I Believe To My Soul
Available 4th October 2005
I’d like to tell you everything, of course. I’d like for you to know every unlikely event that led me to the famed Capitol Studios in Hollywood for seven days of recording this past June, with some of the greatest living artists of soul music.
Not
that the music that resulted needs subtitles; I believe it
will ultimately –and must- provide its own context.
Still, there is history to be considered. If a beautiful woman
were to stroll past your front stoop on a summer evening, startling
even the young toughs out for a smoke, you wouldn’t need
me to make sense of it for you. But if the young lady also
happened to be the great-granddaughter of both Fats Waller
and Amelia Erhardt, you might like me to point that out to
you; then that long, hard second look might offer nuances that
you had initially failed to consider, like that swing in her
step, or the far away look in her eyes. Somebody stop me.
es, there is history to consider. And historically, Soul Music is as important as any music that has ever been produced in this country. It offers us our most authentic amalgam of gospel, blues and rural country music, as if all three had been funneled into a single jar, shaken, and then passed hand-to-hand. And everyone who has had a taste knows its sweet overtones and biting finish. But it is stunning to realize that, while thirty years ago soul music was chart topping pop music, there remains only the narrowest platform for those artists practicing a contemporary version of the form. What is now called R&B has staked out its own decidedly distinctive territory in the mainstream; and while the lineage is obvious, there appears to be no room in the manger for the deep, cool, sultry and mature reflections of love and loss, pain and redemption that are the hallmark of classic soul –to say nothing of story and melody. It’s impossible, for instance, to listen to a record by Angie Stone or Mary J. Blige and not hear the debts owed to Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye and The Staple Singers; yet how many of their young audience has been given the map to trace their few fragments of silver up river and back to the mine? We continue to revere classic rock’n’roll, and dedicate much real estate and air space to its forerunners; but we’ve become deaf to the enduring contributions of the great soul practitioners that helped inspire it –even though many still walk mightily among us. And make no mistake: those legacy artists are not the only ones who suffer the consequences of our naïve indifference.
The path that led me to this specific project has been a circuitous one. It began, strangely enough, with the comedian Richard Pryor. (Note to self: the ways of the lord are mysterious indeed.) My brother David and I spent almost two years working at Richard’s behest, fashioning the events of his astounding and turbulent life into a screenplay. While doing so, I sought solace and inspiration in the music that most mattered to Richard during his zenith years of the 1970’s: Parliament Funkadelic, LaBelle, electric Miles and, most significantly, Ann Peebles.
I had a cursory knowledge of Ann’s work before this; but once I started to really listen, I became obsessed with her beautiful song craft, the understatement of her recorded performances, and with her voice -which I find as evocative as any I have ever heard.
I became a pilgrim and a zealot and a sideshow barker; an advocate for an artistry that I’d witnessed to be death defying and life changing.
Around the same time, by way of coincidence and good fortune, I produced a record for soul great Solomon Burke. While doing interviews on his behalf, it became apparent that many others, not just myself, were starved for a contemporary version of authentic Soul. As result, I saw an opportunity to legitimize and feed my obsession. And I realized I had a choice: I could lie around the house in my bathrobe and hope that, say, Ann Peebles would one day be directed by the universe to seek me out as a conspirator, or I could imagine a scenario that would give me an excuse to call her.
My bathrobe in tatters, and my house too noisy to lie in, I chose the latter. I called Ann. And Mavis Staples. And Billy Preston, Irma Thomas and the great Allen Toussaint, among others; and I worked my sideshow barker routine in two directions, playing both ends against the middle: coaxing the participation of some of my favorite living artists, while simultaneously seeking a label home that would facilitate a collaborative project between them.
All things considered, it wasn’t as difficult as it perhaps should have been. I wasn’t the only one, apparently, who saw the opportunity as important and viable. So with the combined support of Warner Strategic Marketing and Hear Music, I set camp for one week at the afore-mentioned studio in Hollywood and assembled the most creative and sympathetic musicians I could imagine. I invited Allen Toussaint to be not only a featured artist but also a daily guest in the band (akin to asking James Joyce to sit in at a writer’s workshop); and then I set spinning the revolving door. Each day or so a different artist walked in to change the color of the light, and to embody two or three songs they’d never recorded before –much of it new and original material.
The result, then, is new music done in a classic mode, not a recreation of classic music. It is a record authentic to where these five particular artists find themselves today –and in relationship to each other. It is music steeped in tradition, but played with no particular reverence for it. We had only one criterion for the music as we worked –that it feel like a living thing when we stepped away from it.
It doesn’t matter to me at all if you call this “Soul Music” or not. Anything that comes out of the mouth of Irma Thomas or Mavis or Billy Preston is inarguably…soulful. What matters is that we have stepped away from it; and it moves on without us.
Joe Henry
South Pasadena, CA