The Birth of Soul Reviewed

This three-disc album is arranged chronologically covering the period from 1952-1959.

Disc 1

The first five tracks on Disc are vocalized with big band orchestration. The first three are smooth and jazzy. Starting with track 4, Jumpin' in the Morning, the sound becomes less smooth and more R&B.

Tracks 6 through 17 feature smaller, rhythmic R&B sounding bands. These tracks are bluesy, becoming more and more intense, bringing in gospel elements toward the end of the disc.

My favorite Ray Charles is the blues singer. My favorite track on this disc is # 8, Sinner's Prayer, featuring a great blues band, Ray's piano, and a gospel-charged soulfulness. Here is an older Ray Charles singing and playing this song with B.B. King.


Disc 2

Disc 2 is the heart of this album. The blues/gospel fusion is well developed, and Charles' voice is amazing with an inner lightness under the grit.

I have a lot of favorite tracks from this disc, but the first (track 18), I Got a Woman, is a must-listen. It is a Ray Charles original, based on a gospel tune, but I thought it was a traditional blues when I first heard it. Come Back Baby, track 20, sounds very gospel to me, slow, rhythmic, and intense with gospel shouting, and Hard Times, track 23, sounds very bluesy. Starting with track 26, Drown in My Own Tears, another soulful favorite of mine, Ray's back up singers, the Raylettes, first appear. Hallelujah I Love Her So, track 27, is a Ray Charles hallmark, here in a youtube of a rare 1955 live performance.

Disc 3

Here there are fewer Ray Charles originals, a general smoothing out of the grit, and evidences of a more commercial sound. Track 36, Swanee River, is cute, a soul-ish version of a classic with an R&B beat. Tracks 37-39 are straight R&B to my ears. Track 40, I Want a Little Girl, is to the tune of This little Light of Mine, and has a commercialized R&B sound. My track picks from disc 3 are track 44, Tell the World About You and Track 50, What'd I Say, seen here in a remarkable 1963 performance.

Happy New Year everyone! I plan to spend the holiday listening to Ray's Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, number 104 on the Rolling Stone Magazine list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

The Genius: Ray Charles and the Birth of Soul

The Birth of Soul: The Complete Atlantic Rhythm and Blues Recordings 1952-1959 by Ray Charles made the number 53 spot of Rolling Stone Magazine's 2003 list of the top 500 albums of all time.

On listening to all three discs in this collection for the first time, the greatness was not in question, but the quality that stood out most for me was the fluidity of Ray Charles' performances. He seems the easy master of every style from jazz to pop to r&b to pre- rock and roll, and especially the blues. In his liner notes for this album,* Robert Palmer also notes Charles' versatility, calling him "...[a] musical polymath, blender and creator of of idioms, setter of styles and trends...." According to Palmer, around Atlantic Records they took to calling him The Genius.

But what about this "birth of soul" business? Soul music is variously defined as a mixture of blues and gospel and, more often, as a mixture of rhythm and blues and gospel. Soul music tends to be grittier and more emotionally intense than typical R&B, and uses gospel devices like call and response and the gospel choir (ie: the backup singers). Since the 1960s, what is called soul music has diversified quite a bit, according to allmusic, but in the 1950s of Ray Charles' creative flowering, he is credited with bringing gospel fervor to the blues and creating soul music.

Charles himself describes the process, as quoted by Robert Palmer: "There was a crossover between gospel music and the rhythm patterns of the blues, which I think came down through the years from slavery times....But when I started doing things that would be based on an old gospel tune I got criticism from the churches, and from musicians too. They thought it was sacrilegious or something....But I kept doing it, and eventually...the people started saying I was an innovator."

Next time, I'll go through the discs with my comments and Youtube links to give you a taste of this genius.

* This 3 disc set is available at our library, but Robert Palmer's liner notes are missing. They can be found in the Robert Palmer collection Blues and Chaos, not in our collection but available through our library system.

Josh Groban on the Big Screen

Saturday, December 19 at 2:00 pm

Don't miss this concert filmed in Pasadena and backed by a symphonic orchestra. Groban's debut album, Josh Groban, was released in November 2001. Over the next year, Groban became a star. His album went double platinum, and he had his own PBS special in November 2002. This is the PBS concert featuring the following selections:

1. Alla Luce Del Sole
2. You're Still You
3. Vincent (Starry Starry Night)
4. Gira Con Me Questra Notte
5. Un Amore Per Sempre
6. Alejate
7. Broken Vow
8. To Where You Are
9. Cinema Paradiso (se)
10. For Always (song from A.I. - John Williams Conducting)
11. Home to Stay
12. Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring
13. Canto Alla Vita
14. The Prayer (featuring Angie Stone)
15. Let Me Fall (from Cirque du Soleil)

R&B & Soul Album Playlist

Following the lead of young Angela, the creator of a Five Year Crash Course in Music, I made a list of (take a deep breath) the 30 best R&B & Soul albums from 1952 to 1993. I hasten to add that any such list is arbitrary and leaves a lot out, but I wanted to give myself, and possibly you, a crash course in pop music history, focusing on one genre.

Again following the lead of Ang, I consulted the Rolling Stone Magazine list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. There, after eliminating all the rock, I was left with a list of about 45 albums containing many by Stevie Wonder, quite a few by James Brown, just about all that Otis Redding ever made, and some others. While I agree about Otis Redding, I only wanted to sample one album, hopefully the best, by each artist. So putting together the Rolling Stone list with the genre lists at Allmusic, I came up with my own R&B & Soul Album Playlist. I wound up with 29 artists, so to round the list off to 30 I added Wilson Pickett because I like him. (PS: I hope you click on the links above, especially the Allmusic, one which is crammed with information.)

Here is the list, in rough chronological order:

Ray Charles (genre) (Soul) (album) The Birth of Soul

Fats Domino (New Orleans/R&B) Walking to New Orleans

Etta James (R&B) At Last

Jackie Wilson (Chicago Soul) Mr. Excitement

Sam Cooke (Soul) Live at the Harlem Square Club 1963

The Drifters (Soul) Under the Boardwalk

James Brown (Soul/Funk) Live at the Apollo 1963

Smokey Robinson (Soul/Motown) Going to a GoGo

The Supremes (Soul/Motown) Where Did Our love Go?

The Temptations (Soul/Motown) The Temptin' Temptations

Aretha Franklin (Soul/Urban) I Never Loved a Man Like I Love You

Dr. John (R&B/New Orleans) GrisGris

Otis Redding (Soul/Southern) Otis Blue

Sly & the Family Stone (Funk) Fresh

Ike & Tina Turner (Funk/Soul) Proud Mary: The Best of Ike & Tina Turner

Lou Rawls (Soul/Philly) The Best of Lou Rawls

Marvin Gaye (Soul/Motown) What's Going On?

Wilson Pickett (Soul/Southern) The Exciting Wilson Pickett

Stevie Wonder (Soul/Funk/Motown) Innervisions

Al Greene (Soul) Greatest Hits

Curtis Mayfield (Chicago Soul/Funk) Superfly

Earth, Wind and Fire (Funk/Soul/Urban) Gratitude

Gladys Knight (Soul/Motown/Urban) Imagination

Michael Jackson (Motown/Urban) Off the Wall

Funkadelic (R&b/Funk) One Nation Under a Groove

Whitney Houston (R&B) Whitney Houston

Janet Jackson (R&B) Rhythm Nation 1814

Mary J. Blige (R&B/Urban) My Life

D'Angelo (Soul/Neo-Soul) Brown Sugar

Toni Braxton (Contemp. R&B) Toni Braxton

Please let me know if I've left off anyone important, or if you have an alternate album choice. It was Ang's 60s list headed by Aretha Franklin that set me off on this soulful path. I've listened to her album, but I think I'll come back to it, since I want to start at the top chronologically. I'll listen to and comment on at least some of the albums and artists, and discuss the genre definitions along the way. On to Ray Charles then.

I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving.

We interupt R&B...

...to bring you news from another part of the music world. This week the Country Music Association (CMA) passed out awards during its annual showcase which was televised on Veterans Day, November 11.

Here are this year's winners:

Entertainer of the Year: Taylor Swift (of course)

Song of the Year: "In Color" (Jamey Johnson, Lee Thomas Miller, James Otto)

Single of the Year" "I Run to You" (Lady Antebellum)

Album of the Year: Fearless (Taylor Swift)

Male Vocalist of the Year: Brad Paisley

Female Vocalist of the Year: Taylor Swift

Vocal Duo of the Year: Sugarland

Vocal Group of the Year: Lady Antebellum

Musician of the Year: Mac McAnally

New Artist of the Year: Darius Rucker

Music Video of the Year: Love Story (Taylor Swift)

Here are some You Tube links:

Taylor Swift, Love Story
Lady Antebellum, I Run to You
Jamey Johnson with Keith Urban, In Color Don't miss this one.
Sugarland, Keep You Another great performance. What a voice!
Darius Rucker on Letterman Formerly of Hootie and the Blowfish

Best Of Lists and a Jazz Offering

A Five Year Crash Course in Music

Recently, I discovered a great idea while searching for musical ideas and news on line. A young British woman named Ang (short for Angela) is compiling lists of the 52 best pop music albums of every decade starting with the 60s. She proposes to listen to one album each week and post video and written reviews when she has digested the music by listening to the album at least five times. Here is a link to her blog in the section where she explains how she selected her album candidates. You can click through to see her lists for the 60s and 70s and the reviews she has posted so far. You can also follow her on Facebook.

So far Ang has posted her 60s and 70s list. Rather than her reviews, I am most interested in her selections. I am very tempted to follow her idea and listen to all of the top albums. In fact I started the process by listening to the first selection on Ang's 60s list: Aretha Franklin's I Never Loved a Man The Way I Love You, her first album on the Atlantic label.

In hearing Aretha at her best, I got interested in the definition and evolution of R&B and Soul music, a genre that I know little about except for what everyone hears on the radio. I am toying with idea of going through Ang's selections in this genre and perhaps researching some selections of my own. In any case, you will be hearing more about Aretha Franklin and this seminal album that began her rise to become Queen of Soul and one of the biggest music stars of all time.

Jazz on a Summer's Day

Meanwhile, join us in the large meeting room on the first floor of the library for a unique experience. On Saturday, November 21 at 2:00 PM we will be showing Jazz on a Summer's Day, a day in the life of the Newport Jazz festival of 1958. This is a true work of visual and musical art which mixes scenes of an idyllic summer on the water with jazz performances from the festival. This film captures a lost America and presents classic performers like Anita O'Day and Louis Armstrong in their prime. This ends our jazz offerings for a while (Fall is for jazz), so don't miss this large screen showing.

Time for Jazz

Coming soon, on Saturday October 10 at 2:00 pm, is one of the most unique and touching music documentaries you will ever see. Although it contains some rare performance footage, it is mainly a loving tribute to the men (and women, although there are fewer of them) who made jazz.

A Great Day in Harlem , a 1994 Oscar-nominated film documents the story behind the Summer day in 1985 when freelance photographer Art Kane gathered 57 jazz greats for a group portrait. The film highlights such seminal artists as Dizzy Gillespe, Thelonious Monk, Count Basie, and Gerry Mulligan. This film captures the past, or as the film's web site describes it:

"A Great Day in Harlem captures the spirit of an era when New York City was the center of the jazz world, when music history was constantly being made, and when creativity was fostered by an intense and nurturing community of musicians and fans. It was indeed a great day when musicians met and joked with friends, family, and community residents - in one instance even blowing a few jazz riffs - on a side street in Harlem in 1958. Like the photograph it documents, A Great Day in Harlem is a vivid portrait of a unique community."