making sure folks dance in the street or juke or blue-light basement, soul music announces “people get ready” or “(don’t worry) if there’s a hell below we’re all going to go” or “it’s all right (to have a good time).”
Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain.
Soul’s acknowledgment of the pain of the everyday retains a power that participates in the blues tradition, frequently locating its concerns with a “lover,” or in “love,” the Beloved serving as a stand-in for a larger yearning. Don’t know much about history / Don’t know much biology: when Cooke sings these lines, he evokes (and revokes) the very things that might limit a black man in the South or in the States, his history and biology being overdetermined; the song can be read as an ironic comment on exactly what a black man, particularly at midcentury, knows all too well.12 In denying history and biology, time and the natural world, Cooke takes pleasure where some would see only struggle. This pleasure, in the end, is one found not just in the listener—even as the soul artist is describing pain—but in the performance, which in its virtuosity, emotional accuracy, its soul, achieves a secular transcendence.
We see such transcendence most clearly in soul’s wordlessness. Following in the tradition of the field holler, the blues moan, and jazz scat, the soul shout expresses the inexpressible. No wonder such “going to church” is often found at the edges of 45s, or the end of soul records. In an interview, Cornel West discusses this riffing in terms of the margins of the music providing, despite the strictures of radio formats and the recording industry, a place for gospel-based improvisation; he also registers his dislike for radio DJs who cut such songs off too early. (Amen.) Imagine hearing James Brown’s “Please Please Please” without the final hollers, or worse, “Let’s Get It On” without Marvin Gaye’s final plea, almost an aside, Make me feel sanctified. This sanctifying of the sensual (or the sensuality of sanctifying) is at the heart of soul music and is missing, for instance, in comedian Jack Black’s otherwise faithful version of “Let’s Get It On” from the movie (or should I say “cover”) version of High Fidelity. Black sings Something like summertime instead, making the yearning for a time and place, instead of a space beyond the worldly, an Elsewhere.
Soul isn’t just transformation, but transport.
As with other kinds of storying, soul seeks the transport of the self through worldly means, yet with otherworldly implications. This is a universal desire in a secular form—and arguably involves the increasingly postmodern problem of how. Redding’s solution, found in “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)” or “The Happy Song (Dum-Dum)” or the whistle in “Dock of the Bay,” is to foreground the inexpressible, to verbalize it through means other than words. The consistency of Redding’s use of the wordless soul riff—even found in the “no no no” of his “Satisfaction,” bringing to mind the king’s “O” at the end of Lear—gives the lie to those who insist the whistle in “Dock of the Bay” occurred only because he forgot the words. As with scat or the gospel shout, this wordlessness is not merely a lack of words (though sometimes it is that), but an improvisation of, and persistent need for, a sound just beyond reach. Found in postwar black culture from bebop to late Coltrane, this often-wordless yearning takes many different forms, from the broken rhythm of Hughes, the bold, half-bitten form of black concrete poet N. H. Pritchard, to the blues haiku of Sonia Sanchez, and the blues sonnets of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Suffice it to say, even if we believe that Redding forgot the words, such a story chiefly ignores the power and proficiency of his solution: his whistle while “sittin’ on the dock of the bay” forlornly and momentously embodies what the entire song attempts to name, a storying sound that tells us all we need to know about yearning and waiting, the loneliness that won’t leave him alone. Or us.
Soul music reminds us that the voice is not always natural, but often artificial. You could say that black folks’ very yearning is a kind of technology—a conveyance, if you will, that like the soul shout or moan is meant to usher us beyond the beyond. Falsetto in soul music, where it occurs with notable frequency, is such a chariot, partly earthbound, with claims on a sound beyond nature—a reaching for the supernatural. Sometimes I just fold my arms and say—aaaaah. This is in part a secular solution to the ways “nature” has been corrupted, made, like biology and history, to serve racist ends. Especially when running away from bondage was seen as a medical disease, the so-called natural inferiority of blacks (and racist cures for such) would be enough to make nature, not to mention “naturalism,” suspect. Sometimes I wonder.
The African American emphasis on Elsewhere also insists that all we see ain’t all there is. Falsetto is the supernatural made vocal, Ariel for the airwaves: simultaneously hypermasculine and lovingly feminine, sexy yet chaste, falsetto in soul music is a sign of vulnerability that emerges from strength. It is the deepest voice, after all, that often creates the highest.13 As falsetto reveals, soul embodies a set of opposites, even contradictions: “Love and happiness” Al Green sings, and helps us to know these may be two different things. Something that’ll make you do wrong, will make you do right. These contradictions are found in the song’s instrumentation, the organ playing and the horn section providing a sorrowful undertow and a hopeful Negro heaven all at once. The attempt is as important as the result, soul says, taking the tragicomedy of the blues to heart in ways pop songs rarely did before. Like the woman talking on the phone late at night, the song is trying not just to make it new but make it right.
Falsetto is also a “machining of the voice” whose descendants—from “Computer Love” to Autotune, from the strange modified voice found in the funk of “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey” to the electric spankings of P-Funk—will crowd the radio soon enough.
Such a falsetto can also be found in mingering—that elusive word found in the folk art of Mingering Mike. Recently discovered, “Mingering Mike” was a best-selling musical artist for years, starting in the late 1960s and early ’70s—at least in his imagination. Mike would craft records and whole record companies by hand, making folk art in the form of album covers that feature a rotating and increasing roster of performers, usually his friends and family members in different guises. (In this he is not necessarily different from actual record companies, from Stax to Motown.)
Mingering Mike’s grasp of the conventions of the soul singer and the soul label—with its staple of stars and lesser stars who’d guest on their records, its various imprints and spinoffs, the girl singer and girl group, bands named “The _________,” much like the Temptations or the Supremes (or any other of the recent white “The” bands for that matter), the offshoot comedy records, the hard-hitting later antidrug and/or antiwar record by their major recording artist—proves the ways in which soul is an idiom to be mastered, and can provide a vision beyond the expected.
It also reveals how the soul artist is a chorus of one—if not a record label. Turning pop into hand-drawn folk art, and turning folk art of his albums into pop, if not popular, masterpieces—so much so that Mike often slipped his handmade records into the flimsy cellophane wrappers of real records, price stickers and all, even occasionally placing them in the bins of real record stores—Mingering Mike doesn’t just have soul artist but post-soul artist written all over him. The result, his mingering, asks questions of the real and the imaginary and the ways that storying disrupts the universe by making its own world, leading us out of our constrictions, beyond the groove.
Part lingering, part “meandering” and “thriving on a riff,” all imagination, mingering might best describe the elusive black art of escape. Maybe then mingering is not just an adjective but a verb—like blackness itself.
Soul takes the analog both as its method of transmission and as a metaphor. It is exacting inexactness, its improvisations demanding. Soul also proves analogous to the movements in black writing that it in part spurred: the search for a written, black-based, oral aesthetic in contrast to a “white” one (which could be said to belong to Black Arts); or, in a search for an equally black, transformative aesthetic that takes from either folk material or white material, but that knows that blackness is never just style but an improvisatory process whereby material is made “black.”
What’s become of the brokenhearted? Black culture does not worry the gap between the black origin and destination; in fact, it remakes the gap into its own image. It shares the tradition of reinvention found in the spirituals, which not only invented new material but sometimes transformed white hymns; the African American preservation and transformation of the once-British ballad; and the remapping first performed by the spirituals of the American landscape. As Amiri Baraka would argue in his groundbreaking Blues People, it is exactly this moment of transformation of musics whereby the African first became the African American.
I want to reiterate here, and dissent a bit too, that unlike Baraka in Blues People, I don’t believe there is a pure, prelapsarian blackness that once it becomes “American” evaporates. Instead, I believe it is black culture (which is distinct) that transforms American culture (making it more black, and thereby more distinct). Baraka himself has come to see the ways his groundbreaking book hadn’t quite realized this: “When I talked (in Blues People) about surviving Africanisms in Afro-American culture I did not take into consideration that American culture itself is historically partially constructed of continuing and thematic Africanisms!”14 This is my country. American culture is black culture—and it is this unique African American culture that in large part makes American culture popular the world over.
My sermon tonight is on the blackness of blackness: the question is no longer the influence of black culture on American culture but the influence of blackness on black culture itself.
Soul is exacting where the blues blurs; both meet in the moan, where form and content collapse. This moan may be traced through the music. I have come to articulate the tradition as a kind of pyramid, centered on the blues, built on the moan, and reaching for the North Star. A heritage of transformation extends not just from soul music but from the many idioms that inform and surround the music itself—soul, after all, charts not black essence but artfulness.
The distinction between the two is best maintained, even though soul came to be synonymous with black identity, so much so that folks identified their shops as being owned by a “Soul Brother” during the 1965 riots in Watts to spare them from destruction. A way of saying “black-owned,” soul brother also implied identifying with the struggle in those streets, and with the not-insignificant purpose of protecting one’s property.15 Sam Cooke too embodied this by being one of the first black artists to start his own publishing company, realizing the real money in the music industry came from writing, not singing. Retaining and even creating your rights—and writing—is part of soul’s aim. Soul may be best thought of as a totem, a kind of conjure or fetish, to be carried like a badge of courage or worn like a marker; soul brother or sister meant you were “down” with the cause, which could be said to be blackness itself.
Soul is not a color but a culture; not innate so much as an ethos. Internal, but signified by external qualities, soul is international, cosmopolitan, generative. It’s remarkable how many soul songs are named “Think.” But don’t take my word for it, let’s consult Mr. Dynamite, the Godfather of Soul, the Funky President, Soul Brother Number One: James Brown. In his 1971 evaluation “The Lyrics of James Brown: Ain’t It Funky Now; or, Money Won’t Change Your Licking Stick,” Mel Watkins defines soul in a manner that complicates any reductive view of soul as merely “the essence of blackness,” making it instead the height of artistry—and ecstasy.
If the truth be told, the artistry of James Brown is epitomized by the guttural grunt (uh, uh) or the equally familiar cry of “oo-wee” that punctuates practically every song he has recorded. In those simple, primal utterances Brown comes nearer his poetic goal than in any of his more elaborate lyrics. For there, he is not singing about black life—he is black life. The object is subject and vice versa, distance is eradicated and the lyric is snatched from abstraction to reality. Form and content converge as one. Thereby Brown expressively simulates one of the essential qualities of the black life style: its straight-out, direct nature and insistence upon commitment to life, not reflection upon it.16
As with Redding’s nonverbal acuity, Franklin’s riffs, and Mayfield’s falsetto, James Brown’s moan manages to achieve a wordlessness that borders on brilliance.
This doesn’t mean that the Godfather of Soul’s shouts—channeling the shouts and hollers, the sacred and secular songs of slavery—aren’t self-conscious, any more than his negotiation of “both the arrogant, swaggering quality” characteristic of soul along with “the qualitative need to challenge and reaffirm (with, of course, the awareness of the possibility of loss) that underlines that posture.”17 The authority and reaffirmation that Watkins identifies as James Brown’s “ethos of immediacy” are notably theatrical. Storying and counterfeit can help us better position and maintain in our sights the very “real poses” in soul that Watkins goes on to mention. And also to understand the way authority is achieved—not through simple authenticity but by means of an ironically genuine reaction from a black audience based on the effectiveness of Brown’s “act.”
The posture of soul—even if a measure of the distance traveling from abstraction to reality—is found in James Brown’s very titles, and Watkins’s use of them in his own title. “Licking Stick” or “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” or “Mama Popcorn” all take nostalgic concepts of a black past, however recent, and make them present—in other words, a tradition.
For Brown, soul is ritual, as in the famous putting on of his robe when, after his performance, he is spent from hours of “begging” Please Please Please, or from “rapping” to the crowd about the dangers of heroin—two aspects of his performance integral to his themes. Brown’s finale, Watkins reminds us, “is perhaps the most obvious example of his intent”: “The act is repeated several times, each time with a more sumptuous and ornate robe and with more dramatics, until finally the curtains close. It is a ritualistic act, performed at every show. And despite critics, who find its obvious theatricalism boring, few black viewers object. The reason is simple: Symbolically, it cements the performer-audience rapport; it is a put-on, a parody of posturing and an act in affirmation of the acceptance of absurdity, the adhesive which binds James Brown to blackness and to his audience. From this core attitude, his lyrics flow effortlessly, like good pot-liquor from fatback.”18 The very qualities found in the downhome metaphor of pot liquor make up soul: Brown’s “good foot” may be the selfsame “putting your foot in it” folks say when the food tastes expecially good.
Where the blues make mention of food in order to make hay, or to roll in it—cookin’ as a metaphor for lovemaking—soul uses food as a metonym for memory.
Don’t know much about history: rather than depend on the official record, black folks have used memory as a new means of transmission; a shadow book of ear music, coded complaint, and burrowed belief.
We could call this transmission, this memory as history, this changing same, the groove. Much like a record, machined yet handheld, musical and vocal, delicate yet hardy, even damaged the groove can still be heard. Like the ring shout, it goes round and round, cyclical but progressing—and even progressive. No wonder the storying tradition looks like a circle, wheel within a wheel, the record a talisman carried like those sacred objects that made up a slave’s hidden cosmology. So too the slave’s sacred, Africanized songs became the secular, spiritualized ones a century later, their shouts and hollers now bought and sold instead of their bodies. But never, even in slavery, their selves.
With the advent of “race records”—the earliest recording of black folks on wax, from “Crazy Blues” to “West End”—black audiences could hear their own culture talking back to them from the machine itself. It must have been remarkable, a response for a call that had been a long time coming. Much like when black folks were first beginning to be on television in numbers—appearances were notable enough to make Jet magazine in a one-page listing—and the literal call would go round saying Tune in. That was soul. Each transmission an insurrection. Each tuning-in a turning of the culture.
Each groove the needle found was an actual sound wave made physical; each record was the transmission of a knowledge we always knew we had and had held dear but hadn’t heard coming out of a phonograph or squawk box before. His Slave’s Voice—a voice of mastery.
The moan and falsetto are a particular technology and form of this transmission—seeking both the higher and the lower frequencies to make meaning beyond words. Though these words too changed: the slave’s assertion that Before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave became Muddy Waters singing
I don’t want you to be no slave
I don’t want you to work all day
I don’t want you to be true
I just want to make love to you—
as well as Sam Cooke’s You know I’ll always be your slave till I’ll be buried, buried in my grave in “Bring It on Home to Me.” In the song, background singer Lou Rawls literally echoes the feelings and phrases Cooke is singing of; the line not so much repeats as shadows Cooke, often changed slightly, sometimes just behind the beat, and in that way both blues and gospel. The song shadows two voices as one, enacting the relation of the voice to the tradition that also predicts it. It is a mix of memory and ecstasy, which is to say, soul.
Like singing, cooking was one of the few resources and means of invention openly available to the slave. Alongside the other, often secret inventions of the storying tradition, soul food does stand out (and up): we can see in the often-shared palate of the Southerner the ways in which black influence, reportedly hard to trace, is both undeniable and remarkable. The naming of soul food as a category is a recognition of this influence while also a reclamation of black inventiveness by and for black folks themselves.
In the classic foodways narrative Vibration Cooking by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor (1970), the first section is called Home; others include “Away from Home,” “Madness,” “Love,” and “Mixed Bag.” Subtitled Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, the book conjures travelog, notation, genealogy, and that African American form, the Geechee, reclaimed from a sometime slur. “It’s a possibility that it’s the same tribe in the south now. Some people say Gullahs, some say Geechees and some refer to us as maroons.”19 In Vibration Cooking, Verta Mae (the name she originally published under) crafts an update to Hurston’s Mules and Men, both narrators insisting on becoming part of the narrative. By combining recipes and stories, she declares both as forms of memory as history.
Much of the book is about naming, as well as “name-calling.” Verta Mae remedies these misnomers even with “so-called okra,” which she calls not by its slave name but by its African name, gombo. She often refers to people not mentioned before by their first names, as if we already know them; doing so calls and recalls us into her widening circle, familiarity being more important than narrative, storying over chronology. Even by not using her last name in her early publications, Verta Mae gets familiar and down-home with her readers.
The relation of the recipes to the narrative is quite a counterpoint, or riff, more like the jazz of the Sun Ra Arkestra she performed with—or even like the crosshatch paintings of her “homeboy” Jasper Johns, who hails from the same South Carolina town. Throughout, Verta Mae connects self to soul, soul food to story, and story to a slave past and presence, and telling stories on yourself:
I had an uncle named Costen. They say that education run him fool. They say that he knew more than anybody in Allendale County including white folks….
He could recite poems and add up as many numbers as you could throw at him. All in his head, too. He didn’t need to write nothing down. Uncle Costen used to tell us stories about slavery. How it was and how it wasn’t. One story that he told was about the Underground Railroad. He said that sometimes they would be in the middle of their dinner when the stops (homes that hid slaves en route to freedom) got word that a slave or slaves were coming through that night. They might even have some neighbors or even members of the family there who were not cool. Everybody wasn’t in it all together like the Browns (John & sons) so they had to have signals to let each other know that tonight it would happen. Uncle Costen said they had a special dish they would serve called
HARRIET TUBMAN RAGOUT20
Foodways are an essential part of the community’s coding and escape. Such escape is also part of not just Verta Mae’s family but her birth: we are told she was born a three-pound baby, one of twins; her six-pound brother did not survive and she was not supposed to. Placed in a shoebox on an open stove, she is tended to by her Aunt Rose, who fed her with an eyedropper and goat’s milk, her mother having “the childbirth fever.” Soul is that nurturing in the face of nothing; it’s the close call amid the fever of childbirth; it is the homemade incubator cooking up more than just food.
Soul is also the escape of Smart-Grosvenor’s family from and during slavery: her great-uncle, “Uncle Willis’ father could read and write so he made up free issue passes and had what they called a ‘bootleg pass ring.’ He sold the passes for sacks of flour, sacks of corn, bacon, hogs, etc., and comme ça he managed to feed his family.”21 The counterfeit is both the “bootleg pass ring” and the food provided as currency, buying a broader liberty.
Soul food is a form of exile. If not the food of the refugee, soul food provides the makings of a migrant meal—filled with connotations not just of place and locality but also of foods first carried by Africans imported into the slave states, then later brought north as part of the Great Migration, and onward to Paris and beyond. Soul food meant a foodstuff carried on the person as well as a form of personhood, whether “black rice” or gombo, root vegetables or Douglass’s root. Verta Mae’s descriptions all bear this out, whether writing about Philly, Paree, or a transatlantic voyage in which the talk is less of food than a fellow passenger’s racism (at a children’s party and meal) and Verta Mae’s setting her straight by bringing sewing on deck and pretending to make a “voodoo doll” (in a chapter called “I Love… Bon Voyage Parties). What all this has to do with food is the shared presence of the fetish, of Africanisms and African American ritual—forms of sustenance that are equally nonverbal, powerful, and even playful.
There is, however, often omen: Verta Mae in the midst of other recipes mentions peacocks and how they “are too beautiful to be eaten and I don’t think the Creator meant for people to have peacock feathers sitting in vases on window sills. If I was Jimi Hendrix I’d get rid of that vest. It is said that peacock feathers bring bad luck and I believe it.”22 (The call was apparently not heeded.) This don’t mean that Verta Mae is not interested in the put-on of soul—the “put-on” just might mean “putting on” a pot of greens. All are alchemy.
In her reading of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, British biracial writer Zadie Smith touches on the ways soul provides a kind of transatlantic sustenance:
I always thought I was a colorblind reader—until I read this novel, and that ultimate cliché of black life that is inscribed in the word soulful took on new weight and sense for me. But what does soulful even mean? The dictionary has it this way: “expressing or appearing to express deep and often sorrowful feeling.” The culturally black meaning adds several more shades of color. First shade: soulfulness is sorrowful feeling transformed into something beautiful, creative and self-renewing, and—as it reaches a pitch—ecstatic. It is an alchemy of pain. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, when the townsfolk sing for the death of the mule, this is an example of soulfulness. Another shade: to be soulful is to follow and fall in line with a feeling, to go where it takes you and not to go against its grain…. A final shade: the word soulful, like its Jewish cousin, schmaltz, has its roots in the digestive tract. “Soul food” is simple, flavorsome, hearty, unfussy, with spice.23
Soulfulness, then, is the way black folks can, like Hurston, make “‘culture’—that slow and particular and artificial accretion of habit and circumstance—seem as natural and organic and beautiful as the sunrise.”24 Cooking soul food is a direct example of what Smith calls “an alchemy of pain,” culture as ongoing and transformative as yeast.
We may not like soul food as a term (my father liked to say when he was young, he and his just called it “food”) and we don’t have to eat it (though I cannot imagine why not), but if we cannot see the ways soul food’s ethos of reclamation and reuse—making more than making do, of taking leftovers and leavings and making them not only palatable but desirable, making it right—if we cannot see this desire as not mere survival but a heroic act of reinvention—then we’re missing out on a large part of the storying tradition of black culture.
It is soul food that first brought the current buzzwords of organic, sustainability, and recycling to bear in the culture. Like storying, soul food was born out of necessity, but now is a form of pleasure. Once the territory of those who couldn’t afford to let any part of, say, the hog go to waste—from the rooter to the tooter—now offal is no longer awful. If black folks aren’t always sharing in the profits or the prophecy of returning to the soil, or soul, we mustn’t mistake the lack of a label of “certified organic” for a lack of influence—instead it is the very presence of influence. What we helped make, we can’t always taste.
Food in soul music represents a desire for radical renewal. When James Brown hollers grits and gravy and cracklin bread at the end of the record, he is not simply performing a kind of praise or roll call or naming, though he is doing that too. His is a kind of radical nostalgia: something too often ignored in Black Arts, which sought a new, black future, understandably; however, in their desire to make it new, artists of the period too often tossed out the greens with the pot liquor. Some soul’s memory is both aware of, and pitched against, history, just as the falsetto is pitched against a notion of nature: both ideas have, over the years, at times proved oppressive to black folks.
The kinds of food may have been different, but even reggae, soul’s Caribbean kin, shares not just the notion of food as fellowship but the crucial kinds of freedom celebrated and reified, even deified, by soul. Bob Marley would take soul’s transformations, as well as his initial failing to make it as a soul singer in the States, and synthesize them into reggae—just as he took Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” and turned it into “One Love.” Everything’s gonna be all right he sang, a refrain found in several of his songs—whether sung in a concrete jungle or sung by three little birds outside his window—but that might as well describe a politics carved from a hard-won hope. As much as the sound system or the dub mix, it is this scrappy, syncretic spirit that would make its way north to the South Bronx and form one of the wellsprings of hip-hop—alongside James Brown’s moan and his funky drummer’s persistent perscussion.
How many white musicians give shout-outs to foodstuffs in their songs? From “Salt Peanuts” to Brown’s smothered steak (two times) holler at the end of a song, black performers make food a staple of their performance in ways rarely seen elsewhere. (Only punk music comes to mind, where the Ramones or Descendants declare the straightahead pleasures of a cheeseburger or chicken vindaloo, fast as their music.)25 The cornmeal porridge Marley sang of in “No Woman No Cry” might just be another name for grits, in the end; or, polenta, if you’re feeling fancy.
Soul and reggae also know what it means to go hungry: A hungry man is an angry man. Such hunger is not just literal, but lyrical; hunger is yearning made physical. We want more, it says; we want our sweet potato pie and to sing about it too. Soul marries this yearning to music, whether as struggle or ritual, sustenance or the shout.
This in part is because all these foods can mean home—which in black talk is not just a place but the nickname of a person who reminds you of it. Nostalgia, after all, means homesickness.
Soul means the performance and its perspiration, a ritual and riff, a fancy robe and its being discarded in a mix of power and pretense. Like any good drama or falsetto, the perennial coronation of Mr. Dynamite, his making and remaking each night, is an act or even affect crafted in order to get at something real, actual, earned. The robe ritual, like the rituals of Southern black life that James Brown sings of and transforms, are aspects that approach something of our sense of the fetish: a symbol of black power, made visual or at least nonverbal, flirting with that “oo-wee” at the edge of words.
Such power is familiar to those in the black church, where, Hurston reminds us, “Shouting is a community thing. It thrives in concert,” so to speak. And yet, as she says in nearly the next breath, “It is absolutely individualistic. While there are general types of shouting, the shouter may mix the different styles to his liking, or he may express himself in some fashion never seen before.”26 This fruitful tension between the group and the individual makes its way through the culture and finds its avatar in James Brown. Where the shout, chant, and hum are ways church folk express devotion, Brown’s use of the same might be said to be in service of self-determination: please, please, please.
What the Godfather’s hollers articulate—and they do articulate—is exactly the fetish’s sense of power and sexuality. Not to mention glamour. Just as Frederick Douglass’s root provided a measure of physical and psychic freedom, James Brown’s rootworked and conked-root glamour does much the same. If the ritualistic and performative nature of soul—its function as fetish—originates in the field holler, then soul’s postmodern aspects are found in the Godfather’s self-conscious and self-referential discussing with his band what’s next: D, down D, funky D, sweet D. By incorporating stage directions into the playing itself, Brown brilliantly anticipates and parallels the post-soul incorporating of everything into one “brand new bag.”
That this bag is down-home and ritualistic, soulful and smart, African American talk and Africanized rhythms, also tells us a lot about blackness and postmodernity—where they meet and how each makes the other possible. You could even say this bag is the selfsame “brown bag of miscellany” that Zora Neale Hurston describes herself as in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Ralph Ellison sums up soul and its struggle this way: “It is this ability to articulate this tragic-comic attitude toward life that explains much of the mysterious power and attractiveness of that quality of Negro American style known as ‘soul.’ An expression of American diversity within unity, of blackness with whiteness, soul announces the presence of a creative struggle against the realities of existence.”27 Such border crossings—the “expression of American diversity within unity”—and synthesis in dissonance and everyday ecstasy are the postmodern point.
And, soul asks, if you can look good doing it, why not?