Abstract
On the early evening of April 4, 1968, at the intersection of College Street and McLemore Avenue in South Memphis, the architects of the Southern Soul sound were conducting a session in Studio A of Stax Records. Three miles away, at the Lorraine Motel, Sam & Dave’s baritone player waited for Isaac Hayes, then one-half of the in-house songwriting-duo Hayes-Porter, to drive him to the studio. When Hayes’s wife indicated that she needed the family car, Hayes told the baritone player that they would take separate taxis to the studio. It was during that ride that Hayes heard of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Devastated, Hayes arrived at the session unaware of the degree to which King’s death would change his consciousness as an artist and an African American.1 As riots broke out across Memphis, Stax co-owner Estelle Axton confessed that staff feared for the safety of the studio because of its reputation as a white-owned label. Anticipating that the building would be burned or vandalized, Axton’s brother and Stax co-owner Jim Stewart recruited two other staff members to help move studio recordings offsite as a preventative measure.2
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Notes
Robert Bowman, Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records (New York, NY: Schirmer Books, 1997), 144.
Dorian Lynskey, 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (London, UK: Faber and Faber, 2010), 150.
David P. Szatmary, Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2004), 173.
For additional information on the methodology informing the use of textual analysis in this chapter, please see Angela Y. Davis on Blues women and the post–World War I and interwar period, Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday (New York City, NY: Random House Inc., 1998).
Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and the Black Public Culture (New York City, NY: Routledge, 1999), 42–44, 51–53, 88–90.
Michael Eric Dyson, Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye (New York, NY: Basic Civitas Books, 2004), 48.
William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), 412–414.
Black Power pluralism held that the interrelationship between individual and group power was crucial. Believing that economic and political access to power was divided among a number of competing ethnic and racialized groups, pluralists argued that the inability of African Americans to obtain an equal access to power stemmed from their failure to mobilize into an effective bloc that stressed collective success over individual achievement. The solution was to use issue-oriented coalition politics in order to draw together and empower disparate groups around issues of overriding importance at the state and national levels. For additional information on Black Power Pluralism, see John T. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African American Political Thought (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992), 116–117, 150–182.
Black Power nationalism advocated on behalf of efforts to reclaim, preserve, and strengthen an in-group identity, this time for reasons of exercising choice, power, and the maintenance of long-term sociocultural autonomy. Interested in averting assimilation and withdrawing from the body politic, nationalists tended to believe that African Americans had to be awakened and unified in order to understand that they must define and establish their own values in order to succeed in their struggle for power. For additional information on Black Power Nationalism, see William L. Van DeBurg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 25–27;, 112–118, 129–131
and John T. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African American Political Thought (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992), 118–177.
Signifying practice is considered an intrinsically subversive rhetorical device whereby the speaker uses words and phrases that are indirect, repetitive, and meant to foster new meanings outside of the mainstream discourse. For additional information on signifying practice, see Dick Hebdige, “Style as Homology and Signifying Practice,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Andrew Goodwin and Simon Frith (London: Routledge, 1990), 60–61.
David Brackett, “The Politics and Practice of ‘Crossover’ in American Popular Music, 1963 to 1965,” The Musical Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 311.
Joel Whitburn, Joel Whitburn Presents: Top R&B/Hip-Hop Singles, 1942–2004 (Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, MI: Record Research Inc., 2004), 84.
James Brown, “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” 1968, Say It Live and Loud: Live in Dallas 08.26.68 (Polydor 31455 7668–2, 1968).
James Brown, The Godfather of Soul: An Autobiography (New York, NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), 196.
Lynskey, 33 Revolutions Per Minute, 154; Rickey Vincent, “James Brown: Icon of Black Power,” in The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture, ed. Tony Bolden (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 60.
Africanisms are described as flexible conceptual frameworks that have survived throughout slave capture, changing and adapting to diasporic conditions in order to inspire creativity throughout the Americas. This framework, in relation to music-making, includes an aesthetic of group participation: a performance style that uses body language and dress to convey a sense of being hip and emotionally intense; an aesthetic of sound that encourages the expressive use of timbre; an improvisatory sense that privileges the reinterpretation of familiar material over being faithful to the original; and a preference for topical music and social commentary. This framework has helped scholars of African American music understand how black musicians have built upon the foundation of inherited African values, styles, and sensibilities. For additional information on Africanisms, see Joseph E. Holloway, ed. Africanisms in American Culture, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005).
Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby, African American Music: An Introduction (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 51–54; James Stewart, “Message in the Music: Political Commentary in Black Popular Music from Rhythm and Blues to Early Hip Hop,” The Journal of African American History (2005): 313.
Mark Anthony Neal, “Trouble Man: The Art and Politics of Marvin Gaye,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 22, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 252.
Robert W. Stephens, “Soul: A Historical Reconstruction of Continuity and Change in Black Popular Music,” The Black Perspective in Music 12, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 26–27;
Joyce Marie Jackson, “The Changing Nature of Gospel Music: A Southern Case Study,” African American Review 29, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 192;
Jon Fitzgerald, “Motown Crossover Hits 1963–1966 and the Creative Process,” Popular Music 14, no. 1 (January 1995): 3–4.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 109–110; Burnim and Maultsby, African American Music, 296–303.
Nina Simone and Stephen Cleary, I Put A Spell On You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1991), 95–96.
Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 300; Simone and Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, 80.
Waldo E. Martin Jr., “Representation, Authenticity and the Cultural Politics of Black Power” in The Cultural Turn in U.S History: Past, Present and Future, ed. James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman and Michael O’Malley, 256 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Gerald David Janes, A Common Destiny: Blacks and the American Society; Committee on the Status of Black Americans, Commission on Behavioural and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council, (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1989), 273.
Francesca D’Amico, “Inner City Conditions: Drugs, Employment/Unemployment, Urban Decay, Economy and Poverty, Crime and Violence and Family,” Politico-Soul/Funk Idiom Database, 1968–1979. Organized and Collected by Francesca D’Amico, September and October 2011.
David Ritz, Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1985), 140.
Joanna Demers, “Sampling the 1970s in Hip Hop” Popular Music 22, no. 1 (2003): 45.
Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Holiday: A Memoir (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2012), 174–175.
Tony Bolden, “Blue/Funk as Political Philosophy: The Poetry of Gil Scott-Heron,” in The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture, ed. Tony Bolden (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 229.
ZZ Scott-Heron, “Pardon Our Analysis (We Beg Your Pardon),” 1975.
Tadhg O’Keeffe, “Street Ballets in Magic Cities: Cultural Imaginings of the Modern American Metropolis,” Popular Music History 4, no. 2 (2010): 123.
Gillian Frank, “Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash Against Disco,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 2 (May 2007): 287–288.
Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk, 1978–1984, (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2005), 154–157.
Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 168.
For more information on Greil Marcus’s observations see Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll (London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1975).
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D’Amico, F. (2014). The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, But It Will Be Recorded: Soul, Funk, and the Black Urban Experience, 1968–1979. In: Brown, T.S., Lison, A. (eds) The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375230_12
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