Chicago-based David Whiteis’ Southern Soul-Blues, a worthy follow-up and companion to his Chicago Blues: Portraits and Stories (also from the University of Illinois Press), targets the somewhat amorphous yet geographically and culturally specific musical subculture indicated in his title. Defining his parameters as the living music of “Mississippi River Culture” [1]—i.e. southern black communities of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, parts of Texas and Arkansas, along with diasporic communities in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and other northern Midwestern industrial centers—as expressed through “a stylistic amalgam” encompassing gospel, “postwar urban blues, 1960s-era deep soul...funk and postfunk...contemporary R & B…neosoul, rap, and hip-hop” (4), Whiteis is interested in where and how this music is performed and received; how it is disseminated through independent labels, self-produced recordings, and bootleg copies; and, above all, in the performers themselves, a colorful cast of artist/entertainers that he discusses with keen appreciation and insight.
After briefly establishing the contexts for this musical style/genre in Part I, the bulk of Whiteis’ study contains portraits of representative players: Part II treats journeymen (and -woman) performers Latimore, Denise LaSalle, J. Blackfoot, and Bobby Rush; Part III turns to a younger generation (relatively speaking, as the youngest of them is forty years old, the others in their late-forties or mid-fifties); and Part IV, after examining songwriting and the recording business, ends with a portrait of T. K. Soul, a forty-nine year-old whose music partially embraces the aesthetics of hip-hop, suggesting one possible direction for future developments in the genre. Part V serves as a critically informed buying/listening guide for curious listeners, glossing the careers of important artistic predecessors (e.g., Clarence Carter, Etta James, Johnnie Taylor), with a final section—self-admittedly selective and subjective—highlighting the next generation of up-and-coming artists.
In tone and approach, the book treads the line between critical scholarship and journalism, eschewing an overarching theoretical framework in favor of detailed ethnography that reveals the daily workings and inherent values of participants, particularly performers and industry people. Written in an engaging style, one suggesting that Whiteis has gleaned much of his knowledge of this scene from personal experience with the people and places, the volume affords general readers, undergraduate students, and music fans a revealing look at this under-researched niche music culture.
Whiteis adeptly draws detailed character sketches based on multiple phone and personal interviews that not only provide relevant background information but typically go much further by exploring the underlying issues that motivate his subjects. As entertainers and public personalities, they are apt to relate narratives that reflect how they’d like to be viewed by audiences, in the present and for posterity—narratives they may prefer to tell themselves, as we all do—but the author displays a knack for delicately problematizing overly facile readings of such statements, noting where the performative dimensions of an interview belie more nuanced explanations.
One of the book’s central themes is the balancing of an artist’s showbiz persona/lifestyle with the more mundane aspects of private life—the contrast between the ritual of performance and the routine of daily existence—of particular relevance in the domain of southern soul-blues because many if not most of its artists are neither household names nor hit machines, even within the context of, as one singer described it, “this little southern circle” (176), and a significant number of even the name players could be characterized as riding out careers based on previous “hits.” Another important theme, an update on the Saturday night/Sunday morning ideological schism intrinsic to blues, gospel, and soul music, here deemed the “raunch debate,” addresses the issue of whether commodified and (overly?) sensationalized sexuality undermines other more traditional and “authentic” values such as spirituality and self-affirmation. Descriptions of vaudevillian scenarios of dildos, bump-and-grinds, or phallic microphones are sure to titillate readers, but Whiteis contextualizes them with astute commentary on the complex sexual politics of a musical style that attracts and caters to a middle-aged, largely female clientele, an arena where, ironically, lack of sensitivity to women’s issues—whether maintained by male or female performers—would be a decided handicap. It’s not surprising, therefore, that women performers exemplify some of the most extreme examples of extroverted carnality—if only within the delimited ritual spaces of soul-blues performances.
The book addresses a number of compelling sub-themes as well: the role of age and ageism, the mythological trickster figure, the influence of African spirituality, the rural/urban dichotomy, competition and one-upmanship, amateurism vs. professionalism (i.e., musical proficiency vs. emotional delivery), traditional vs. progressive trends, and others. Interestingly, however, Whiteis is relatively mum in regards to the intersection of outside racial and ethnic influences with this seemingly isolated African American sub-culture, likely a reflection of its insider status, but possibly this is a convenient abbreviation. I would be curious to know, for example, what part whites and other “outsider” audience members play in supporting the live scene and to what extent artistic authenticity is or is not tied to notions of racial/ethnic essentialism.
Whether one accepts “southern soul-blues” as a palpable, isolatable identity, a “boomlet” (201) slightly past its prime, or prefers to view it as the living continuum of African American music culture writ large yet regional, maintaining a core identity, perhaps, but continually in the process of becoming something else, Whiteis gives readers a deep cross-cut of this distinctive vernacular musical culture.
Notes:
[1] A term used by Al Bell, former president of Stax Records, cited in Rob Bowman’s Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records (New York: 1997), p. 85.
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[Review length: 902 words • Review posted on March 5, 2014]