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Soul Music

At the Beginning was the Church

Solar worships

Cory Henry & The Funk Apostles at the stage at Cosmopolite in Soria Moria. The concert took place on 30. October 2017. Lineup: Cory Henry (vocal), Nicholas Semrad (keyboard), Adam Agati (guitar), TaRon Lockett (drums), Sharay Reed (bass guitar), Denise Stoudmire (backing vocal) and Tiffany Stevenson (backing vocal).

Credit Photo: Tore Sætre / Wikimedia  Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0

The church appeared as a shelter for African-Americans. Following their own ministers, they soon developed a unique way to celebrate the Almighty, paroxystic and on the verge of trance. While the Gospel tradition undoubtedly brought many gifted and seasoned vocalists, the powerfulness still shines in evangelical, mainly pentecostal jams, and other services. 

We must situate the socio-religious context as inevitably linked to the Black Church. The specific African-American Christian cult has been named and conceptualized as Black Church. This is due to the specificities linked to its religious practices, implying an advanced practice of singing and a porosity between rural blues and evangelical prosody. To a larger extent, Black Church played a leading role in the Black community, as a social work. Within this social work leadership, music takes pride of place1.

The Black Church

A look at Contemporary Gospel acts such as the late Rev. James Moore (1956-2000), a native from Detroit Michigan, gives a precise insight into the level and power of church music nowadays. The skills developed by church musicians are extremely refined and they have nothing to be ashamed of when compared to conservatory students (though most of the time they are getting a classical training at the same time). The choirs and the amplified instruments are extremely loud, because the communion with God expects them to give all.

This “Black sacred music”, using elements of urban funk and soul music, soon turned into a whole genre in its own right with its own codes, ending in finding its place in the studios, venues and musical industry.

Crossing genres: sacred/profane, back and forth

Nevertheless, we would like to concentrate on the more “secularized” Black music type. The coexistence of a “Black church Gospel” and a secularized Black music vast genre (a branch that is now nearly 60 years) is questionable. And if they share aesthetic similarities, their ways of interpreting and their codes are quite different. Some of the performers dare to play profane music, while others exclusively dedicate themselves to the music of the church service.

Boyer, Horace C. “The History and Importance of the Black Church.” Harvard Gazette, 9 Mar. 2021, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/03/the-history-and-importance-of-the-black-church/.

Categories
Commodification Music industry Songwriting Soul Music Text analysis

The Wonderful Insights of Oliver Wang on Donny Hathaway’s Everything is Everything

This article by scholar and DJ Oliver Wang (actually an excerpt from a special VMP 2020 pressing liner’s note) is seminal in several ways1. Retracing the whole genesis of what is in fact only the very first solo album ever recorded by Donny Hathaway, it highlights the Chicago encounters, most noticeably the one with musicians Curtis Mayfield and drummer Ric Powell. Moreover, it deciphers the importance of setting the scene for Black culture, sharing a universal message of love and joy, helped by the consistancy of the perfomances. However, the record is mainly composed of only three original songs penned by Hathaway. Nevertheless, Hathaway kept his promise by completly rewriting and rearranging covers.

Cutting ties with Curtis Mayfield and Curtom

The counsciousness of his own musical abilities and genius seemingly played a considerable role in the break-up with Curtom (Mayfield’s label and trademark). Incidently, through Mayfield, Hathaway had connected with Chicago native guitarist/bassist Phil Upchurch, who had to become his teaming partner throughout his short career.

Never to be done again… that is genius

Coming straight from Howard University, Mayfield’s musical skills were so advanced that he taught music at an early age. Wang shares his hypothesis that wouldn’t he had taken back his freedom, he could have achieved a Motown-like success with Curtom, turning it into a musical industry capable of producing massive hits. But was he too reluctant to become a Holland/Dozier kind or an Isaac Hayes type of writer/composer ? No doubt he minded being a piece – even the brightest – in a record company’s assembly line. Maybe the voices inside were telling him to do so.

Social views : joy and love as weapons in the troubled nixonian era

It is nearly impossible not to underline the impressive soulfulness and joy spreading in this record. This is almost an alternative to Marvin Gaye’s introspective and somewhat melancholic What’s Going On. It surely contains its own somaesthetics (or holistic somatics)1, and while there is soul, the body is in an emergency to express itself without ties, it carries its own expression and esthetic energy (Rudinow, 2010)2. As Wang puts it, there is a certain religiosity, a unique relationship between Hathaway and God, on the other hand, tracks such as The Ghetto and Sugar Lee sound as high times of celebration, embodied in a joyful jam session (in which one could hear claps, shoutings, spanish words, laughs, a baby crying – Hathaway’s own daughter…).

And the Voices Inside song keeps resonating as a timeless anthem. The voices of young, gifted and black people, shouting, clapping their hands, living in the city, enjoying themselves. The cover photograph is kind of a fantasy : Donny is smiling, hand in hand with black children in a round in front of a ghetto brick wall. What a contrast ! We have to value the exquisite sociological and musicological work, as well as the memory traces left by this studio work. Definitely an audacious bet for this first record at ATCO.

Everything is Everything : a popular culture motto

Last but not least, Oliver Wang reveals the origin of the motto Everything is Everything : chicagoan radio DJ Herb Kent used this expression throughout his 7:30/11 pm aired program on the AM 1450 WVON station. None other than Leonard and Phil Chess, founders of Chess Record, acquired the station in 1963. Since, “the voice of the negro” is no more used, for the more politically-correct “the voice of the nation”. The radio broadcasted from the Chicago tower.

1 “One Transcendent Performance That Illustrates Donny Hathaway’s Musical Genius.” NPR.Org, https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2016/10/17/498265985/one-transcendent-performance-that-illustrates-donny-hathaways-musical-genius. Accessed 23 Apr. 2021.

2 Formis, Barbara. « Richard Shusterman, Conscience du corps. Pour une soma-esthétique [1] », Mouvements, vol. 57, no. 1, 2009, pp. 155-157.

3 Rudinow, Joel. Soul Music: Tracking the Spiritual Roots of Pop from Plato to Motown. University of Michigan Press, 2010, pp. 110-111.

Categories
Lectures Songwriting Soul Music Text analysis Translation

Are Negro Spirituals Translatable ? Yourcenar’s Case

This is a serious matter raised by a recent discovery, as I was looking for critical examples of how to communicate the epitome of gospel songs to a French-speaking audience. It might seem quite a naive question, but yet I was expecting answers. Knowing MargueriteYourcenar for her famous writings, such as Alexis, L’Oeuvre au Noir or Les Mémoires d’Hadrien, and being aware she was acknowledged as a Virginia Woolf’s translator, I was nevertheless surprized, if not shocked, to learn that she intended to translate Negro Spirituals and provided a cultural and historical prologue. Let us first put it this way : Yourcenar at that time had a solid reputation as an author and as a translator. I am not going to patronize both a belgian and french academician, whose writings – I must confess – I tend to ignore. Much has been said since the mid 1990s, needless to reinvent the wheel : in a 2003 paper, taking the opposite side of 1965 global reception, Pr Isabelle Collombat analyzed the conditions of production of such a translation (Collombat, 2003), pointing at how improper was the process1.

First I began to shrug at the sight of the complete rewriting of a susbstance that one will not imagine sung in french. Then I began to feel really embarassed, at what felt like an abusive foreignizing, leading Yourcenar to see the black people in an european condescending way, escalating to a kind of excessive and earthy text adaptation, that ends sounding as Negro Spirituals sung by Edith Piaf. Alas !

The fact that it was undoubtedly acclaimed by the whole critic at the time it was published tells even more about the european ethnocentric failure. As aforementioned, the translation expresses radical stylistic choices, carried by an oversized romanticism. Yourcenar must have believed it was only a matter of transposing the negro condition to the oppressed French masses during La Commune tragic events (1871). Indeed, french popular songs, known as “chanteur de rue”2 genre, are noticeably influenced by the depressing atmosphere that followed La Commune, eventually pounded by WWI. This very musical genre is characterized by an exaggerated emphasis and vocal tremolos, suggesting the sadness of parisians walkways between the two world wars.

That emphasis appears to be heretic when it comes to translate the oral form incarnated by Negro Spirituals. Singing religious themes in cotton fields doesn’t equal singing la vie dans la rue.

In brackets, there is a major difference between singing to keep the fire of hope burning when you are a slave and singing as a chanteur des rue (street singer) just to make a living. The latter, though miserable, is a profession.

To achieve her goal, Yourcenar spent 20 years or so, to gather sources, Roland Hayes’ recordings being the cornerstone. Still, it is such a pity that she did not write the origin of each single song. The reader will have to go back to the introduction to understand Yourcenar’s position, her tone being mostly assertive :

« Pour trop de Français, encore aujourd’hui, la musique noire signifie l’excitation, le bruit, la chaleur ou l’exubérance, voire les trépignements et les cris, un succédané, en somme, d’un folklore primitif, ce qu’elle est en effet en grande partie, mais non pas ce trésor de ferveur, de douleur, de gaieté et d’humble tendresse humaine qu’elle est aussi. Par manque de connaissance de ce qui se cache sous la splendeur et l’intensité du son, cette grande poésie contemporaine chantée intéresse, étonne ou excite, plutôt qu’elle ne bouleverse en France l’auditoire »

(For most of the French people, black music means excitement, noise, heat or exuberance, even stomping and shouts, a subsitute in a nutshell, of primitive folklore – from which she originated, but not a fervor gem of pain, joy and humble human tenderness, for she is too. By lack of knowledge of what is hiding underneath the majesty and the intensity, this great contemporary sung poetry amazes or turns on more than it moves deeply the French audience).

One can assume the intention was fairly good. But, stuck between the end of colonialism and an occidental-shaped mind, Yourcenar delivers the typical exotic vision of the Negro culture, with a tremendous amount of stereotypes. It appears mandatory to put it into context, but historicism (which makes us consider this translation as a moment of french literature in a pre-decolonization context) makes such an attempt quite clumsy.

Now, let’s take an example of Yourcenar attempt to translate a variation on Deep River (Fleuve profond, sombre rivière) : we can see Yourcenar preferred the classic poem form, by favoring rhymes and symetric construction, in verses. Abusive word contractions, unappropriated foul language and the use of Mon Dieu (“My God”) reflects a biased reading of a Negro Spiritual. Whatever the fervor is, it never allows the appopriation of God within the discourse.

J’connais une grande rivière,

C’est pas l’Mississippi,

Et c’est pas l’Muskegee,

C’est pas un trou boueux entre moi et mon Dieu !

La promesse qui m’console,

C’est pas une vaine Parole,

C’est pas l’prêcheur qui gueule,

C’est l’espoir du salut qu’est fondé sur Dieu seul !

Fleuve profond, sombre rivière,

Jourdain, Jourdain entre mi et mon Dieu,

Bâtissez-moi un pont d’prières,

Et qu’j’arrive à l’aut’bord, au camp’ment, au saint lieu !

As a conclusion, I read Fleuve Profond, Sombre Rivière with curiosity and to quench a need to identify French regards on Negro Spirituals. I was not expecting such an exotic and ethnocentric vision, depicting Negros with an exaggerated debilitating language (for the record, this latter language abuse has been turned into mockery by french songwriter Serge Gainsbourg in the song Toi Mourir in 1981).

Petit Nègre3, 4 does not equal to Negro Speech.

It underpins the translator choices : in this precise case, radical choices were made (and I suppose Yourcenar was aware she was taking responsibility for it).

But it the end, the songs are turned into vaudevillesque contraptions.

Because stereotypes were part of the culture.


1 Collombat, Isabelle (2003). « Traduire ou ne pas traduire : Fleuve profond, sombre rivière de Marguerite Yourcenar », in GRAI, n° 6. (4/2003), pp. 60-76.

2 « Chanteur des rues ». Wikipédia, 10 août 2020. Wikipedia, https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chanteur_des_rues&oldid=173700176.

3 Petit-nègre is a somewhat pejorative french expression to characterize one’s poor language ability. In spite of decolonialization, it is still in use in a large part of the population.

4 « Le français “petit-nègre”, une construction de l’armée coloniale française ». France Culture, 21 février 2018, https://www.franceculture.fr/sciences-du-langage/le-francais-petit-negre-une-construction-de-larmee-coloniale.

Categories
Commodification Music industry Songwriting

The Commodification of Music

It has been a very discussed issue, especially since the vinyl era revival, starting in the mid 2000s. This video proposes a synthetic outline of records (be it material or digital) as a medium to replicate music copies.

How come so many people believe in vinyl acetate superiority ? Is fetishism built only against “soulless digital” ? As Walter Benjamin would say, does illimited reproductibility makes the music lose its soul ? (Walter Benjamin. (2008). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction / Walter Benjamin ; translated by J.A. Underwood. Penguin.)

Can one lose the sense of listening while focusing on the ultimate and best technology ? How come purists want to go back to the master tapes ?

Let’s go for a quick insight !

https://blog.europeana.eu/2016/03/how-vinyl-records-are-made/
Categories
Soul Music

W.E.B. Du Bois & his Musical Quotes

It is remarkable how Du Bois used musical quotes to build up his writings, especially his most famous work The Souls of Black Folk (1903). He was known to be a fairly good singer, though he used to self judge and in fact considering he knew “little of music”.

Du Bois himself claimed that music was way more evocative than words in the construction of black people’s identity and whole story, in the sense that it travels through the entire oral tradition (even though this accurate expression is never used in his own writings). He considered he inheritated his own history through his grandparents’ songs.

Every chapter opens with a musical quote, illustrated with the very first bars of the score. These quotes took their origin in the black people’s sorrow songs’ tradition. The aim was to highlight, we guess, the popular culture that underlies the process leading to freedom.

In the video selection hereafter, one will enjoy not only the various of the song quoted by Du Bois, but also the writer’s thought process itself.

As a conclusion, we take good note that Pr. Alexander Weheliye (Rutgers University) published an exciting essay in 2005, Phonographies (Duke University Press), in which he analyses the reuse of musical fragments in a whole personal work.

Categories
Songrwriting Soul Music Text analysis

Donny Hathaway’s Thank You, Master (For my Soul): Food for the Soul

Prologue : Donny Hathaway (1945-1979) released his debut solo album, Everything is Everything in 1970. The Chicago native explores the typical love/soul theme concern, addressing to God.

A soulful moment amidst various styles, from rhythm and blues to Cuban rhythm, is the classic gospel-inspired Thank You, Master (For my Soul).

This is a very typical incarnation of gospel and Negro spiritual genre in a soul record from the 1970s, reaching success in popular audiences, as did Ray Charles records.

First of all, double and equivocal meanings are remarkable, so as the general praising tonality. The words are sung on a piano-driven laidback and slow groove, alternating a range of shades, form quiet, nearly silent passages to moaning vocals helped by a solid brass ensemble.  

Here, Master can be heard as a way to address to God in an ambiguous or double-sided meaning, but Lord is added to unveil the intention, hence the use of the anaphoric way. This is quite a relatively simple prayer-type songwriting. The vocabulary is as simple as it can be, and the repetition is typical of the greeting, thankfulness song. One can count 26 repetitions of “Thank You”, with the exception of the more formal “Much Obliged”. Humility, as a result, dominates the song.

In this respect, despite the pain, despite the sadness and the tears, Donny Hathaway thanks the Lord for keeping him. One can see it is none of a request for absolution or penitence: just selfless and pure thankfulness, as suggested by the following example, underlining a certain unworthiness:

My Bed was not my cooling board

Using a metaphor with the equipment used for dead bodies preservation, Hathaway emphasizes on his own ability to live as simply as can be, and to thank God for putting shoes on his feet (a typical biblical figure), completed with words: the walls of his room were not the walls of his grave.

With a catchy hint, Hathaway addresses the audience with a rather disturbing, somewhat elusive:

 Y’All don’t know what I’m talking about.

What’s more, it precisely synthesizes the unique relation, quite mystical, with God.

Some of the stances then following offer a double, if not, a triple reading and an increase in intensity. For instance, with the play of words hereafter in the last words of the song (that are echoed by a backing vocal performed by Hathaway himself), Hathaway uses a surprising polyptotic anaphora:

My sheet (my sheet) was not my wine (Was not my whining sheet).

On the whole, this is the epitome of revisited Gospel in popular soul music, characterized by this ability to play with words. Sheet can be linked to either a musical sheet, a bed sheet or, eventually, as suggested by the echoed words in brackets, a whining sheet, to dry one’s tears. Wine undoubtedly refers to the Christ’s blood at the church, given by the Minister, while Hathaway opposes sheet/wine in a curious manner that seems more relative to improvisation and the subsequent ad libitum part. A satiety that meets the need for “food for the spirit” while it still does suppose the “food for the body”.

Every single good owned briefly by the praying songwriter is described as a precious gift given by God, as a reference to the famous overexploited quotation  found in the book of Job “The Lord Gave, and the Lord Hath Taken Away” (Job 1:21). Even the word blessed, in “But Lord You Blessed Me” can be linked to either the benediction or the gift.

Thank You, Master (For my Soul)

(Donny Hathaway, 1970)

[Verse 1]
Thank You, Master, for my soul
Thank You, Master, thank you for my soul
You gave me food to eat, you put shoes on my feet
And You kept me
Lord, I know, haven’t been so good this week
But You continue to Bless me
And just want to take time to thank You, for my soul

[Verse 2]
Thank You, Master, thank You for my soul
Lord, thank You, thank You, Master, thank You for my soul, yeah
‘Cause you didn’t have to hear my moanin’
Lord, You didn’t have to hear my groanin’
But You kept me, yeah
You put shoes on my feet, you kept food for me to eat, yeah
And Lord, how You Blessed me
But most of all, thank You, Master, for my soul
Thank You, thank You

[Bridge]
That’s alright
Woo-hoo

[Outro]
Thank You, Master, Lord, thank You for my soul, yeah
Thank You for my hands, thank You for my feet
Thank You, Lord, thank You for my mind
Thank You for my soul
Lord, I know I haven’t been so good this week, God
But You kept me
You didn’t have to hear my moanin’
You didn’t have to hear my groanin’, hey hey
But Lord, You Blessed me
And Lord, i want to thank You
I just got to say “much obliged” to You, Master
‘Cause the walls of my room was not the walls of my grave
My bed was not my cooling board
Y’all don’t know what i’m talkin’ ’bout
My sheet (My sheet) was not my wine (Was not my whining sheet)
And I want to say thank You, thank You
Thank You, thank You, thank You, I want to thank You, Lord

Categories
Lectures

Notes on Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music

Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, published in 1986, is a perfect sum on southern soul music, focusing on Stax Records’ story. Nearly 30 years later, its value is unquestionable.

Though one can blame the book for dismissing northern Detroit soul music or Philly Sound, as did Joel Rudinow (Rudinow, 2010) :

In the end, Guralnick draws a bright geographical line, emphasizing audience demographics as well as regional-cultural and musical-stylistic differences, and confines himself to the project of reconstructing the oral history of southern soul music. For Guralnick, Motown is not soul music. His argument for this is partly business-historic and partly stylistic.1

Nevertheless, it appears very well built and documented. What could have been a boring story of hit makers appears to be an accurate depiction of how this unique “Memphis sound” business was shaped : while still calling some records “race records” (this expression is very typical from the 30/40s era), the Stax enterprise was mixed, until its most noticable writing team : Otis Redding and Steve Cropper.

Sweet Soul Music has turned into a classic introduction to soul music, despite its paradigm, chosing not to consider northern Motown music neither as rhythm nor as soul music, but… as pop music. Its authors index is a gold mine, and the sources are reliable.

This book brings the material and opens a path for building a history of soul music under a “black and white” approach, overflowing anecdotes that illustrates the subject (never too much).

1 Rudinow, J. (2010). Soul Music : Tracking the Spiritual Roots of Pop from Plato to Motown. University of Michigan Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/1103

Categories
Uncategorized

Black Troubadours

This work is concurrent with a Master Thesis projet at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, under supervision of Dr Laurence Cossu-Beaumont.

This research supposes a solid matter, written and oral,including musical and biographic elements. The textual analysis of songwriting will held an peculiar place, between the following concerns.

We aim to question the variety of lexiques, in music so as in literature, underlining how african-american culture borrows to other diasporic slangs (deriving from spanish, french, german, yiddish): how do these transformations operate and to what extent are they mutual?

Another concern are the transformations and textual circulations: we are questioning the nature of transformations that allows a comodification of african-american music. The commodification has a major importance when it comes to lightening the movements between holy and unholy songs (see Joel Rudinow, Soul music: tracking the spiritual roots of pop from plato to motown, University of Michigan Press,2010).

The status of the african-american troubadour

It’s less activism than cultural transformations that will guide this research,focusing on the status of the “troubadour”, defined as a creator carrying, recreating stories, tales, thus transforming myths and conscientized history, turning them into a whole new material.