Soul and Funk
Recommended Books
The recommended books below include biographies and studies on many aspects of soul, funk, and mid-twentieth century R&B. Additional books can be found in biographies (especially ML 420) and in types and styles of popular music (for soul, see ML 3537 and, for funk, see ML 3527.8). Also try the subject searches, "Soul musicians" and "Funk musicians." Recommended books are sorted by their call numbers for ease of browsing. Hover over the info icon to see a description.
Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul by
In Higher Ground, one of our most insightful music writers brilliantly reinterprets the lives of three pop geniuses and the soul revolution they launched. Soul music is one of America's greatest cultural achievements, and Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and Curtis Mayfield are three of its most inspired practitioners. In midcentury America it was soul music--particularly the dazzling stream of recordings made by these three stars--that helped bring the gospel vision of the Black church into the mainstream, energizing the era's social movements and defining a new American gospel where the sacred and the secular met. What made this gospel all the more amazing was that its most influential articulators were the sons and daughters of sharecroppers, storefront preachers, and single parents in the projects, whose genius gave voice to a new vision of American possibility. Higher Ground seamlessly weaves the specific and intensely personal narratives of Stevie, Aretha, and Curtis's lives into the historical fabric of their times.
Call Number: ML400 .W36 2004Publication Date: 2004
Hit Me, Fred: Recollections of a Side Man by
With Hit Me, Fred, sensational sideman Fred Wesley Jr. moves front and center to tell his life story. A legendary funk, soul, and jazz musician, Wesley is best known for his work in the late sixties and early seventies with James Brown and as the leader of Brown's band, Fred Wesley and the JB's. Having been the band's music director, arranger, trombone player, and frequent composer, Wesley is one of the original architects of funk music. He describes what it was like working for the Godfather of Soul, revealing the struggle and sometimes stringent discipline behind Brown's tight, raucous tunes. After leaving Brown and the JB's, Wesley arranged the horn sections for Parliament, Funkadelic, and Bootsy's Rubber Band, and led Fred Wesley and the Horny Horns. Adding his signature horn arrangements to the P-Funk mix, Wesley made funk music even funkier. Wesley's distinctive sound reverberates through rap and hip-hop music today. In Hit Me, Fred, he recalls the many musicians whose influence he absorbed, beginning with his grandmother and father--both music teachers--and including mentors in his southern Alabama hometown and members of the Army band. In addition to the skills he developed working with James Brown, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, and the many talented musicians in their milieu, Wesley describes the evolution of his trombone playing through stints with the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, Hank Ballard, and Count Basie's band. He also recounts his education in the music business, particularly through his work in Los Angeles recording sessions. Wesley is a virtuoso storyteller, whether he's describing the electric rush of performances when the whole band is in the groove, the difficulties of trying to make a living as a rhythm and blues musician, or the frustrations often felt by sidemen. Hit Me, Fred is Wesley's story of music-making in all its grit and glory.
Call Number: ML419.W455 A3 2002Publication Date: 2002
The One: The Life and Music of James Brown by
The definitive biography of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, with fascinating findings on his life as a Civil Rights activist, an entrepreneur, and the most innovative musician of our time Playing 350 shows a year at his peak, with more than forty Billboard hits, James Brown was a dazzling showman who transformed American music. His life offstage was just as vibrant, and until now no biographer has delivered a complete profile. The One draws on interviews with more than 100 people who knew Brown personally or played with him professionally. Using these sources, award-winning writer RJ Smith draws a portrait of a man whose twisted and amazing life helps us to understand the music he made. The One delves deeply into the story of a man who was raised in abject-almost medieval-poverty in the segregated South but grew up to earn (and lose) several fortunes. Covering everything from Brown's unconventional childhood (his aunt ran a bordello), to his role in the Black Power movement, which used "Say It Loud (I'm Black and Proud)" as its anthem, to his high-profile friendships, to his complicated family life, Smith's meticulous research and sparkling prose blend biography with a cultural history of a pivotal era. At the heart of The One is Brown's musical genius. He had crucial influence as an artist during at least three decades; he inspires pity, awe, and revulsion. As Smith traces the legend's reinvention of funk, soul, R&B, and pop, he gives this history a melody all its own.
Call Number: ML420.B818 S65 2012Publication Date: 2012
Trouble Man: The Life and Death of Marvin Gaye by
Marvin Gaye was a twentieth-century icon, one of our greatest pop singers. He made his name with the Motown sound of the sixties, but went on to become a musical revolutionary with the release of What's Going On -- an album that touched on war, ecology, racism, violence, and poverty. It perfectly captured the spirit of the times and changed people's perceptions of what soul music could achieve. Behind the songs, however, Gaye's was a troubled life: drug dependency, tortured personal relationships, and ongoing financial and legal difficulties led inexorably to the final fatal meeting with his father. Since his tragic death, his stature has increased rather than diminished. His musical legacy has endured that his popularity and influence will endure and continue to win new generations of fans. Trouble Man, based on exhaustive and exclusive new research, is the definitive story of the turbulent life and violent death of an American icon. Steve Turner probes beyond the undying magic of songs like "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," "What's Going On," and "Sexual Healing" to trace the jagged contours of Gaye's life and examine the man behind the legend. Turner's detailed exploration of Gaye's childhood and his relationship with his family, his religious upbringing, and his meteoric professional success and ultimate descent into drug abuse and financial instability offers a new look at a beloved American musician.
Call Number: ML420.G305 T87 2000Publication Date: 2000
Between Each Line of Pain and Glory: My Life Story by
For as far back as Gladys can remember, she has always been a performer. A true child prodigy, she was born in Atlanta in 1944 and has been earning her way as a singer since the tender age of four. By the time she was in high school, she was belting out doo-wop ditties and torch songs in juke joints and nightclubs on the "chit'lin' circuit" as the opening act (with The Pips) for the likes of Sam Cooke, Ike & Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, B.B. King, Jackie Wilson, and Little Richard, among others. And then there were the legendary Motown years - and the multi-Grammy-Award-winning ones that have followed. Along the way her life has been filled with enormous ups and downs, details of which Gladys shares for the first time in this book. Between the lines of her life story, you'll find her bravely facing many of life's most difficult challenges, including racism, sexual assault, addiction and recovery, and her struggle to break free from disappointing romantic relationships while maintaining a strong sense of personal pride and independence.
Call Number: ML420.K65 A3 1997Publication Date: 1997
Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament by
What does it mean to be in the groove? Winner of the 2007 Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music. Winner of IASPM's 2007 International Book Award. In this exploration of the funk groove and its unique sounds, author Anne Danielsen takes an in-depth look at this under-explored genre. Danielsen concentrates on the golden age of funk in the late 1960s and the 1970s, focusing on two of the era's artists who made a substantial impact on the landscape of popular music: James Brown and George Clinton/Parliament. Aiming to understand funk not only as objectified musical meaning but also as lived experience, she begins with the musical events themselves and draws on her experiences as both a fan and a scholar to capture how their particular organization creates the funk listener's pleasure. Danielsen further examines issues surrounding race in the construction and consumption of this music, focusing her study with how white listeners responded to funk in the 1970s, and arguing that African American music has remained a means of catharsis and of dealing with pleasures of the body. Funk's crossover to international success among listeners of pop and rock music affected both the music itself and audiences' understanding of it. Presence and Pleasure shows us how.
Call Number: ML3527.8 .D36 2006Publication Date: 2006
The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture by
The Funk Era and Beyond is the first scholarly collection to discuss the significance of funk music in America. Contributors employ a multitude of methodologies to examine this unique musical genre's relationship to African American culture and to music, literature, and visual art as a whole. "Paying homage to the ancestors (Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Professor Longhair), sitting at the feat of the elders (George Clinton, Sly Stone, James Brown) and welcoming a brand new generation of griots headed by funkmaster Aaron McGruder, The Funk Era and Beyond fills the largest remaining gap in the conversation on African-American music. Bolden's collection is theoretically sophisticated, endlessly provocative and, best of all, a joy to read." -- Craig Werner
Call Number: ML3527.8 .F86 2008Publication Date: 2008
Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Remakes and the Struggle for Artistic Identity: Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Phoebe Snow by
Soul Covers is an engaging look at how three very different rhythm and blues performers--Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Phoebe Snow--used cover songs to negotiate questions of artistic, racial, and personal authenticity. Through close readings of song lyrics and the performers' statements about their lives and work, the literary critic Michael Awkward traces how Franklin, Green, and Snow crafted their own musical identities partly by taking up songs associated with artists such as Dinah Washington, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, George Gershwin, Billie Holiday, and the Supremes. Awkward sees Franklin's early album Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington, released shortly after Washington's death in 1964, as an attempt by a struggling young singer to replace her idol as the acknowledged queen of the Black female vocal tradition. He contends that Green's album Call Me (1973) reveals the performer's attempt to achieve formal coherence by uniting seemingly irreconcilable aspects of his personal history, including his career in popular music and his religious yearnings, as well as his sense of himself as both a cosmopolitan Black artist and a forlorn country boy. Turning to Snow's album Second Childhood (1976), Awkward suggests that through covers of blues and soul songs, Snow, a white Jewish woman from New York, explored what it means for non-Black enthusiasts to perform works considered by many to be Black cultural productions. The only book-length examination of the role of remakes in American popular music, Soul Covers is itself a refreshing new take on the lives and work of three established soul artists.
Call Number: ML3537 .A95 2007Publication Date: 2007
Move on Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power by
Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago's place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment. In Move On Up, Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Together, soul music and Black-owned businesses thrived. Record producers and song-writers broadcast optimism for Black America's future through their sophisticated, jazz-inspired productions for the Dells and many others. Curtis Mayfield boldly sang of uplift with unmistakable grooves like "We're a Winner" and "I Plan to Stay a Believer." Musicians like Phil Cohran and the Pharaohs used their music to voice Afrocentric philosophies that challenged racism and segregation, while Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Chaka Khan created music that inspired Black consciousness. Soul music also accompanied the rise of African American advertisers and the campaign of Chicago's first Black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. This empowerment was set in stark relief by the social unrest roiling in Chicago and across the nation: as Chicago's homegrown record labels produced rising stars singing songs of progress and freedom, Chicago's Black middle class faced limited economic opportunities and deep-seated segregation, all against a backdrop of nationwide deindustrialization. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and a music critic's passion for the unmistakable Chicago soul sound, Cohen shows us how soul music became the voice of inspiration and change for a city in turmoil.
Call Number: ML3537 .C63 2019Publication Date: 2019
The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (Print and eBook) by
In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in Black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices--inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs, and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such as Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and Minnie Riperton performed virtuosic survivorship and thus helped to galvanize Black communities in an era of peril and promise. Their soul legacies were later reanimated by such stars as Prince, Solange Knowles, and Flying Lotus. Breaking with prior understandings of soul as a vague masculinist political formation tethered to the Black Power movement, Lordi offers a vision of soul that foregrounds the intricacies of musical craft, the complex personal and social meanings of the music, the dynamic movement of soul across time, and the leading role played by Black women in this musical-intellectual tradition.
Call Number: ML3537 .L67 2020 and ProQuest Ebook CentralPublication Date: 2020
Motown: The Sound of Young America by
The music of 'Motown' needs no introduction. Berry Gordy's record label became a style unto itself, producing hit after suave, sassy and sophisticated hit, and shaped the careers of so many of the greatest musicians of all time. The label produced more US number-one hits than the Beatles, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys combined. Now, and with fresh new insights and an incredible visual narrative, the official, visual history of this momentous contribution to music and American culture is told in full. This book delves deep into the success stories of Motown's powerhouse creative team, including the Holland-Dozier-Holland triumvirate, and unpicks backstories of the Motown musicians envied by many, and covered by the rest. The roster includes Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross & the Supremes, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, the Jackson 5, The Temptations and Martha Reeves & The Vandellas. Motown: The Sound of Young America is dense with information and materials gathered from the personal accounts and archives of many of the key players. It is a spectacular labor of love befitting an incredible story.
Call Number: ML3792.M67 W45 2019Publication Date: 2019
Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by
The story of Stax Records unfolds like a Greek tragedy. A white brother and sister build a record company that becomes a monument to racial harmony in 1960's segregated south Memphis. Their success is startling, and Stax soon defines an international sound. Then, after losses both business and personal, the siblings part, and the brother allies with a visionary African-American partner. Under integrated leadership, Stax explodes as a national player until, Icarus-like, they fall from great heights to a tragic demise. Everything is lost, and the sanctuary that flourished is ripped from the ground. A generation later, Stax is rebuilt brick by brick to once again bring music and opportunity to the people of Memphis. Set in the world of 1960s and '70s soul music, Respect Yourself is a story of epic heroes in a shady industry. It's about music and musicians -- Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, the Staple Singers, and Booker T. and the M.G.'s, Stax's interracial house band. It's about a small independent company's struggle to survive in a business world of burgeoning conglomerates. And always at the center of the story is Memphis, Tennessee, an explosive city struggling through heated, divisive years. Told by one of our leading music chroniclers, Respect Yourself brings to life this treasured cultural institution and the city that created it.
Call Number: ML3792.S78 G67 2013Publication Date: 2013
Interlibrary Loan
Users are encouraged to search for items beyond University Libraries' catalog via RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and WorldCat. Materials not available in print or online may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. Please allow up to seven days for electronic delivery and up to fourteen days for delivery of physical items.