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November 15, 2005

Soul, its own self

The house in which we now live was built in 1950 by a man who had survived the Baatan Death March and went on to teach (photography, I believe) at Morehead State University. His wife, Deane Tant, was the premiere hatmaker in this part of Eastern Kentucky, the milliner of record at a time when fashionable ladies wore hats and gloves to every proper social occasion, and every social occasion was proper. Or so I'm given to understand. The office in which I type was, I hope, her workshop. That would explain the lighting, and some oddly placed electrical outlets. (On the other hand, there was a tanning bed in the adjacent closet when we moved in -- any idea how hard it is to get rid of one of those things -- so the house has been misused for years.) A few tags have turned up in the attic, and three of her hats surfaced up at a garage sale down the street. They were in here on top of the bookcases until last winter's water leak caused some redecoration which hasn't yet been undone, and I've not yet restored them to a place of honor.

But I will.

I am reminded of their place in the closet, however, by the hatbox case in which Rhino has packaged one of its new and fabulous collections, One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost & Found. Mostly the hatbox and its four discs sits on top of the turntable with some other box sets that maybe I'll have time to listen to one of these days. (Still, who knew Toni Basil cut her first single for A&M in 1966?)

Aw, nuts. Let the publicists wait, I'll listen while I think out loud here.

Co-producer Sheryl Farber's opening note suggests that the girl groups have been given short shrift in rock history. I've no doubt she's right, but, perhaps because of my long friendship with Gillian G. Gaar (who wrote the seminal history of women in rock, She's A Rebel) and the tapes she used to make every Christmas, it never seemed so to me.

That said, as with much soul music, I can't claim anything more than AM radio familiarity with these songs, and most of what's here wasn't on my radio in Seattle, at least not that I recall. And for any number of years I thought I hated soul. In hindsight that seems a mild over-reaction to the Philadelphia Sound, dominant during my junior high years; certainly I spent long hours with Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding, and later, longer hours with the golden age of gospel.

(I realize the girl group sound and soul occupy different critical realms, but, at least in my memory, they are tied into the same Casey Kasem memories. Let's see...if soul is the secular gospel, then girl groups are the pop form of soul? Something like that, maybe.)

By the time I had money to spend for my own music, I had somehow figured out that the path to rock understanding ran through blues, and so spent the late '70s listening to Elmore James and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Television and the Spencer Davis Group, Peter Green and the Undertones, Steely Dan and Sleepy John Estes. A weird schmeer of things, in hindsight, but it was all brand new and exciting at the time. Reading about the blues (not even the guys in the used record store were much help sorting all those mysterious reissues out), I came to envy those intrepid explorers from the folk revival who went down to Mississippi and into Appalachia and plucked blues musicians and fiddle players and other artifacts of the early recording era from their menial jobs and put them back on-stage.

Something like that seems to be happen again, though I'm not quite sure I understand why (though I'm not complaining). These last couple years some of my favorite records have been made by veteran soul singers tracked down by record collectors and lured back to the microphone: Rosco Gordon, Nathaniel Mayer, Bettye Lavette. Solomon Burke.

As with the country blues, the community which gave birth to these first-generation soul singers seems largely to have abandoned that music in favor of other noisier, more ornate sounds. And so it is once again left to outsiders (curiosity seekers; we liner-note nerds who insist good music is rarely what sells) to track down forgotten voices and bring them back to the spotlight.

During the folk boom, I think this was meant (albeit with some unintended condescension) as a sympathetic component to the Civil Rights movement. Today's soul revival seems, from here, to have a less certain agenda. Maybe it's just jaded listeners seeking something new amid the old dust of used vinyl. Maybe it's a rose-eyed attempt to reconstruct a past when certain communities seemed yoked together in a great movement. Or maybe it's just something within those voices that we're drawn to.

I think I'll stick with that last answer for the moment.

While I'm here...a couple other things. We're having some software issues between our blog publishing platform and our ISP which make it less easy for us to post blogs. That, in part, is my apology for the long time between postings here. That'll change, one way or another, but not immediately. Second...I lost all my e-mail, including a handful of responses to ideas posted here that I'd meant to address. I do apologize for that. I believe the appropriat electrons have been flayed, but we'll see.

Posted by Grant at 3:31 PM | Permalink