The problem I had with soul music is that by the time I was listening to pop music actively in the 1970s it was becoming obvious that there was a huge difference between a lot of what was called soul music and music that had soul. Soul had always been smoother and slicker than its cousin funk, but as the '70s progressed it lost whatever edge it might have had and degenerated into middle of the road sludge with all the sexuality of the suburban shopping malls it was being pumped into. The idea that anyone could consider what Hall & Oates sang as being in anyway related to the music of Isaac Hayes and James Brown was almost as nauseating as equating Pat Boone with Little Richard because he covered "Tutti Frutti" (to this day one of pop music's biggest abominations).
Of course one of the problems was the continued lack of integration of pop radio, as there was some music that was still considered too "black" to be played on the mainstream pop stations. Growing up in lily white Toronto, Ontario of the 1970s you hardly ever heard James Brown or Isaac Hayes on the radio, and that's probably the reason that I never even heard of Al Green until the Talking Heads covered his great song "Take Me To The River" on their album More Songs About Buildings And Food. Even their minimalist version couldn't disguise the song's great mixture of soul and gospel and set me to wondering who this guy Al Green was.
Well, of course Al Green still is; in fact he's just released a new album, Lay It Down, a collaborative effort with a variety of hip-hop and soul singers from today's generation of musicians. While Al has been releasing soul records since the late 1980s there was another reason for me not being familiar with him back in the 1970s — he had stopped doing pop music to concentrate on performing gospel. Now I had vaguely known about his change of life for some time now, but I didn't really know any of the details. Twenty-five years ago American documentary film maker Robert Mugge released Gospel According To Al Green that talked to Green about that issue, and in celebration of the movie's twenty-fifth anniversary Acorn Media will be releasing a special edition DVD version of the film on January 27, 2009.
Article comments
1 - Tom
You'll never catch me saying Daryl Hall & John Oates are soul singers (well, except for Daryl's "Soul Alone" album), they're the best rock duo in history.