There is no better music in the world than American Soul music.
Here is my irrefutable, logical argument as to why that is.
Emotion that’s inspired more art than any other?
Love.
The part of love that inspires more art than any other?
Heartbreak.
What is Heartbreak?
It’s something teenagers feel.
What are things teenagers feel?
- Illogical attachment.
- Overly-emotional sentiments.
- Earnestness that borders on annoying-to-others.
But the main thing that teenagers feel is everything.
This is, deep in our frozen adult hearts, what we are annoyed by when we are annoyed by young people.
Teenagers still feel things. They feel them completely and truly. Things we as adults are no loner able to do (just me?).
Most teenagers have very little life experience to weigh whatever they are currently going through, against.
And thus, like a baby, the pain a teenager is currently experiencing (in teenagers case, romantic) is the worst thing they’ve ever felt.
And secretly, this is how we as adults wish we could react.
Alarm goes off Monday morning?
“I wanna break down and cry” – Usher
Leave the grocery store without the one thing you went there to get?
“And when I try to walk away, you hurt yourself to makes me stay” – Lauryn Hill
Have to do one more thing today you just don’t have the energy for?
“No, no, no, no, no” – Destiny’s Child
Well that was fun.
But I really do think that soul music is the best music humans have ever created.
What all other art forms pull back from, soul music leans into.
Soul music feels like love, and all its unrequited, heartbroken arteries, more than any other music.
To express your feelings for someone without bleeding into corniness is possibly the most difficult task of a songwriter.
“Corniness” sounds like an arbitrary place to draw the line, but corniness at its core is a betrayal, nothing short of a lie at the most fundamental level, at the very place where artist and public agree to meet in peace, it is a dagger in the back of those who have put down their guard in good faith.
The Intermediate Guide
A few months ago, I wrote about, and compiled a playlist: A Beginner’s Guide to Country Music.
I am a beginner when it comes to country music.
I am not a beginner when it comes to early soul and R&B, but I cannot claim to be an expert.
Rather, I have been living with this playlist for the past several years, adding to it my favorite soul songs from the 60s that fit the following rules:
- I have to truly, honestly like the song.
It can be tempting to include an obscure artist for the sake of obscurity but if the song didn’t move me, I didn’t move it onto the list.
- None of a very popular artist’s most popular songs.
Ok, maybe a couple.
But, I tried to focus on the less popular B-sides in an iconic singer’s career, or the most popular song from a lesser known artist.
- No songs that could have been on the Forrest Gump soundtrack
Ok, maybe a couple.
If I’ve added a song that some might consider a contender for the Forest Gump soundtrack, I am preemptively countering that the song I added is actually far less represented than we think it is.
One of the greatest travesties of American music history is how little this music is played on radio stations today. But I digress.
- Some early 50s and later 70s songs thrown in.
I even have an early Billie Holiday in there because sometimes you have to do what’s right for the mood.
- Multiple Songs from an artist
With the Beginner’s Guide to Country, I kept it to 1 song per artist.
By the way, I have nothing against the Forrest Gump soundtrack.
It is a great soundtrack. It is, quite possibly, the best document of what the 1990s remembers of the music of the 1960’s and 70’s. It is a definitive collection of how one time period thinks of another, earlier time period.
In other words, it is the beginner’s guide to that collection.
Mine, as I’ve mentioned, is not a beginner’s guide.
What More Could There Be To Write About Without Just Sharing The Playlist?
Well, how about…
7 Cathartic Moments in The Intermediate Guide to Early Soul and R&B
7 moments from 7 different songs on this playlist, that define this list as a whole.
#1. “But I remember that night”
Located at the 2:15 mark of Sam Cooke’s “Tennessee Waltz”.
“Tennessee Waltz” builds and builds. Every verse has the same lyrics. It’s back bone is a 12 bar blues structure. It’s beat repeats, over and over.
The way we re-live our own trauma’s is what this song understands.
Cooke’s vocal performance makes the turn into the final third of the song feel as though the entire history of the world had been building up to it.
When he hangs on the final vowel of “rememberrrrrrrr” no one in the room forgets the time they were dancing with their baby, only to have their friend, or time, or their own shyness, steal them away.
#2. “Stone blind and out of his mind”
Located at the 0:54 mark of Smokey Robinson & The Miracles “Baby, Baby Don’t Cry”.
You don’t see it coming, and it’s not that similar to the rest of The Miracles catalog but the chord change followed by “stone blind” at just under a minute into “Baby, Baby Don’t Cry” feels like a mixture of 60s weed, Detroit heartbreak, and nothing short of humankind’s complete redemption.
#3. “pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease”
Located at the 4:15 mark of Gene Chandler’s “Rainbow ’65“
Van Morrison loved this song so much he wore out turntable needles playing it.
At the 3:50 mark of “Laughing In The Wind” Van the Man uses a very similar “baby baby baby baby” that Gene Chandler belts out in Rainbow 69.
The entire 6 minute live version of “Rainbow ’65” is an absolute massacre.
One line after another is sung so completely, so uniquely it feels as though Chandler is using every one of his vocal tricks in one song. And to good effect.
When the horns build under his vocals during the chorus, your heart wells up and it gets harder to breath.
But all of that, as substantial as it is and as well as it could all stand on its own, is just a ladder to the 4:15 mark where Chandler takes his voice, and us listeners, to the heavens.
#4. “I was just, I was just, I was just…sitting here thinking“
Located at the 1:30 mark of Etta James “I’d Rather Go Blind”
“I was just sitting here thinking” is the line that begins what might be the most beautiful expression of drinking your sorrows away anywhere in music.
I was just sitting here thinking
About your kiss and your warm embrace
when the reflection on the glass
that I held to my lips now baby
revealed the tears that was on my face
The second verse of “I’d Rather Go Blind” is the yellow hue of the smokey lights, hanging behind the bar in your hometown, down the block from where you grew up falling for the one that got away.
#5. “Ray Charles called you his sunshine“
Located at the 1:39 mark of Solomon Burke’s “Can’t Nobody Love You”
Another bridge, another huge chord change setting the stage for a banger of a vocal.
Burke sings but he screams, he holds anger in his palm like an injured dove, he cries in tune.
Like I mentioned at the beginning, soul music is earnest and expressive without being corny.
“Sam called you cake and ice cream, and he called you cherry pie… but you’re the apple of my eye” should be corny (a reference to Cooke’s song “Nothing Can Change This Love” and Charles’ version of “You Are My Sunshine”), and with a lesser singer it might have been (with a lesser genre it wouldn’t stand a chance) but Burke not only pulls it off, he pulls your heart out of your chest and forces it to ache.
#6. When the organ hits in “Melting Pot”
Located at the 2:35 mark of Booker T & the MG’s “Melting Pot”
By the 2:30 mark of the 8+ minute instrumental epic, you thought you’ve heard it all.
And then the snare goes on a run that smashes right into a whole note organ wailing away with all the release of moonlight breaking through the cloud of a nightclub dance-floor, packed with all the tension of the week.
Where most of the moments in this cathartic list are still living through the pain of a break up, this moment is over it, it’s out the door celebrating all the living of its best life it’s about to do.
#7. “I had a woman, lord”
Located at the 1:46 mark of Ray Charles’ “Hard Times”
I end the list with maybe the most important song on it. Important for me and my love of soul music, at least.
I don’t have much Ray Charles on this list because he felt bigger than the list, as though nothing he could do (after Ray anyway) could be unknown, or overlooked enough.
“I had a woman, lord” beings the turn that finishes the song on the saddest, most painful singing I’ve ever heard.
But in singing that pain, and expressing it so exactly, there is a release, a joy that defines what it means to be a living, feeling being, and it is in this moment that soul music does something better than any other music the world has ever made: let us live out our grief in all it’s ragged, broken completeness.