Sunday, March 23, 2008

Soul Deep Sunday


I had a lot of tasks to do down here in the Bob bunker on Easter Sunday and I found the very best video wallpaper for accomplishing the task with VH1 Soul's broadcast of a BBC documentary called Soul Deep.

I came in on the the last twenty minutes or so of the first epsisode which featured the evolution of Atlantic records and Ray Charles up to What'd I Say closing out with absolutely fabulous footage of the Raylettes and the Ray Charles Orchestra with amazing performance with choreographed horn moves and the band seemingly pulling out all stops.

Part Two was entitled The Gospel Highway and primarily featured Sam Cooke. It was framed by recreated footage of that fateful night in the motel and early on showed the classic footage of Cassius Clay and Sam Cooke signaling that a change was gonna come for real. I found this episode intriguing because the story of Sam Cooke is the story I don't know much about that of the gospel highway. This is the holy road version of the chitlin circuit in the east and south where touring acts suffered Jim Crow injustice and were treated by high royalty by their fans. The Soul Deep filmmakers showed some exceptional footage by The Staple Singers, gospel highway contemporaries of Sam Cooke's. It was interesting also to see the story of RH Harris covered. He was the star of the Soul Stirrers who left for a solo career and was replaced by Sam Cooke.

In the episode, Gerald Early emphasized that Sam Cooke certainly was not the first black artist to sing pop music, but he was the first to be able to put "that soulful gospel quality into pop music." But Cooke was headed beyond just recording pop music at the time of his death by the motel proprietess. His recording of Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind with "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" yielded Cooke's response song and final classic A Change is Gonna Come which clearly implies not many more roads and damn soon. The episode ends with another bit of prophesy coming full circle, Aretha Franklin at the piano singing Cooke's first hit You Send Me.

The story of Motown through 1967 was the focus of episode three. There were a couple interesting things going on for me in this episode. One was the contrast between Chicago and Detroit music scenes. And the other was how Berry Gordy and Motown did not issue social material until after the 1968 riots, which also led to the migration of the company to Los Angeles. Love Child was the musical turning point and ends up the hour. I guess I had never considered how heavy those lyrics were.

Episode four was called Southern Soul and emphasized Otis Redding his great collaboration by Booker T and the MGs. The episode also told the story of the other Atlantic Stax/Volt folks such as Sam and Dave and, ov course, Aretha Franklin and how black and whites worked together to create great soul music in the deep south, triumphing on American charts, Monterey Pop, and European tours until their efforts were influenced greatly by the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.

I was going to quit there, but episode five was Ain't It Funky and followed James Brown from Cold Sweat (Pee Wee Ellis tells how it was based on Miles Davis' So What , a fact I did not know) up through the mid eighties collaboration of Afrika Bambatta with "Peace, unity, love and having fun." In between we saw James' fallout from I'm Black and I'm Proud, the funk of Sly and the Family Stone, and Bootsy Collins hooking up with George Clinton and P-Funk. This was one funk-filled hour, to be certain.

I passed on the hip hop to contemporary episode because most of my chores were completed and it would have seemed majorly anticlimatic after a full afternoon of soul pioneers. The website for the series indicates that a DVD is probably not in the works. That's a shame. Meanwhile, one hopes it will cycle again soon on VH1 Soul.
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:14 PM
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