A gripping narrative that captures the tumult and liberating energy of a nation in transition, Sweet Soul Music is an intimate portrait of the legendary performers--Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, James Brown, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Al Green among them--who merged gospel and rhythm and blues to create Southern soul music. Through rare interviews and with unique insight, Peter Guralnick tells the definitive story of the songs that inspired a generation and forever changed the sound of American music.
With his two short-story collections in the ’60s, Almost Grown and Mister Downchild, Peter Guralnick was a fiction writer first and a music historian second. Those origins are obvious in 1986’s Sweet Soul Music, with its epic trajectory, complex and relatable characters, telling details, and sharp prose that emphasizes empathy and clarity over showy idiosyncrasies. Tracing soul’s roots in the black church and its entry into the mainstream, Sweet Soul Music begins with the innovations of Sam Cooke and Ray Charles, who transformed gospel music by applying its emotionalism to secular matters. Cooke in particular—followed by the worldlier James Brown—was a savvy, striving businessman who broke new ground for blacks simply by succeeding in the industry.
“Soul music is Southern by definition if not by actual geography,” Guralnick writes, and the South becomes a richly complex, often hostile setting for this story, defined by segregation as well as by the desire to thwart it in search of great music. Both Stax in Memphis and Fame in Muscle Shoals were essentially integrated, with white and black musicians and businesspeople working alongside one another. Soul music, in addition to offering some of the hottest, rawest, and most inventive sounds of the ’50s and ’60s, provided a model of how an integrated society could interact to everyone’s benefit. “Soul music,” he writes, “derives, I believe, from the Southern dream of freedom.” And the book is as much about tragedy as triumph: the murder of Sam Cooke, the death of Otis Redding, the shuttering of Stax Records, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Ultimately, this is a book about what was and—just as crucially—what might have been. –Stephen M. Deusner
-<p>A gripping narrative that captures the tumult and liberating energy of a nation in transition, Sweet Soul Music is an intimate portrait of the legendary performers--Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, James Brown, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Al Green among them--who merged gospel and rhythm and blues to create Southern soul music. Through rare interviews and with unique insight, Peter Guralnick tells the definitive story of the songs that inspired a generation and forever changed the sound of American music.</p><p></p><p></p><p>With his two short-story collections in the ’60s, Almost Grown and Mister Downchild, Peter Guralnick was a fiction writer first and a music historian second. Those origins are obvious in 1986’s Sweet Soul Music, with its epic trajectory, complex and relatable characters, telling details, and sharp prose that emphasizes empathy and clarity over showy idiosyncrasies.Tracing soul’s roots in the black church and its entry into the mainstream, Sweet Soul Music begins with the innovations of Sam Cooke and Ray Charles, who transformed gospel music by applying its emotionalism to secular matters. Cooke in particular—followed by the worldlier James Brown—was a savvy, striving businessman who broke new ground for blacks simply by succeeding in the industry.</p><p>“Soul music is Southern by definition if not by actual geography,” Guralnick writes, and the South becomes a richly complex, often hostile setting for this story, defined by segregation as well as by the desire to thwart it in search of great music. Both Stax in Memphis and Fame in Muscle Shoals were essentially integrated, with white and black musicians and businesspeople working alongside one another. Soul music, in addition to offering some of the hottest, rawest, and most inventive sounds of the ’50s and ’60s, provided a model of how an integrated society could interact to everyone’s benefit. “Soul music,” he writes, “derives, I believe, from the Southern dream of freedom.” And the book is as much about tragedy as triumph: the murder of Sam Cooke, the death of Otis Redding, the shuttering of Stax Records, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Ultimately, this is a book about what was and—just as crucially—what might have been. –Stephen M. Deusner</p><p></p>
