blues deal with the unavoidable problems that come with being human. You wake up in the morning and they’re waiting for you all around your bed.
It’s not a question philosophy can answer. All you can do is reach down inside the pain, finger the jagged grain, tell your story and hope you can find the strength to go on. You never really get away, transcend. If you’re lucky, though, if the song’s call gets some sort of response, some echo in the parts of your head that believe it may be worthwhile, a smile from that woman at the dark end of the street, that’s all you can hope for. Reaffirmation, the strength to say, yeah, I’ll be. Chicago blues master Willie Dixon stated the blues answer to Hamlet’s question with irreducible clarity: “I’m here, everybody knows I’m here.” Knowing all that time that tomorrow morning the blues’ll be right there beside his bed. Good morning, blues.
Murray’s rephrasing of Ellison’s “transcendence” as “reaffirmation” clarifies the meaning of “near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” Sometimes the blues make you laugh, but the real “comedy” resembles Dante as much as Richard Pryor, who, we might note, had his own “inferno” and used it as a source for much grim humor. If tragedy describes a world in which loss is inevitable and irrevocable, comedy describes one where balance, however tenuous, wins out. Dante’s point was that hearing the harmony behind the screams required a perspective close to God’s; that’s why the comedy’s “Divine.”
And why human life, as Richard Pryor can testify, mostly isn’t. On the human level, evil’s not something you can change, just something you have to deal with. Singing the blues doesn’t reaffirm the brutal experience, it reaffirms the value of life. The blues don’t even pretend you’re going to escape the cycle. You sing the blues so you can live to sing the blues again. A lot of times the blues are mostly about finding the energy to keep moving. That’s why they’re such great party music and that’s why you hear them echoing through rock and through rap.
The blues tell you that as long as you can hear your voice, as long as you can find even a little bit of the laughter in the tears, you can most likely find the strength to wake up in the morning and deal with the fact that you messed it up again, that the devil’s back at the door and you’re putting on your shoes, humming his song.
14
Soul Food:The Mid-South Mix
Wilson Pickett called it “grits music.” King Curtis gave his amen, introducing “Memphis Soul Stew” by announcing, “We sell so much of this, people wonder what we put in it.” He went on to serve up a hit single concocted from “a half tea-cup of bass,” “a pound of fatback drums,” “four tablespoons of boiling Memphis guitar,” “a pinch of organ,” and “a half pint of horns.” “Now place on the burner and bring to a boil,” the Texas-born sax man called out. “Beat well.” Add a vocalist with the down-home intensity of Otis Redding or the aching soulfulness of James Carr and you have the recipe for the funkiest, grittiest soul music of the sixties. Steve Cropper observed that “It wasn’t Chicago, and it wasn’t New York, and it sure wasn’t Detroit. It was a Southern sound, a below-the-Bible-Belt sound. It was righteous and nasty. Which to our way of thinking was pretty close to life itself.”
According to James Brown, who provided most of the ingredients for the Memphis recipe, you couldn’t separate Southern soul from gospel: “Gospel is contentment because it’s spirit, and you feel that spirit when you sing it. It’s the same spirit I feel when I’m on stage today. I feel it when I sing. Period. I make people happy, and they feel it.” Brown, who’d placed nine songs on the R & B charts before Carla Thomas’s “Gee Whiz” and the Mar-Keys’ “Last Night” established Stax as a major force in soul music, reflected that “The word soul . . . meant a lot of things—in music and out. It was about the roots of black music, and it was kind of a pride thing, too, being proud of yourself and your people. Soul music and the civil rights movement went hand in hand, sort of grew up together.”
It may seem like something of a contradiction that what was almost universally received as the blackest of the soul styles had by far the largest amount of white participation. Cropper and bass player Duck Dunn, both white, joined black organist Booker T. Jones and black drummer Al Jackson to form Booker T. and the MGs, the Stax house band that backed Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, and countless others. Frequently, they were joined by the Memphis Horns, led by white trumpeter Wayne Jackson and black sax man Andrew Love. The top tier of Southern songwriters included Redding, the black team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter, and good old boys Chips Moman and Dan Penn, whose credits include “The Dark End of the Street,” “Do Right Woman,” “Cry Like a Baby,” and “Sweet Inspiration.”
Although it was created by Southerners and remained very much rooted in the region, Memphis soul transformed the entire pop music scene. Black singers from the North who’d had trouble adjusting to crossover styles frequently found the Southern approach liberating. Even though Aretha Franklin walked out of the Muscle Shoals Studio after a white session musician used a racial slur with her husband, the song she recorded there—“I Never Loved a Man”—ignited her career, which had floundered for a half decade up North. Having decided she didn’t much like recording in the South, Aretha brought the South to Atlantic’s New York studios. All of the hits that established her as the “Queen of Soul”—”Respect,” “Natural Woman,” “Think,” “Chain of Fools”—feature white Southern musicians, including bass player Tommy Cogbill, organist Spooner Oldham, drummer Roger Hawkins, and guitarists Jimmy Johnson and Joe South.
Memphis’s impact on white pop music was equally profound. Penn and Moman’s American Studio became a Mecca for a range of singers that have little in common except that they made their best records in Memphis: Neil Diamond, Dionne Warwick, Lulu, the Box Tops, the Sweet Inspirations, Dusty Springfield, Bobby Womack, B. J. Thomas, James and Bobby Purify, jazzman Herbie Mann. For a sense of what Memphis contributed, listen to Diamond’s “Holly Holy,” Womack’s “Woman’s Gotta Have It,” the Box Tops’ “Soul Deep,” or Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis, highlighted by a beautiful rendition of “Son of a Preacher Man.” The sessions Elvis recorded at American are by far the best music he made during the last two decades of his life; they produced the hits “Suspicious Minds,” “Kentucky Rain,” and “In the Ghetto”—Elvis’s single foray into explicit message music. But the real high points are soul standards—”True Love Travels on a Gravel Road,” “Only the Strong Survive,” and, most tellingly, Percy Mayfield’s “Stranger in My Own Home Town.” The Memphis sessions justify James Brown’s sincere praise of the “strong spiritual feeling” in Elvis’s music.
Penn summed up the interracial complexities of the scene when he told Memphis chronicler Robert Gordon: “There were a lot of white people and black people who had tried to bring the R & B and the white side together. It became a white/black situation, you had white players and black players together. The mixture, who knows what that does to us, but it does something. There was so much respect.” Penn went on to contrast the sixties with the eighties. “Now we get all these white people in the studios. Everybody respects each other but it’s like you ain’t bringing anything different to ‘em. We’re trying to make a painting here, what color did you bring? You’re orange and he’s orange and we need some red, we need something different, and back then black people brought so much to the whole thing. . . . That cross-color respect was a wonderful thing. It carried a lot of power. We don’t seem to have much of that now.”
The interracial scene of the sixties originated in the forties and fifties. After Boss Crump closed down Beale Street, musicians continued to participate in interracial networks without public sanction. If whites in fifties Chicago were extremely unlikely to see “real” gospel music live, aspiring white musicians such as the members of the Royal Spades (later the Mar-Keys) attending all-white Messick High School could slip across the river to West Memphis. Royal Spade alumni Cropper and Dunn were among those who learned their approach to music from B. B. King and bandleaders like Ben Branch and Willie Mitchell, who would later help shape the music that lifted Al Green