April 2020. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom by Peter Guralnick
2012, Little, Brown and Company, 438 pages. Written in English, read in English.
“Before this book is published,” Solomon Burke prophecies to the author in the epilogue to this book, “two men are going to die. Let’s just hope it’s not you and me.” The author, Peter Guralnick, is luckily still with us and continues to write and publish fine books, without any particular human sacrifice. Solomon Burke has been dead these ten years. Indeed, many of the heroes, and probably a fair number of the villains, of this book, are already dead — the last of which was Little Richard this last Saturday — and very much like rock and roll in general, he starts it all.
In our journey through David Bowie’s list of favourite books, we’ve encountered three books — so far — which revolve around the same era, telling the same history and trying to arrive at similar conclusions, each from a slightly different angle. The first we’ve read, “Nowhere to Run”, was written from the perspective of a journalist — each chapter written as if it could not feel out of place in a music magazine; the second, “The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll”, from the point of view of a scholar, trying to make sure that all of the references are there and are cited, verifying that no one can claim plagiarism or lack of authority; but this book, is written from the point of view of a fan. And yes, it sometimes veers towards an academic historical references ditch. But compensation soon comes with Guralnick’s testimony of his own first encounters with the artists he’s telling about, and the delight of meeting them in person and becoming a friend to some of them.
The colourful characters that are shining above the other players in the book are similar to the ones who are highlighted in the other books — Solomon Burke, for example, seems to be a master of ceremonies in all three books, and he has also been seminal in providing Guralnick with the relevant contacts to continue his explorations, along with Otis Redding’s brother.
Guralnick focuses on two things that are generally neglected when the camera zooms out of the origins of this genre of music and onto the chart topping girl groups and divas — the south and soul music, both connected and none could have been as influential on the history of music without the other. He also focuses a lot more on the label owners, the songwriters, the producers and the backing musicians, rather than on the artists themselves. The artists may have been the colourful ones, the charismatic ones who have drawn the crowds and sold the singles, but the people behind the scenes were those who created the infrastructure from which soul music could find its way out of the church and into the limelight — and through it, influence the entire history of music. Guralnick also draws a line in the sand that is missing from the other books in terms of defining the difference between soul music and rhythm and blues (although, he confesses at the beginning of the book, the very people who were part of creating this type of music sometimes don’t make that difference) — soul music died, he says, when Martin Luther Kind Jr. died. He also goes forward to provide some very compelling arguments for why that happened.
The book is concluded with several lists of further exploration for the avid reader — again, not provided as an academic addendum but as the true labour of love of a fan and his friends — you can imagine the scribbles on legal paper of school friends passing information to each other of names of LPs and 7 inches you must get, and now that knowledge is also yours.
The May selection for the David Bowie Book Club is Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.
