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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 182 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Right On: From Blues to Soul in Black America
Michael Haralambos
Causeway Press £12.95
The influence of both blues and soul on contemporary popular music is difficult to underestimate. Both have been incorporated into the mainstream of American culture to the point where no nostalgia trip is complete without them as part of the soundtrack.
Right On is an attempt to analyse what conditions gave birth to and sustained blues as a music form. It seeks to explain why blues stagnated and was replaced by soul as the dominant popular music form in black America. It is a fascinating study conducted by someone more famous for his A level sociology text books than for his love of black American music.
In the cotton states of America’s southern delta region conditions for black Americans were appalling. Economic exploitation had long replaced slavery but the levels of poverty, racism and the repression of those who fought back made the Delta comparable to South Africa. It was in these states that blues developed toward the end of the 19th century.
The songs that were sung typically did not talk of a bright future in a promised land, nor of the racism that existed all around them, nor even of the resistance which occasionally broke out, but of the pain of existence in a world where the odds were stacked against you. Blues dealt with the results rather than the causes. Roy Brown sang Hard Luck Blues, ‘I’ve got so much, so much trouble / Sometimes I sit and cry / I’m gonna find my mother’s grave / fall on the tombstone and die.’
The ending of the First World War saw the beginning of the move north for many. Those from the delta took their musical traditions with them and harshness of life in the south was replaced by harshness of life in the ghettos of Chicago and Detroit. Initially blues was still a reflection of the conditions that people found themselves in, but by the mid-1950s the social and political position of black Americans was beginning to change.
The year 1960 is described by some as ‘the year of the massive awakening’ for black America. Four black students from a college in North Carolina sat down at an all-white lunch counter in Woolworths and refused to be moved. One year later more than 50,000 people were involved in civil rights demonstrations. The ‘awakening’ is reflected in the music of the time, soul music.
As a music form, soul owes more to gospel than it does to blues not just because the ‘call-response’ structure which is typical of soul but because of its optimism. Gospel always offered the hope of a better life after death. Soul reflected a feeling that a better life could be had before death and a degree of determination and pride which could be interpreted in a variety of ways. James Brown sang it in Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud: ‘But we’d rather die on our feet / than keep living on our knees / Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.’
Right On chronicles the development of two music forms in relation to the economic and political periods in which they emerged and the result is a book which offers many insights and a fascinating read at the same time.
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