Miss Simone

For the last few days I've been listening to BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week, an abridgement of Alan Light's biography of singer and pianist Nina Simone, What Happened, Miss Simone?

Nina Simone is notable not just for spanning multiple genres in her musical output - blues, jazz, gospel, soul, R&B and pop as well as the classical music she had been trained to perform as a child in North Carolina - but also for being a political figures whose songs Mississippi Goddam and The Backlash Blues (the latter penned by her friend the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes) exemplified the harder-edged, more militant tone the black civil rights movement took on in the sixties in the face of racist intransigence from the Southern states and the Federal government's sluggishness in enforcing freedoms legally won by African-American activists.

Simone acquired a reputation for being "difficult", a trait often ascribed to her having some sort of personality disorder, but given the racism she experienced throughout her life (she refused to play at her first public piano recital until her parents were moved forwards from the back of the concert hall where they had been placed and put onto the front row and later had a place at a music college denied to her on the grounds of her colour before becoming a cabaret act at the bar in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she adopted her stage name) it was surely either a case of her standing up for herself, or, if it did indeed stem from mental illness, was a reaction to those injustices.

A Chess Jigsaw Puzzle

I've just bought and am now listening to the complete Chess recordings of sixties soul singer Sugar Pie De Santo. I'm sure I'm not the only person prompted to pick them up after hearing her sing Go Go Power on this TV advert.

Although Chess Records in Chicago is best known as a blues label, in the sixties its subsidiary Checker had a roster of young female soul and R&B singers which as well as Sugar Pie De Santo included Etta James and Fontella Bass.

The liner notes for the album feature photos of Sugar Pie performing at the Jigsaw club in Manchester. There's a bit about it on this forum, suggesting that it operated in the mid to late sixties as a competitor to the better-known Twisted Wheel, but none of the people I've asked who were going to clubs in Manchester then can remember it, and the building on Cromford Court which housed it was flattened in the early seventies to make way for the Arndale Centre.

Here's Sugar Pie in 1964 singing Slip-In Mules, written by Tommy Tucker (real name Robert Higginbotham) in reply to his own hit, Hi-Heel Sneakers.

The Prince of Pop

The singer Prince, who has died aged 57 at his home in Minnesota, drew on a number of musical genres as sources of inspiration.

The son of a jazz musician, I'd guess he was influenced by that, as well as by funk and rock (his stage act always reminded me a bit of Jimi Hendrix's). As a teenager in the mid-80's, his songs were everywhere and appealed to me more than those of his contemporary and fellow African-American singer Michael Jackson who I always found overly produced and commercial.

It's interesting how American popular music gets categorised, firstly by skin colour, with black performers tending to be called rhythm and blues artists when they'd be classed as rock or pop if they were white, and also African-American music itself, which is somewhat arbitrarily divided, generally by white critics, into secular (blues, jazz, soul, R&B) and religious music (spirituals, gospel), despite numerous artists spanning those sub-sets, including Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Etta James, Sister Rosetta Tharp and Aretha Franklin. There are also many examples of people from one genre influencing another, with clear similarities (and claims of plagiarism) between soul singer James Brown and blues harpist Junior Wells, and fusions such as soul-blues and jazz-rock.

One of the funniest things I've ever read are the liner notes to Muddy Waters' Folk Singer album in which the producer Ralph Bass muses as to whether Perry Como is a soul singer!

Amy

I watched the film Amy the other day, about the singer Amy Winehouse who died in 2011 aged 27 from heart failure as a result of alcohol and drug abuse.

Not many people come out of the film well, from her father whose desertion when she was a child seems to have triggered her later emotional problems to her husband who got her hooked on heroin and crack and the paparazzi and tabloid journalists who hounded her until her death. The only people who emerge with any credit are her first manger Nicky Shymansky and her schoolfriends who tried to help her and the singer Tony Bennett with whom she duetted not long before she died.

I can remember the first time I heard Amy Winehouse, on a pub jukebox singing Rehab. I was convinced it was a sixties soul record before the person I was with put me right.

The shores of America

I'm reading two books at the moment which both speak to the immigrant experience in twentieth century America, albeit in different ways, The Life of Saul Bellow by Zachary Leader and The Last Sultan, Robert Greenfield's biography of Ahmet Ertegun, a founder in the late forties of Atlantic Records, the soul and R&B label whose roster of artists included Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin.

Bellow was the son of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire who had travelled from St. Petersburg to Chicago via Canada whereas Ertegun arrived in Washington, D.C. with his jazz-loving brother Neshui in 1935 from London where their father had been the Turkish ambassador (The Last Sultan also discusses the Erteguns' relationship with the Chess brothers Leonard and Phil, founders of the Chicago blues record label of the same name and themselves Jewish immigrants from a town in Poland, now Belarus).

There a couple of things which immigrants bring to their artistic endeavours, whether literary or musical. One is the ability to see the society they have joined with the perspective of an outsider, and the other is a blindness to its barriers and rules: I'd guess, for example, that Ertegun was the only student at the exclusive private prep school he attended as a teenager in Maryland who bought records and went to jazz clubs in Washington's black section.

RIP Bobby Rogers

Bobby Rogers has died aged 73 in his home city of Detroit, Michigan.

Rogers was a member of stellar sixties soul group The Miracles - duetting here with lead singer Smokey Robinson on You've Really Got a Hold on Me - and like Robinson was also a songwriter, collaborating with him on classics such as The Way You Do the Things You Do.

Looking for a brighter day

Radio 1 Xtra had a programme last night about the musician, poet and activist Gil Scott-Heron who died last year at the age of sixty-two.

Scott-Heron's music spans blues, jazz, soul and funk. His spoken word poetry over a drum beat can also be seen as a precursor of hip-hop. He is probably best known for The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

One of the most interesting bits in the programme was an interview where Scott-Heron talked about his childhood in Tennessee. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother, a religious woman who took him to church where he heard gospel music. He also listened to blues records by Robert Johnson, later describing himself as a "bluesologist" exploring the African roots of the music. I was struck by the similarities between his childhood influences and that of another African-American musician, Muddy Waters.

The programme was called Gone Too Soon but Gil hasn't gone: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was played in Tahrir Square by the revolutionaries who toppled the Mubarak regime in Egypt last year.

Amy one year on

I watched a BBC Arena documentary last night to mark the anniversary of the death of Amy Winehouse, consisting of a performance and interview she did in Dingle in the far south-west of Ireland in 2006.

I remember the first time I heard Amy Winehouse, about the same time, when Rehab came on a pub jukebox. I thought it was a sixties soul record at first and was surprised when I realised it was actually a current hit.

In the interview, Amy talked about the musicians who had influenced her, some of them fairly obvious like Ray Charles but also unexpected ones such as Thelonious Monk.

One of the saddest things I've read about Amy is Tony Bennett, who recorded a duet with her just before death, saying that he thinks she knew that she wasn't going to survive much longer. Towards the end of her life, she had apparently overcome her drug addictions but was still struggling with the alcoholism that would ultimately kill her.

Watching the interview in which she comes over as both thoughtful and fun, it's hard to accept that she's no longer with us. Rest in peace Amy.

Back to the 80's with Dexys

The line-up of Later with Jools Holland last night included Dexys, the reformed Dexys Midnight Runners.

Along with Madness, Dexys Midnight Runners was one of the bands I listened to quite a bit in the early 80's. I suppose it was the fact that - like teenagers who listened to rock and roll in the 50's - I enjoyed the traces of the music's roots without at first knowing what they were. Dexys Midnight Runners combined Irish folk with black American music, a hybrid dubbed "Celtic soul". Madness on the other hand based their sound on Jamaican ska and, like the Rolling Stones with Muddy Waters, named themselves after a song by their musical hero, Prince Buster.

Dexys' lead singer Kevin Rowlands has struggled with drug addiction and financial problems in the years since the group's heyday so it was good to see him back on TV last night, transporting me back to those days with Come On Eileen.

Whitney Houston, 1963-2012

The body of the singer Whitney Houston, found dead in a hotel room in Los Angeles last weekend, has been flown back to her native Newark, New Jersey. Although the coroner's report may take several weeks to complete, it seems likely that her death was the result of an addiction to drugs and alcohol.

Even if her music was a bit too commercial for my tastes, there was no denying the power of her voice in its prime, rooted in the gospel singing of the African-American church. The explanation for Houston's untimely demise offered by most of the media centred on the idea that as a young woman she had been unprepared for the pressures of in the music industry and as a result had turned to drink and drugs.  I'm not so sure about that.  As the daughter of a professional gospel singer, a cousin of Dionne Warwick and goddaughter of Aretha Franklin, she was pretty well placed to understand the music industry she entered as a nineteen year old. And it seems more likely to me that she drank heavily and took large amounts of drugs because she enjoyed it and had the wealth to do so.

Twisting the night away

The future of the famous Twisted Wheel club in Manchester is under threat.

The Twisted Wheel was a leading soul and R&B club whose stage in the 60's hosted, among others, Arthur Conley, Edwin Starr, Junior Walker and Solomon Burke.  Along with other clubs like Blackpool Mecca and the Wigan Casino, it helped launch Northern Soul, the movement that revived the careers of dozens of obscure, bemused but highly delighted US Southern souls artists who now found themselves playing to massive audiences in the industrial towns of North West England. It closed in 1971 (a victim of the drive by "God's Copper" James Anderton to close down late night clubs that also wiped out Manchester modern jazz scene). Now a gay club, Legends, it still hosts a soul night a couple of times a month, run by a promoter from the original Twisted Wheel, which attracts hundreds of people, some of them travelling from abroad.

The building is now in danger of being knocked by a developer who wants to build yet another hotel.  Manchester City Council's whole redevelopment of the city centre in the last decade or so has involved allowing the building of dozens of indentical hotels and upmarket flats, many of them now empty as a result of the economic downturn.  It is a policy that has seen the Hacienda nightclub turned into apartments and developers threatening to knock down the early nineteenth century Briton's Protection pub.

What the council and developers who want to knock down historic pubs and clubs in the city centre and replace them with a swathe of apartments and hotels ignore is that the people who move into or stay in them might just want to go out for a drink or a dance at night.

The Sound of Young America

Last week's death of Marv Tarplin, the guitarist in Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, got me thinking about the criticism that the music coming out of Motown's Hitsville USA studio in Detroit in the late 50's and early 60's was as mass produced as the cars rolling off the Ford assembly line which gave the city and the label their names.

There is no denying that the Motown sound is more polished than the Southern soul exemplified by Stax in Memphis.  The label's founder Berry Gordy, a former assembly line worker at Ford who had previously run an unsuccessful jazz record store, consciously created a template for music that would appeal to young white as well as black people, labelled the Sound of Young America.

But the Motown sound was also rooted in African-American gospel and specifically its immaculate close harmony singing. Combined with sharp suits, some nifty dance steps and lyricists of the calibre of Smokey Robinson (who wasn't called "America's greatest living poet" by Bob Dylan but could have been), it produced a sound and a look that is as distinctive as it is timeless.

Blues, jazz and soul

I've just received an email from Amazon alerting me to offers on "Blues CD's". What strikes me is how arbitrary that category can be. According to Amazon, it includes Dinah Washington and Etta James for example.

Clearly blues, jazz and soul all overlap with each other and are all rooted in black religious music. I think it's also probably true that many of the distinctions within African-American music have been made by white critics rather than the musicians themselves. Ray Charles for example is usually categorised as a soul singer but could just as easily be described as a blues, jazz, R&B or even country singer. 

I read an article in a blues magazine a few years back about the club scene and record buying trends in black areas of Chicago which pointed out that many of the people seen as blues artists within their own community are seen (and dismissed) by white blues critics and fans as soul acts. 

I know whose judgement I trust...