Mr G: Thinking About Don

We used to talk about Don Covay – me and Joe (Mr. C to you), Peter Wolf, and Freddy Blue.

He was the shadow king – not because he was any less of a talent than any of the other great soul singers, he was just different in that his talent was expressed primarily through his pen. Well, through his writing, through his

scheming and dreaming.

We used to kid around – was it Don or was it Mick? They sounded so much alike, particularly, of course, on “Have  Mercy” (“Have mercy, baby – have mercy on…ME”). Which one of them took his style from the other?

Peter was the one who knew him best, who shared adventures and eventually songwriting credits with him. (Someday the world will beg loud and sweetly enough to persuade Peter to write about those adventures –whether with Don, or Alfred Hitchcock, or Tennessee Williams, or Van, or Bob, in an elegant, Christopher Isherwood-styled memoir.)

I think it was Solomon who first introduced me to Don. He said in that inarguably (I mean, who was going to argue with Solomon) persuasive voice of his, “Pete, you got to meet the guy. I mean, come on. ‘You’re Good for Me.’ ‘Tonight’s the Night.'” And he reeled off a string of Don’s hits – and some I’d never heard of – as if he were sharing the secret of the universe with me. Which of course, he was, in his own deeply allegorical Solomonic way.

Don was truly a free spirit. The Soul Clan, in all its permutations, both real and highly imagined, was perhaps the fullest extension of that freedom. With Solomon he was forever the warm, witty, irrepressible younger brother (even though I think he was in fact older). Each got such a kick out of the other’s eccentricities and foibles – but there was never any question who was in charge.

Sadly, Don’s warm, antic spirit never fully translated on stage – maybe it just couldn’t be harnessed. For all of his discipline as a songwriter and a recording artist, Don simply didn’t seem to possess the ability to pace himself. “He never,” said Solomon sorrowfully (but I’ve got to say, mirthfully, too), “knows when to stop.” But his music, of course, will unquestionably live on – and on – and on – well, just listen to it, and tell me he didn’t hit an eternity note.

The last time I spoke to Don, Peter and I called him up at the care facility outside Washington D.C., where he had been living since his stroke of eleven years before. Not every day was a good day, Don said, but this one was, and while his speech had been affected, his spirit shone thorough. He talked a little about his breakthrough as a songwriter, how after talking to his idol, Sam Cooke, he finally came to embrace his vocation. “Write about what you know, write about what you’ve experienced, write about what you observe,” Sam told him. “Write about natural things – you’ve got to come out of the future and get back to the past, to what you knew when you were a little kid.” Most important of all, Sam said, “All you got to do is be yourself.”

And that’s what Don became in his writing, his own pure, pluperfect and incontrovertible self. It was in that realization that he wrote “Have Mercy,” his first real Don Covay song. And after that he never looked back – his goal was, simply, to express himself, following whatever path his muse took him, never feeling the need to explain, just to express – himself.

Guest Blogger: Mr C on Don Covay

It’s In The Wind

by Joe McEwen (aka Mr. C)

Don Covay wrote “It’s in the Wind” after the plane crash that killed his friend Otis Redding.  Today this wistful, melancholy ode sadly serves as Don Covay’s own epitaph.

Born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Don migrated to Washington D.C. and 

joined some doo-woper friends in The Rainbows.  Somehow he latched on to Little Richard, who briefly took Don under his wing, nicknaming him Pretty Boy and producing his first solo record, “Bip Bop Bip,” backed by the Upsetters.  After several years as a Richard wannabee and a bunch of boogity shop singles, Covay found his footing in the emergence of ‘60s soul.  After advice from his singing and songwriting idol, Sam Cooke, he developed a keen, narrative songwriting style that found early success with Gladys Knight (“Letter Full of Tears”) and particularly Solomon Burke (“Tonight’s the Night,” “I’m Hanging Up My Heart for You” and “You’re Good for Me”), who became a buddy and partner in mischief.

His own records, first on Rosemary/Atlantic as Don Covay and the Goodtimers, were extraordinary,  idiosyncratic gems. They were passionately sung tales framed with trademark choppy, guitar-led syncopation and highlighted by the oft-covered smash “Mercy, Mercy.”  Covay seemed to thrive in Jerry Wexler’s Atlantic universe, despite only achieving two subsequent hits of his own: “See Saw” (recorded with Booker T and the MG’s at Stax) and “Sookie Sookie.”

 His singles were singular in style, rich in storytelling drama, and delivered with absolute conviction: “Take This Hurt Off Me,” “Temptation Was Too Strong,” Watching the Late, Late Show,“ House on the Corner” I Stole Some Love" and The Soul Clan (Solomon Burke, Arthur Conley, Ben E. King, Joe Tex and Don) opus “That’s How It Feels.”  He delivered perfectly calibrated, classic songs for Wilson Pickett (“Three Time Loser,” “I’m Gonna Cry”), Little Richard (the epic wrenching, recitation “I Don’t Know What You Got (But it’s Got Me),” Otis Redding (another beautifully crafted, “begging” classic,“Think About It,” which was only released posthumously), and Aretha Franklin (“Chain of Fools).  Later, in 1973, at Mercury, Covay clicked with the half-whispered, half-sung infidelity tale "I Was Checkin’ Out (While She Was Checkin’ In).”

Before his debilitating 1992 Stroke, Don Covay was an irrepressible force, never lacking for a song, an idea, a plan, a scheme (the Soul Clan was one of his best) or a bright new day.  On a personal note, our paths happily crossed often in 1974 and '75, and I hosted him on my WBCN radio show where he proudly premiered the glorious, Dixie Hummingbirds style rave-up, “It’s Better to Have and Don’t Need (Than Need and Don’t Have).”   Today, Don Covay is in the wind.

Talkin’ About Live Soul

This post originally ran on www.okayplayer.com here. It was intended as a list of some favorite soul tracks released on live albums (kind of an abbreviated soundtrack to the new enhanced eBook edition of Sweet Soul Music). Okayplayer used youtube audios, with one alternative Ray Charles video performance thrown in for good measure. (Now, that might be the start of a future great-live-soul-videos list!) For those of you without Spotify, we’ve included the youtube versions here, too.

There’s nothing like live music.

I don’t know what it is. Many record producers and engineers see it as an illusion – it looks better than it sounds – but for me it’s the essence of all music.  From the first time I saw Lightnin’ Hopkins when I was sixteen years old to catching James Brown and Solomon Burke in person (not to mention Howlin’ Wolf and Jerry Lee Lewis) when I wasn’t much older, I’ve never found anything to match it.  With the soul and gospel shows it’s more of the incantatory nature of the experience – I don’t know of anything that can equal the wildness and out-of-control control of a groove that draws you in even as it keeps you at a tantalizing remove. Often the live versions of familiar songs are slower, more drawn-out, they deepen the emotional resonance of lyrics you thought you knew by heart – but not always. It’s the unexpectedness, the spontaneity of the moment that makes it different (same as jazz), whatever expression that hypnotic moment  may take. 

So little of this music has been recorded the way it actually sounds – in the clubs, on-stage, with an audience that is as much a part of the experience as the performer him or herself. Here are just a few, a very few, live recordings that suggest some of that untrammeled freedom. In answer to the Desert Island Disc question (what’s the one record you would take with you to that mythical desert island, assuming all obstacles of technology could be overcome and records still existed?), I’ve always said that I would gladly give away all my records, CDs, recorded music, just to see Howlin’ Wolf shatter reality one more time. He was one of so many who was never recorded properly in his own milieu. In fact, apart from B.B. King Live at the Regal, I can’t think of any of the great blues singers who were recorded live in a manner that reflected the unparalleled range of moods and emotions that you could take from their in-person performance – unless you count the history-before-it-happened Alan Lomax Library of Congress recordings of Muddy Waters and Son House. Or the Harry Oster field recordings collected in the electrifying Country Negro Jam Sessions on Arhoolie, featuring the fiddle-guitar duo of Butch Cage and Willie Thomas. From my perspective – and I know this is heresy – I would argue that neither Aretha nor Otis Redding nor Al Green, say, was ever adequately captured in the full flowering of an unvarnished live performance.

But then personal preference is always a matter of personal taste. So without begging the question, and without seeking in any way to invite invidious comparison, here is a select selection of live soul(ful) performances,  with directions toward a few more. But, seriously, don’t stay home pondering my list or anyone else’s – or even dwelling on memories. Go out and hear some live music – right now!

 RAY CHARLES – DROWN IN MY OWN TEARS

Slow, slower, slowest. There is no one who can tease out a feeling – the feeling – better than Ray, even as he continues to keep the pulse of the music going, keeps the listener on the edge of his/her feet.  Listen to the way he uses the horns to permit his voice to weave sinuously in and out of the arrangement, to delay and deliver the message until finally, toward the end, the Raelettes come in for the first time and Ray plays off of them instead, in a warm human interchange that culminates in a searing falsetto inspired to begin with by Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Only to followed, after many professions of faith have already been elicited from the audience, by the reassuring repetition: “I want to know, don’t it make you feel, all right?” And it DOES.

[Note: the audio of this performance was recorded  in 1959 and can be found on the album Ray Charles in Person, the clip above is the same song performed live at Newport Jazz Festival. – ed.]

James Brown – LOST SOMEONE

Much the same could be said of James Brown’s historic 1962 live album (recorded at his own expense because his record company had so little faith in its potential). Listen to the way James draws out the tension with his mastery of repetition and homespun advice. (“Don’t go to strangers /Come on home to me…. You know, we all make mistakes sometimes. And the only way we can correct our mistakes/We got to try one more time.”) Listen to the way he draws in the audience (us), listen to the way he teases and tantalizes in much the same way that Alfred Hitchcock moment by moment intensifies the suspense in his films. (Suspense, as Hitchcock defines it, is not the same as surprise – everyone knows what’s coming, we just don’t know when.) And then the audience explodes as first James, after a suitable tease (“I feel like I want to scream.” “Scream!” comes back at him) lets loose with his own apocalyptic version of the Archie Brownlee-inspired scream, then takes it one step further by getting the audience to scream, too. Then, and only then, as James declares after nearly ten minutes of apocalyptic drama, “I believe my work will be done.” And so it is – until the next time, the next show, the next moment of revelation. 

If this only whets your appetite for more (and how could it not?), check out Live at the Apollo Volume 2, from 1967, just five years later, for an entirely different (but no less satisfying) experience, when everything has become rhythm and James dances madly on the precipice of funk. Or try “Oh Baby Don’t You Weep” from the faux-Live at the Royal (with faked audience applause), which in its own way is just as apocalyptic in its studio recreation as it ever was on stage. . And don’t under any circumstances miss Alex Gibney’s brand-new documentary, Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown. You won’t believe your eyes (and ears) – but, on the other hand, I know you will.

WILSON PICKETT – IF YOU NEED ME (don’t be put off by the mistitling; it really is “If You Need Me”)

This is the song that Solomon Burke popularized after Jerry Wexler bought the publishing but forgot to lock up the record. So both artists had hits with it, on different labels. Solomon always sang the hell out of the song in his warm, pleading style, but I don’t know if anyone ever beat Wilson’s version, recorded here at Philadelphia’s Uptown Theatre with all the harsh intensity of Pickett’s imperiously scoured voice. After a long, exhortatory introduction (it goes on for almost half the length of the song itself) Pickett offers up the same sermon that Solomon interjected into his version virtually word for word (“People have always said that I didn’t mean you no good….But one thing I know, way deep down in the bottom of my heart I’ve done the best I could”) – but with an entirely different tonal meaning. And, of course, as befits a song of such sturdy melodic construction, you get full audience participation, underlining the sense that what is being shared here is a particular experience, but universalized in such a way that it can evoke both an inner core  of aloneness and a spirit of community at one and the same time. This is what Sam Phillips sought in the studio, music that is at once real (“R-E-A-L,” Sam always said) and fully aware of how hard it is to create a convincing simulacrum of reality. Not unlike a Bruce Springsteen concert.  Can I get a witness?

SAM COOKE – BRING IT ON HOME TO ME

This, of course, is not just one song – it’s a symphony of Sam, arranged as a kind of showcase (in much the same way that Solomon Burke or James Brown, but not Ray Charles, arranged their medleys) for his various songs, moods and styles. It was conceived very consciously as a reaction to the way that he and his friend and business partner, J.W. Alexander, felt he had been upstaged by Little Richard, by all the explosive energy that Richard put into every performance, on a tour of England in the fall of 1962. Sam came home and constructed an act of his own to match that energy, and this January 1963 date at the Harlem Square Club was one of its earliest unveilings. Not only that – spurred on by the news that James Brown had recorded his show at the Apollo three months earlier (James Brown Live at the Apollo would not come out for another few months), Sam persuaded RCA to record his Harlem Square Club performance in Miami for an album that was to be titled One Night Stand. It might just as well have been titled Another Night on the Chitlin Circuit as far as RCA was concerned, because it was almost immediately set aside – and was not in fact released until 1984, twenty years after Sam’s death. What is most notable about it, apart from the immediacy of the musical experience is that it really was another night on the chitlin circuit, one of the very few club dates of this sort that was ever recorded. But more to the point, Sam is singing in that hard-edged gospel style that he seemed to have abandoned altogether with his departure from the Soul Stirrers in 1957. It stands as solitary, secular testament to the intensity of that style – and to the way in which Sam was loved by his audience, something which you can hear over and over again in an audience response that turns almost into a singalong. I can’t think of an album with greater charm, or greater intensity. It continually arrives at a point where it seems both singer and audience are about to lose control, only to be deflected by the saving grace of Sam’s polished showmanship, as, much in the manner of one of his most accomplished students, Solomon Burke, he declares, “I better leave that one alone,” every time the temperature in the room threatens to get too hot.

One time when he didn’t leave anything alone was on the Specialty album, The Great 1955 Shrine Concert, which presents the Soul Stirrers and half a dozen other Specialty Records gospel acts, live at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Sam’s “Nearer to Thee,” perhaps his greatest gospel composition, goes on for over eight-and-one-half minutes, with Sam and second lead Paul Foster trading leads until the tension becomes almost unbearable and then in the end, just as in the secular world of soul, finally finds release.  

GENE CHANDLER – RAINBOW ‘65

An epic tale of doomed romance, recorded at the Regal Theatre in Chicago, the furthest point of the chitlin circuit theater tour that also included the Apollo and the Uptown, along with the Howard and the Royal in DC and Baltimore. Once again we are drawn in by the incantatory pulse – at one point it seems almost as if the needle has gotten stuck in the groove, as the singer repeats, “I’m asking you baby I’m asking you baby” over and over again, until finally he breaks into an extended, wailing, squealing  falsetto “Pleasssse.” And then, after playing with words and sounds and clicks and gasps (words at this point no longer have meaning – or at least that is not their primary purpose) finally arrives at his cataclysmic conclusion: “I just want to ask you one thing [three times, four times] I want you to stop, stop THIS RAINBOW….IN MY HEART.” 

ETTA JAMES – SOMETHING’S GOT A HOLD ON ME

This could probably be better called rock ‘n’ soul, of which, if Solomon was the king, Etta would surely make a fitting queen. (There is, of course, only one Queen of Soul.) It’s the only uptempo number in the group – I think most people would agree that deep soul, in order to get deep, generally takes a more measured pace – but here Etta adopts another mode and loses nothing in the process. The raw power of her voice alone, particularly in the extended intro, with its straight-out evocation of the church, would be enough in itself, along with the pumping gospel piano and lyrics that could just as easily be applied to the sacred (and unquestionably have) as the profane. A sense of transport fills the New Era Club in Nashville – here, once again, it need hardly be said, it’s not the song, it’s the feeling.

SOLOMON BURKE – SILENT NIGHT

Listen to the laughter. That says it all, expressing the sense of delight that not just soul music but gospel music, too (hell, all kinds of music) is able so effortlessly to convey. In the end it’s the sound of surprise, the exultation of discovery, the sense on the part of both audience and performer that – hey, (s)he/I didn’t just do that, did we? In Solomon’s case, it is, of course, amplified by one of the most glorious voices you are ever likely to hear –along with the most astonishing talent for improvisation, verbal, musical and, not entirely irrelevantly, comical, too. In this case the listener doesn’t really have to know that the number was recorded in a Macon church on a steaming July day (“It was at least 105 degrees, Pete!” Solomon told me with that sense of conspiratorial wonder that always made you kind of…wonder) to appreciate the anomaly of the situation. Nor is it necessary to put your full, literal faith in Solomon’s pronouncement to producer Fred Mendelsohn as he pointed out the church window, “Look, Fred, it’s snowing!” to recognize the extent to which music can take you away from the literal, the diurnal, your everyday cares and woes. If you put your faith in music, Solomon says over and over again in his songs, both sacred and secular, you can move mountains, you can change the world. (Don’t forget, it was Solomon who announced without irony in one of his early hits, “There’s a song that I sing, and I believe if everyone was to sing this song, it would save the whole world.”)

Now – if you want to get a dose of Solomon at his most gloriously secular (and at his most alive), you can’t by any lassitude of the spirit allow yourself to overlook his Rounder album Soul Alive! Captured with wall-to-wall verisimilitude and fervor at a Washington D.C. club in 1981, it’s like Sam Cooke’s live album, a true symphony of soul. But the thing about it is, as Solomon would be the first to tell you, when the feeling’s right, whether it’s at a little church in Georgia, a bedraggled club that hasn’t bothered to remove its Christmas tinsel in years, or a command performance for the Pope, it really doesn’t matter – when the feeling is right, that’s when a true miracle is achieved.

Peter Guralnick's Top 7 Moments of Live Soul →

On OkayPlayer.com Peter digs into the essentials of live soul for his Throwback Thursday post of Top 7 moments in live soul.

Guest Blogger: Mr. C on Al Green

I met Joe McEwen (a/k/a Mr. C) in 1970 when Jake and Alexandra and I were selling tickets to a Lightnin’ Hopkins concert at the door. Jake was 2, and Joe was 18 or 19. “Did you mean what you said in that Solomon Burke article you wrote in Rolling Stone?” Joe said, without bothering to introduce himself. “Yes,” I said. We’ve been friends ever since.

Recently Joe came across this amazing Al Green clip and dropped by to tell us about it.

– PG 

Mr C:

Al Green didn’t share peanut butter sandwiches with his grade school classmates.  “I’ve always been a loner,” he tells interviewer Ellis Haizlip. 

“I was always the fellow that was alone, by myself.”  

 This little bit of revelation is spoken without irony or pretense. In this remarkable performance/interview on the Soul! TV show aired on January 3, 1973, Al Green seems unburdened by the crush of success that has suddenly thrust this once lonely schoolboy into the guy that now everybody wants to know. He talks, but mostly sings, with full band and by himself, guitar in hand. Despite his owndisclaimer, Al is in great voice and fully engaged, seeming to enjoy Soul!’s inviting setting. For an hour, we’re absorbed by the full flowering of the mercurial Al Green.

Soul! was a PBS black culture hour, the brain child of Manhattan sophisticate Haizlip. It aired from September of 1968 to March of 1973, a Thursday night show that originally featured King Curtis as house bandleader. Guests ranged from Apollo stars like Joe Tex, Jerry Butler, and the Manhattans, to an array of such political and literary lights of the era as James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Shirley Chisholm, and Julius Lester among others.  It was ambitious and understated, a television show that succeeded without the flash of the moment.  A small audience sat, café-style, at small tables, while Ellis Haizlip directed our attention. Looking at Soul! 40 years later, it’s wondrous that something as special and well-crafted as this managed to exist.

 Like a future album title, Al Green Explores Your Mind, on this January evening it was more a case of Al Green Exploring His Own Mind.  And we get to ride along.

http://www.thirteen.org/soul/jan-3-1973/#.UsqKtvbLf4R

Guest Blog- A Word from Mr. C: Soul is Alive... The Blues of Sonny Green

A report from the West Coast by Joe McEwen

Singer Sonny Green is the show tonight. He’s the focus and driving wheel behind the buoyant energy flowing through La Louisianne, a Los Angeles restaurant/lounge in the Crenshaw District.  Sonny Green is at ease being the man.

Sonny’s singing style comes from the vocabulary of Bobby Bland and inhabits the gravel end of Bland’s voice.  He sings slow, easy soul songs that tell a story, he is an interpreter of the hits of his contemporaries: Johnnie Taylor, Bobby Womack, his late friend ZZ Hill and, of course, the just-deceased master Bobby Bland.  The sixty or so people around the bandstand know the words and happily sing chorus after chorus, led by the ever-engaging ringmaster. “That’s the Way I feel About ‘Cha,” “Running Out of Lies,” “Stop Doggin’ Me Around” (“That’s d-o-g-g-i-n”) roll off the tongues of the assembled, as Green strolls the floor, dancing, jiving and collecting tips. 

Familiar faces are introduced; Dancing Ann, Huey the guitar legend, and all the women “in the house tonight” born under the sign of Cancer. Also brought forth are Hank Carbo and the sharply dressed man, Ed Wheeler, who owns the place and gets  his own time in the spotlight singing an impassioned, heartfelt “The Things That I Used To Do."  Everybody seems familiar.  The place is alive., and the songs suddenly breathe a life much different from the  records.  They become a vehicle for a particular and comforting emotional grounding.  The audience and performer, transplanted from the Deep South (posed as a question by Sonny with a predetermined answer) to Los Angeles have become one.

Many years ago, the great soul DJ, the Magnificent Montague, responded during a taped repartee with Sam Cooke: ” I see tonight you’re trying to gather some material for your soul, through mine.“ Those of us in the audience on a recent Monday night at La Louisianne did just that through Sonny Green.  And at show’s close, we  wandered off into the night, so much the better for it.

A Word from Mr C: Lost Soul

Mr. C:

Lost Soul was originally a series of albums I put together at CBS Records in the “80s that cobbled together truly inspired CBS label singles that sadly missed their commercial mark.  The Lost Soul concept seemed to fit the final piece of the SWEET SOUL MUSIC discography. 

Looking at this list almost thirty years later, the song selection still seems on the money.  And if CD reissues and YouTube have made them readily available, the navigation compass remains true to the spirit of intent.  Lost Soul stands as a sturdy and lovingly assembled tribute to great voices from the shadows.

For this edition– a special bonus cut!

"Believe in Me Baby Pt.1 +2” (Jesse James/20th Century Fox)  Reworked Little Milton cover to an appreciative audience with an emotional sermon on “the fast life and things like that.”  A 6 minute charging soul drama that ends at peak crescendo. Showtime.

Mr. G:

Joe’s right. It was so great working on Sweet Soul Music and getting these mix tapes in the mail – one after another, close to 40 in all. It was the basis not just for a book but for a lifelong dialogue, one that pre-dated Sweet Soul Music and has never really stopped.

Listening to this mix today – which was never actually a tape, more like an ideal –  reminds me once again of the richness and diversity of the music.

Now don’t forget: you can still see Otis Clay, a 2013 Blues Hall of Fame inductee, who, like Mavis Staples, continues to perform with undiminished fervor, each of them as emotionally compelling (wait’ll you hear Mavis’ new Jeff Tweedy-produced album) as they ever were. And if you like Jackie Moore’s beautifully controlled version of Paul Kelly’s “Personally” (co-produced by William Bell), check out Kelly’s own “folk soul” album on Bullseye, Gonna Stick and Stay, from 1993, or his great Warner Archives collection, The Best of Paul Kelly, with all but one song on both albums written by Kelly himself.

There’s a Sam Cooke component here that I was not fully aware of at the time. I knew that Arthur Conley’s “Let’s Go Steady,” which stands as an explicit tribute to Sam, was written by J.W. Alexander, Sam’s business partner, mentor, and friend. But I’m sure I didn’t know that Bobby Womack’s striking “What Is This?” was produced by Fred Smith, a Kags songwriter and SAR employee (Sam and J.W.’s publishing company and record label respectively), who had great success on his own as songwriter and producer (the Olympics’ “Western Movies” was just one of his many hits, and he worked with Bill Cosby’ for years), and was the owner of Keymen the label on which Bobby’s single appeared.

Maybe what stands out most of all for me, though, is Little Richard’s epic “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got (But It’s Got Me).” As Joe wrote on the final page of the book, it is “arguably the greatest soul ballad of all time. The Mt Rushmore of soul.” And it is. I can remember seeing Richard with Jimi Hendrix on guitar at the Donnelly Theater in Boston in May of 1965 around the time he recorded the song. (I ushered the show!) He didn’t sing “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got” that night. His showstopper was “Shake a Hand,” on which he left the mike and came to the edge of the stage, projecting his voice effortlessly without amplification and imploring the audience to join him. Which, without hesitating for a second, they very soulfully did.

I remember, too, buying that great Don Covay composition in its various Vee Jay versions (it came in two parts, and different lengths, for some reason, on different pressings). I bought it at Skippy White’s Mass Records: Home of the Blues, where I bought just about every soul record that I own, including Jesse James’ gently insistent “Believe in Me Baby” and Aretha’s first Atlantic album, I Never Loved Man the Way I Love You, the night it came out. That’s where Joe got much of his collection, too – but Joe went me one better. I just brought my Paperback Booksmith paycheck to Skippy. Joe went to work for him after graduating from college – and I’m sure it was the best postgraduate course there ever was.

Roosevelt Jamison, 1936-2013

Quinton Claunch & Roosevelt Jamison August 2012

I’m not sure exactly how I first met Roosevelt.

Probably it was through Quinton Claunch. It was 1981 or 1982. I had started working on Sweet Soul Music, and Memphis – and James Carr, and Goldwax Records, and Otis Redding – were all, of course a big part of the picture. Quinton was co-founder and co-owner of Goldwax, whose biggest star, and probably greatest talent, was James Carr. But James was going through a period of trials and tribulations during which he was virtually incommunicado, and Roosevelt, who had originally brought him to Goldwax, was pretty much his only lifeline to the world. Roosevelt had also written “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” recorded initially by another of his discoveries, and another soul singer of incomparable talent, O.V. Wright, and then, in somewhat circuitous fashion, by Otis Redding in the version that the Rolling Stones picked up and made known to a whole other world on Out of Our Heads.

It doesn’t really matter. The point is, I met Roosevelt, who was working at the University of Tennessee’s Interstate Blood Bank at the time (only one of two or three full-time jobs he was working simultaneously), and once he heard what I was doing, Roosevelt took it upon himself to be my guide.

I don’t know where he found the time – I don’t know where he found the generosity of spirit. But that was Roosevelt – it was his mark in life as well as in music. He seemed to possess an empathy gene, a need to be of service that carried over into every aspect of his life. He was a songwriter primarily, definitely not a singer (his friends told him “to stick to the other end of the business,” he always said ruefully), and with the exception of “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” I’m not sure he ever really profited from the music business – and then only to a limited degree. He had discovered both O.V. Wright and James Carr when they were singing in the same gospel group, the Harmony Echoes, one of a number of quartets that he would rehearse in the back of the blood bank on the corner of Beale and Fourth in the early 1960s. His dream was to bring their talent to the attention of the world (“O God, what is it that Thou has for me to do?” he wrote at the time, seeking inspiration) – and he succeeded. But when I met him fifteen or sixteen years later, O.V. had just died, a victim of drugs at the age of forty-one, and James, two years younger, had himself descended into a fog of drugs and depression.

We started going around. Or, rather, Roosevelt started taking me around – that’s really the point of this story – to a host of his friends who were in large part, like Roosevelt himself, “the story behind the story,” fellow spirits of abundant but insufficiently heralded talent, who looked at me a little like, What are you doing here, but then, since I was vouched for by Roosevelt, never hesitated to welcome me into their homes. I met O.V.’s brother, Eddie Lewis, who Roosevelt assured me sang just like O.V. We went to see the great songwriter and soul singer George Jackson (some of his better-known compositions are Otis Clay’s “Trying to Live My Life Without You,” Z.Z. Hill’s “Down Home Blues,” and Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll,” not to mention the Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple”). And, of course, Roosevelt expended a great deal of time and energy on getting me together with James Carr. There were numerous missed appointments, but finally we picked up James at his sister’s and, after driving around a little, finally settled on a little restaurant in South Memphis, where we sat uncomfortably under the harsh fluorescent light.

James was having trouble just staying awake, expelling his breath loudly from time to time and largely unresponsive to Roosevelt’s promptings. “This gentleman can do a lot for you, sir,” Roosevelt said. “Do you understand where I’m coming from?” But James simply couldn’t. “Aren’t we friends?” Roosevelt tried desperately. “Sometimes,” said James, not really meaning anything by it. “You know,” said Roosevelt, whose dream always remained, to bring the attention of the world to the beauty he saw all around him, “everyone who comes to your concerts loves you. But there are many questions the public would like to ask. Because you’ll go down in history as one of the greatest blues singers of all time.”

There was no truer friend than Roosevelt Jamison. He was the kind of person who couldn’t see a stray dog without needing to feed him – and I always liked to think I was one of his stray dogs. At the book release party for Sweet Soul Music in Memphis, Roosevelt, of course, showed up, and so did his mentor, Dr. L.W. Diggs, the renowned hematologist and pioneer in the study of Sickle Cell anemia, who, defying the state of Tennessee’s laws of segregation, had trained Roosevelt surreptitiously as a medical technologist in the ‘50s, paving the way for him to eventually take over a supervisory position in the University of Tennessee hematology lab. Dr. Diggs was 86 at the time and, as far as I know, no dedicated fan of the music itself. But his granddaughter, who lived in New York, had read an excerpt from my book in the Village Voice that mentioned both Roosevelt and her grandfather, and he showed up for the party dressed like the only distinguished physician in the room.

Roosevelt hadn’t seen him in a while, and he introduced me to Dr. Diggs excitedly (“You remember, I told you about Dr. Diggs!”), and despite an all-star turn out from the music world (Rufus Thomas, Solomon Burke, Sam Phillips, and David Porter, among others), Roosevelt spent most of his time with his one-time mentor and friend, reminiscing enthusiastically about old times.

I saw Roosevelt many times over the years, and it was always renewing. Perhaps most of all because he was someone for whom the dream would never truly be over.

R&B The Transition Years

From the Sweet Soul Music Discography: R&B-Transition Years

This is a playlist I originally put together in 1986 as a kind of introduction to the Discography section of Sweet Soul Music. But I only imagined it – I never actually listened to it straight through. Here it is slightly revised and available through Spotify (and I’m sure you can recreate this on MOG, RDIO, or ITunes).  I can’t guarantee that every recording is the original – but it sounds pretty good to me. And in a funny way I find myself appreciating it so much more now than I once might have – even though these were always songs that I admired without reserve.

I think maybe I just wasn’t as open to wistfulness and melancholy in those days – in some ways I’ll put it down to the education that Elvis and Sam Cooke have provided me with. But, you know, when you really get down to it, it’s probably just life. Nat King Cole’s “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You” – at one time I might have dismissed it as just a little proper, just a little sentimental. But now I hear Oscar Moore’s guitar solo, Nat’s piano, that voice, and there’s no hold-back in my engagement. I’m with Sam Cooke, I’ll take Nat King Cole as my tutorial model any day. Same with Charles Brown’s “Drifting Blues,” with Oscar Moore’s brother Johnny giving his name to the group and playing the beautiful guitar lead. Or the subtlety and heartache of the Prisonaires “Just Walking in the Rain.” It’s not that I didn’t appreciate them way back then. But I appreciate them so much more now.

Is mellowness all? Certainly not. Dig Guitar Slim’s “The Things That I Used to Do,” one of the rawest, most tore-down commercial blues of all time, which also marks the debut of arranger and pianist Ray Charles’ hard r&b sound. Or songs like Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight” – everyone knows what that led to. Or Louis Jordan’s seminal “Let the Good Times Roll,” which left its mark (like so much of Jordan’s groundbreaking work) on James Brown, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, and Sam Cooke, just for starters. And, of course, where would we be without the Dionysian spirit of Howlin’ Wolf, James Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis, or Bob Dylan and Billy Joe Shaver in their untrammeled poetic years? (None included here – just a few points of reference.)

And then there’s the gospel infusion: the majestic Faye Adams version of “Shake a Hand” (I wish you could have heard Little Richard mashing down on this for six or seven minutes at the Donnelly Theater in his 1965 secular comeback – with Jimi Hendrix on guitar!). Or Roy Hamilton’s operatic version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic,  “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which established a trend for spiritual uplift until Ray Charles blew the model wide open with his literal translation of the Southern Tones’ “It Must Be Jesus” into “I Got a Woman.” Or listen to the inspirational message of “Please Send Me Someone to Love” from Percy Mayfield, the “poet laureate of the blues” – nothing to do with gospel, really, just a universal (and universally influential) message of social uplift and racial justice cloaked in a graceful metaphor.

Every song here tells a story – each one has its own story. There’s no trend, there’s no stamp – or if there is a trend (and lots of people, obviously were catching on) each song, each artist stands on his or her own with a heartfelt message of exuberance, sorrow, plaintiveness or pain – doesn’t matter, there’s something to suit every mood.

You know, listening to this I started thinking about Solomon Burke (again), who considered himself a kind of cross between Gene Autry, gospel giant Brother Joe May (“The Thunderbolt of the Middle West”), and Ivory Joe Hunter (just dig Ivory Joe’s very soulful, and hugely influential, “I Almost Lost My Mind”).

You can hear everything that Solomon was listening to here – well almost. But I’ll tell you a funny story about “Don’t Deceive Me,” presented here in its original form by Atlanta blues singer Chuck Willis. When Solomon was making Soul of the Blues for Black Top Records, I suggested that he cut “Don’t Deceive Me” – I thought it would be a perfect match for Solomon’s improvisational skills, with its simple, gut-wrenching lyrics and melody and its wide-open space for a sermon. (I was thinking of the remarkable way that Howlin’ Wolf transformed the song in live performance.)

Well, Solomon did record it – and he called me up right afterwards. “You’re going to be really proud of me, Pete,” he said. “I did it just like you always want me to. I sang the song. And every time I started to get off of it, Selassie told me [this was his son, Haile Selassie], ‘Stick to the song, Dad. Remember what Peter said.’” And when I heard his version, it was indeed true. Solomon had stuck to the song, as I had not infrequently urged him to do – particularly when he stubbornly resisted learning many of the new songs that he was recording in favor of what he liked to call “spontaneity.” “Don’t Deceive Me,” for me, was an altogether different case. Or at least it should have been. But this was where Solomon chose to apply the lesson. Which is why you won’t hear any sermon on Solomon Burke’s beautifully rendered, emotionally controlled version of “Don’t Deceive Me.” I guess I’ll just have to take the blame.