While tracing the pioneering efforts of such pre-soul savants as Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, et. When Rufus Thomas told me that playing frat parties at Ole Miss was to play before ‘the greatest audiences in the world,’ he was completely serious!” It’s ironic, but these bastions of white privilege provided an avenue for black musicians that gave a great many white Southerners their first, in-person glimpse of black music. “The other thing that shocked me was the importance of the Southern fraternity circuit. I was surprised to find how much of a creative contribution was made by white Southerners-writers, musicians and producers such as Dan Penn, Rick Hall and Chips Moman-who, in helping to create this new sound, were able to throw off the old, traditional attitudes and forge a new identity for themselves as well. “For example, I’d always taken the view that the development of soul music went hand-in-hand with the Civil Rights Movement as an expression of black pride in one’s heritage. I interviewed 125 people, many of them two or three times, because I kept uncovering fresh information. “Originally, I thought the book would take me three years to write-it wound up taking five.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |