Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  As early as 1928, an article in Gramophone magazine declared that, at its best, jazz music ‘has soul5’. More than twenty-five years later, the word came easily to Ray Charles’s lips: ‘I try to bring out my soul6 so that people can understand what I am. I want people to feel my soul.’ In his autobiography, he put that feeling into context: ‘I became myself7. I opened up the floodgates, let myself do things I hadn’t done before, created sounds which, people told me afterward, had never been created before … I started taking gospel lines and turning them into regular songs.’

  And that was where the controversy started. To the blues critic, and subsequent British R&B pioneer, Alexis Korner, the juxtaposition of an almost religious passion and Charles’s own emotional outpourings was ‘almost blasphemous8’ and ‘vaguely horrifying’, indicative of ‘a lack of taste’. But there had been shared DNA between spiritual and secular black music since the early 1930s, when Georgia Tom, co-creator of the lascivious blues record ‘It’s Tight Like That’, became Thomas A. Dorsey, originator of modern gospel music. After the death of his wife in childbirth, Dorsey was moved to write ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’, which gospel historian Viv Broughton called ‘a masterpiece of gospel9 hymnody – part spiritual uplift, part blues melancholy’.

  Soon afterwards, Dorsey met a young woman named Mahalia Jackson, whose career he would oversee for the next decade. She made a solitary record in the 1930s, singing with a freedom found nowhere in the blues tradition. Resuming her recording career in 1946, she cut ‘Move On Up a Little Higher’, a righteous gospel performance which contained almost everything that Aretha Franklin would ever need to learn. Within a decade, she had become an international celebrity, her salvation open to all. ‘She lost the black market10 to a horrifying degree’, record producer John Hammond sneered. ‘I’d say that by her death she was playing to a 75% white audience, maybe as high as 90%.’

  Inherent to the black gospel tradition is the trading of lines between preacher and congregation, the call-and-response, a regimented structure which is the living likeness of spontaneity. Like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whose tightrope walk between blues and gospel in the 1940s and 50s saw her don a rough-toned electric guitar and commit her marriage ceremony to vinyl, Ray Charles saw no difficulty in applying the trademarks of gospel to the blues, and vice versa (although he claimed to have turned down lucrative offers to make entirely spiritual records). He went a stage beyond: subtly reworking the words of familiar gospel tunes to carry them into the secular world, so that ‘This Little Light of Mine’ became ‘This Little Girl of Mine’. By 1959, when ‘What’d I Say’ acted as a melting pot for R&B, rock ’n’ roll, blues and gospel, he was openly expressing the groans and grunts of sexual intercourse. ‘I sing with all the feeling11 that I can put into it, so that I can feel it myself’, he explained. Only later was it revealed that he insisted on squiring a long succession of his (always) female backing vocalists, adding an erotic frisson to his music. Mahalia Jackson probably had him in mind when she noted: ‘Some of these record companies12 are trying to make gospel singing a competitor of rock ’n’ roll … Gospel singing doesn’t need artificial, unnecessary, phony sounds.’ Or, as Thomas Dorsey, complained in 1961: ‘I turn on the radio13 and I can’t tell the gospel singers from the rock ’n’ rollers.’ Ray Charles would probably have taken that as a compliment.

  If gospel and Ray Charles were the progenitors of soul, the movement soon became as much a political as a musical force. ‘Soul’ entered jazz, as a description for the music of artists such as Oscar Brown and Cannonball Adderley, who were combining a hip contemporary sensibility with a willingness to revive memories of an even darker age – the work-songs, chants and desperate spirituals of the slave era. For decades, black Americans had measured their success in terms of assimilation: the more they adopted the manners of the white bourgeoisie, the closer their race had progressed towards civilisation. (Carl Van Vechten explored the ramifications of this impulse in his novel Nigger Heaven.) After the Second World War, the African-American community sought out its own culture. Novelists such as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright dared to explore the otherness of the black American. Local acts of revolt against racism and segregation fired the national civil-rights movement. And many urban blacks brazenly adopted customs that they had once tried to conceal in their hope of being accepted by white America. Their language changed: as Ebony magazine noted in 1961, ‘The real Negro folk idiom14 becomes chic’ – the word ‘funky’, for example, passing from being taboo to being shouted aloud. Likewise ‘soul food’, the down-home cooking which would have been despised by polite society, but which stood for home, solidarity, comfort and belonging: ‘collard greens and ham hocks, chitterlings, pig ears and pig feet’. Soul equalled community; soul equalled blackness; soul was a race unafraid to revel in its own culture. And soul was soon borrowed by white critics to describe their own, when under the influence of ‘Negro’ music. In 1962, not only did Elvis Presley have soul, according to a jazz magazine, but the Italian-American singer Timi Yuro borrowed the word for an album title.

  For Aretha Franklin, the daughter of a preacher man, ‘soul’ was how her father sang and declaimed from the pulpit. To Thomas Dorsey, ‘soul’ was an adjective that should be reserved for one form of music: African-American gospel singing. The soul was for Christ, the heart for politics and romance, so the secular brand should be known as ‘heart music15’. It didn’t catch on. A more considered objection came from the writer Horton Floyd, in a polemic he titled ‘I’m Sick of Soul’. Why, he asked, was the Negro race eulogising a quality inspired by its experience of slavery and segregation? ‘By isolating what they believe16 to be a superior Negro characteristic, they are merely giving credence to the racists’ dogma’, he argued: all racial superiority was wrong, whether it was white slave-owner over black slave, or black ‘soul’ over white ‘soul-less’. The questions could spiral from there: did everything black automatically have soul? If soul came from oppression and defiance, what would happen when the black community was free from racism? Were the Black Muslims justified in preaching black supremacy? In the words of a hit by black singer Ben E. King, ‘What is Soul?’

  By 1963, it was clear: ‘soul’ was the name for contemporary black music, while any white singer who could convincingly echo the passion and rhythm of a Ray Charles or an Aretha Franklin was said to be singing ‘blue-eyed soul’. The blues tradition, traced back to W. C. Handy and proudly carried forward by three generations as the emotional expression of black America, was now an embarrassment, reeking of slavery and the acceptance of inferiority (which showed how little people understood the rugged defiance that was at its heart). B. B. King recalled that ‘I was hurt, really hurt17, because many times in the past I was friendless, especially around young people … [they] didn’t appreciate me. There were many nights when I went back to my room and cried.’

  In later years, soul (like blues) would be re-categorised, sorted into neat and restrictive genres, from Northern soul to uptown soul, deep soul and pop soul. It would also cast its reach backwards, to claim the singers who dominated the Rhythm and Blues charts after the initial burst of black rock ’n’ roll in the 1940s. These were men such as Bobby Bland, Clyde McPhatter and Little Willie John, who in their very different ways expressed the sexual thrills and torments of everyday black life. Willie John was the most potent (and now least remembered) of them all: a consummate and consummating ladies’ man, whose stage was customarily littered with underwear and room keys. He dominated an audience with a swagger that would later be copied by James Brown, then by Tina Turner, ultimately by the young Michael Jackson. He sang with utter self-assurance, his voice able to cruise all around the melody and then come back to claim it when it counted (a quality which Stevie Wonder compared with jazzmen such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane).

  Ultimately, Little Willie John wanted to be Frank Sinatra, just as Nat King Cole did: to win the respect of an audience in Vegas or on Broadway, not to be scuffl
ing on the so-called chitlin circuit. Cole made it; John fell into romantic and psychological turmoil, which would result in his being sent to jail for murder. But although he too might tackle a Broadway hit, James Brown never set his sights on cabaret. His aim was to be the hardest-working man in show business, with the tightest band and the most compelling act in the world. In the decade before he discovered the complex rhythmic patterns of funk, he concentrated on delivering a shattering emotional experience with each record and every performance.fn1 That process began with his first release, ‘Please, Please, Please’, on which, as his baffled white label boss accurately exclaimed, ‘He’s just singing the same damn19 word over and over!’ And if the feeling of soul was there, one word was more than enough.

  The entire R&B market20 today is dominated by three factors: vocal groups who seem to have issued to one another a challenge boasting, ‘We can sing out-of-tuner than you can’; tortured, tortuous ballad singers, who would lose all their appeal if they were fitted with spines; [and] instrumentalists who made names for themselves on personal appearances by playing a solo and simultaneously removing their jacket, pants, shirt and teeth while suspended from a chandelier.

  Leonard Feather, Down Beat, May 1955

  The groups are all getting21 to sound like each other. Those crazy falsettos and bass voices alternating in a tune sound all the same in most of the groups. And you know, man, they’re full of those highschool romance thoughts like, ‘Why did you leave me’ and ‘The stars above shine down’ and all that baloney. After a while, the stuff gets on your nerves.

  Savoy Records boss Herman Lubinsky, 1958

  Suits were obligatory; ties long or bowed; hair processed or cropped; voices arranged from bass (comedic, sexual) to falsetto (anguished, vulnerable) via tenor (romantic) and baritone (sensual). Their antecedents were the Mills Brothers with their vocalised jazz instruments, and the Ink Spots’ impossibly angelic chorus. For a dozen years after the Second World War, the vocal group was a repository of emotions which veered between the extremes of sentimentality and eroticism. Only then, when all the permutations of carnality and romance had been exhausted, did white kids join the game, to provide the bridge between the wild-man tradition of rock ’n’ roll and the collectivism of the 1960s rock groups.

  The 5 Red Caps laid out the boundaries with two singles in 1944: the almost a cappella ‘I Learned a Lesson’, slow and saintly; followed by ‘Boogie Woogie Ball’, which was playtime for a street-corner posse. In 1946, the Delta Rhythm Boys accidentally provided a title for this often-overlooked chapter of R&B history, their background singers crooning ‘doo doo doo-wop’ behind the jocular bass lead of ‘Just A-Sittin’ and A-Rockin’’. But it was the Ravens with ‘Write Me a Letter’ the following year who made the case for doo-wop vocal groups to be classified as rhythm and blues – and as men, not teenage boys. For almost a year, they ruled unchallenged, until the Orioles offered the ethereal ‘It’s Too Soon to Know’. By the early 1950s, as one bird group begat another, a menagerie was uncaged, which was chiming with Larks, Swallows, Robins and Crests. But the church-or-street, good-or-bad division remained, with the same unit often switching back and forth on each release.

  The Orioles evoked the high church, with the 1953 reverence of ‘Crying in the Chapel’ followed by ‘In the Mission of St Augustine’. The alternative was a blues two-step which swaggered with street smarts and blues mentality, usually dripping with wry humour and self-deprecation: the catalogue of the Clovers, for example, which led inevitably to the three-minute musical cartoons of the Robins and finally the Coasters.

  By 1951, there was a group who could straddle both extremes, and touch places where the others would not dare to go. With ‘Do Something for Me’, the Dominoes (led by Billy Ward) featured a lead voice that soared as it fluttered, lost in the ambiguous ecstasy of its emotions. Though Ward took the credit and the money, that singer was Clyde McPhatter, who reached his peak of passion on ‘These Foolish Things’, which sounded as if it had been recorded during an attack of delirium. Not surprisingly, as Jet magazine reported, ‘Teenagers used to go22 into hysterics’ when he performed. But the same group could intersperse McPhatter’s sentimental agony with a song as carnal as ‘Sixty Minute Man’, in which the bass man boasted of his impressive sexual endurance. When it was finally released in Britain five years later, Jazz Journal said that ‘this ugly record23’ was ‘not recommended for the private turntable … we plunge into the sediment of the music business … If this record can be likened to any one thing, it must be indecent exposure.’ It topped the American Rhythm and Blues chart for more than three months. When McPhatter joined the Drifters in 1953, tired of Ward’s inequitable financial arrangements, the Dominoes secured a new lead vocalist whose flamboyance could handle everything from fiery sexuality to teenage infatuation: Jackie Wilson.fn2

  The sexuality of ‘Sixty Minute Man’ led to the notorious ‘Annie’ records by Hank Ballard & the Midnighters in 1954, in which Annie first gave Hank a good working-over, then (in a scenario worthy of a country record) fell pregnant, leaving Hank to tackle ‘Annie’s Aunt Fannie’. He interrupted the sequence only to praise another girl’s ‘Sexy Ways’. Choirboy harmonies wouldn’t have suited scenarios this lascivious, and the Midnighters were able to capitalise on an abrupt shift of style amongst black vocal groups in 1953: from ballads and blues to romping rock ’n’ roll. Suddenly the white boys were listening as well – to the Clovers, for sure, as their ‘Good Lovin’’ was the skeleton for Elvis Presley’s ‘Too Much’, while a chunk of ‘Lovey Dovey’ was reproduced twenty years later on Steve Miller’s ‘The Joker’. But the trend that inspired white kids to gather on street corners and imitate what they’d heard on the jukebox was the combination of rock rhythm and a barrage of nonsensical syllables – parodied, inevitably, by Stan Freberg. His target was the Chords’ 1954 hit ‘Sh-Boom’, which set a hookline from the nineteenth-century children’s song ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ (‘life is but a dream’) against a track that anticipated the Jamaican ska sound, and then freed the background singers to conjure up as many vocal sounds as they could without uttering a recognisable word. From that glorious moment, it was a short step to ‘Ling, Ting, Tong’ (the Charms), ‘Chop Chop Boom’ (the Dandeliers) – and, indeed, Gene Vincent’s anthem of incoherent lust, ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’, and years later, the Crystals’ proof that words sometimes aren’t enough, ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’.

  There were numerous white attempts at this doo-wop glossolalia, although most of them concentrated on the syllables at the expense of the beat, and the groups looked and sounded like barbershop quartets; or, perhaps, college glee clubs, a category into which you could squeeze the jazz harmonies of the Four Freshmen (a key influence on the Beach Boys) and the jog-trotting harmlessness of the Four Lads’ ‘Standing on the Corner’. Only in late 1957 did white America launch its own doo-wop tradition, with the banality of the Royal Teens’ ‘Short Shorts’, leading to the gum-chewing, leather-clad machismo of Danny & the Juniors and (the apex of this short-lived movement) Dion & the Belmonts.

  While the young men crooned, rocked and boasted about their sexual conquests, their female counterparts were more restrained. The exceptions were Shirley Gunter & the Queens, who inaugurated the decade-long tradition of the black ‘girl group’ with 1954’s hard-rocking ‘Oop Shoop’. Three years passed before the Bobbettes and the Chantels picked up the torch, with records (‘Mr Lee’ and ‘He’s Gone’ respectively) accentuating their youthfulness; ensuring that romance, rather than ravishment, would be their eternal destiny. This mirrored the fate of the countless combinations of young white women who had followed the jazz-inspired Boswell Sisters and the boogie-woogie-loving Andrews Sisters – a trail towards complete sexlessness which culminated in the almost eerily pure outings of the Chordettes (‘Mr Sandman’ and ‘Born to Be With You’, for instance).

  Only their best prom dresses would suffice for these girl groups, black and white. As such they offered little temptatio
n to the Jewish writing and producing partnership of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who opted to declare their love for rhythm and blues by producing delicious mini-movies which sold equally well to whites and blacks. The most colourful of these were reserved for the Coasters, who sounded like a bunch of hoodlums who’d opted for careers in stand-up comedy. The roles they were given – every line and audible grimace pre-rehearsed – created stereotypes of both black men and teenagers, but were assembled with such love and craft that it is hard to view them as demeaning.

  It was Leiber and Stoller, too, who tipped rhythm and blues into a new era of sophistication, as they married the soul of Ray Charles with a Brazilian beat and a swirling string section on 1958’s ‘There Goes My Baby’ by the Drifters.fn3 They remade the pop single as a dramatic vignette: a compressed bundle of emotion and action, which could explode to fill the listener’s imagination. What they achieved with subtlety, their protégé Phil Spector would soon pursue with cathartic excess: a ‘scorched earth’ philosophy against the expertly placed landmines with which Leiber and Stoller dotted their aural landscapes. In his (white) hands, black music became a personal statement rather than a badge of racial identity.

  For Ray Charles, whose progress through the 1950s involved urban realism and sexuality, strings represented not just prestige (Sinatra and Sammy Davis had strings too) but freedom. ‘Us rhythm and blues25 musicians had had a label slapped on us’, he recalled. ‘Strings were out.’ By the end of the 1950s, he was recording both carnal incantations and time-honoured Broadway songs – the first with yelps of sexual ecstasy, the second with an orchestra Sinatra would have relished. From there, demolishing barriers as he went, he set out to bridge the racial divide, and cut albums of country songs. ‘After all,’ he explained, ‘the Grand Ole Opry26 had been performing inside my head since I was a kid in the country.’ It would take another two decades, and the passing of civil-rights legislation, for Ray Charles to feature on country radio; but in 1962 he succeeded in crossing the other way, persuading R&B (and pop) record buyers to sample the best of Nashville’s songs. ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’ topped both charts for weeks. ‘I wasn’t aware of any bold act27 on my part or any big breakthrough’, he said, while conceding that his country style ‘made the black stations, simply ’cause they had no choice; the record was too important to be ignored’.