If the connection between deep southern soul and country music hasn't been evident to up to now then YOU have not been paying attention my friend.
Percy rocked the world with "When A Man Loves A Woman" in 1966, but he quickly screwed himself ala Little Willle John by becoming known as an irresponsible fuck-up while on tour. There was no quicker way to loose the respect of your peers than to repeatedly allow your vices to screw with the show.
By the time of this 1979 album Percy had largely vanished from the public eye. When I got to chat with him in the late 90's this was one of the unknown albums that he mentioned with pride.
For some reason every mention of this album has only 9 tracks, even the CD version on CD Universe. Well I haven't the faintest idea where my copy comes from but I have 14 tracks so HELL YEAH! Don't care where they came from!
"Sings Country album by Percy Sledge was released Mar 18, 2008 on the Gusto label. Percy Sledge's fate and fame will forever rest on the shoulders of his massive 1966 hit, the forlorn ballad "When a Man Loves a Woman." With its funeral pace and churchy organ, coupled with Sledge's pleading, compassionate vocal, "When a Man Loves a Woman" is one of the most fascinatingly desperate songs in pop history. Sings Country music CDs Although he was one of Southern soul's greatest singers, Sledge never got that near the sun again, at least not commercially. Sings Country songs This collection, recorded with some of Nashville's best session players in 1979, finds Sledge going straight honky tonk, covering Johnny Cash's "I Still Miss Someone," Lefty Frizzell's "If You've Got the Money I've Got the Time," and a pair of Merle Haggard songs, "Today I Started Loving You Again" and "Mama Tried," with an easy and comfortable assurance. Sings Country album It may be country, but that doesn't mean it isn't soulful. Sings Country CD music A nice, if understated, set. ~ Steve Leggett"
If you get a kick out of this one, be sure to check out Dirty Laundry
20 comments:
Hot Dog! I don't think that I have heard this one. :) Thanks, KC
When I first moved to Washington D. C. after ten years in Texas, a white coworker from Missouri asked me whether blacks liked country music. Apparently, her cubicle mate, a self-appointed spokeswoman for the race, had informed her that blacks hated country music. Of course, outside of living a short time in D. C., the "spokeswoman", who was in her twenties, had never traveled extensively or lived south of New York. Rather than belabor the point, I responded that such a declaration would have shocked all of my Texas friends who loved country as much as they loved soul, gospel,and rhythm and blues. I suggested that she asked the savant if she had ever heard Ray Charles finesse country. Of course, my friends loved Hank Williams, Eddy Arnold, and the traditionalists, not the sappy or jingoistic shlock that passes for country today and is really the bastard child of southern rock.
I wish I had known at the time of the conversation of this album and your earlier posting of various artists singing country. To me, it's simple, good music is good music no matter the genre, and I was appalled that the savant with her head up her butt would speak about matters about which she knew so little. Ironically, I encountered the other side of the stereotype when some of my friends in Dallas expressed surprise that a northerner from Boston could love soul, jazz, and the blues. I told them that we can't all grow up in Oak Cliff and learn to play great blues like Stevie Ray, but we can love great music anywhere we live.
Thanks for posting this; I'm looking forward to listening to it several times to discover another facet of Percy Sledge.
I just read something in which T-Bone Walker claimed that if he had not been black, Chuck Berry would have been considered a country singer and as soon as I read that I went "Damn, he is absolutely right!" Lots of soul is really black country, certainly Clarence Carter regularly straddled the line. You find some country songs in the early catalogs of most singers who came from the south. Conversely you find soul in white country singers, Charlie Rich is every bit as much an R&B singer as a country guy - change a couple instruments and there would be no question. Substitute a piano for a pedal steel and a saxophone for a fiddle and damn near any classic country becomes R&B. The two genre's cross mined each others songs forever because they spoke to the same experiences.
I am amazed that so many of my black friends were unaware that most of the musicians at Stax, Muscle Shoals were southern white guys who also played country. I will never forget the look on one guy's face when I showed him a picture of the Muscle Shoals guys and pointed out Penn and Oldham, he knew their names well but had no idea they were white. Part of the real tragedy of this music and a large part of how it faded from the radio is tied to the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King and the climate of racial distrust that followed. Old friends suddenly looked at each other with new eyes and distrust. It played a huge role in the demise of Stax and Rick Hall ended up taking Muscle Shoals into rock and pop - even Chips Moman up at American eventually abandoned soul.
Thanks KC
Cross-Polliination/Fusion of musical genres seems to be creating some healthy comments around here lately so this would be a timely post - I'm not a great lover of country music but there are always exceptions - I like the early stuff ie Jimmie Rogers Hank Williams in small doses I also like Johnny Cash's voice - But let Brother Ray or Solomon sing and I'm in - Dobie Gray had a nice mix too
I do have a CD on MCA from 1994 of duets from Blues/R&B/Soul artists singing with Country artists called 'Rhythm Country And Blues' - Little Richard & Tanya Tucker - George Jones & B B King - Chet Atkins & Allen Toussaint etc - Let me know if you wamt this posted somewhere
Cheers
I'm no great country fan either. Can't trust folk who clap on the one and the three. Too much fakery and flakery going on for my taste as well. Oh there are some great players alright, there's Chet A, Buddy Emmons, Buddy Spicher, Tut Taylor, Vassar Clements, Sam Bush, Hank Garland, and many more etceteras, and there is the true heart-pull of the mountain-music at its root, but this Nashville-Opry manufacturing/packaging process became artificial quite early on in the invention of an entire culture. Wierd. I don't see that happening much anywhere else outside of the pop industry, to be true - I mean, if we're talking authenticity here.
Doesn't mean this Percy Sledge is worthless, not by a long way, I am very curious to hear it myself - I think it just means I recently had to write a paper on 'Country' (obviously prescribed by some kinky sadist) and am still reeling from what I discovered.
Here are four of the most entertaining items in the bibliography - for those who dig reading, these are a whole heap of fun:
Richard A. Peterson – Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (1999)
Aaron A Fox – Real Country : Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (2004)
Joe Bageant – Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (2007)
Joe Bageant – Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir (2010)
I plain don't get Johnny Cash
I've tried and I've failed.
Fair enough.
But Little Richard & Tanya Tucker sounds too good to be true. Maybe in the vaults somewhere is a legendary Tanya Tucker & Rahsaan Roland Kirk, James Brown meets Andre Previn, Loretta Lyn and the Cole Porter Songbook, the Boston Pops play Leadbelly.......
(So, yes please, Gus)
Looking forward to hearing the Percy Sledge.
Thanks for the provocation.
I had to copy KC's write-up and all the comments as well. I hope you don't mind guys. It's for my own use only. Such fun!
Thanks for the recommended reading. I have heard great things about the late Joe Bageant since moving here and will have to read him when I get through K. C.'s list.
I am not a big fan of country either. When I was a boy my mother would put on Porter Wagner and I would have to leave the room. Fortunately she liked James Brown and Ray Charles, too. I couldn't relate to the music at all until I moved to Texas and latched on to alternative country like Robert Earl Keen, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, and others. But for my black friends who grew up in East Texas, country was a passion. Then again, I always loved Ray Charles' country album and his version of Born To Lose and when George Jones was at his best, take away the steel guitars and the ersatz western garb and the man had soul and pain in that voice. Country still takes a back seat to blues, soul, jazz, African and Caribbean, and Irish traditional music for me but I know longer regard it with snobbish disdain as we were wont to do in the Puritan North.
I would have written Yankee but that's a loaded term for us Irish and Irish American folk from Boston. To us, a Yankee will always be a Brahmin or Massachusetts WASP who made life so damned difficult when we first arrived. A Yankee is also any member of that hated rival baseball team from south of us, so I was taken aback when people first referred to me as Yankee or Anglo in Texas.
Throw Levon Helm in the mix, too. In my naive view, I think it's a matter of authenticity which is a rare commodity in country today.
Nothing naive about digging Levon, he was an original and a giant - then we got a fucking genius like Tony Joe White and no-one knows what the hell to call him!
look back to
http://deepsouthernsoul.blogspot.com/2012/07/dirty-laundry-soul-of-black-country.html
It's 00:35 here in the UK and there's Charley Pride singing his cotton pickin' song live on the Jools Holland show - Sounding exactly like a white country singer - Apparently his touring here - Seems like a nice guy but it's not for me
Bageant is a delight, Feilimid. Very warm. Although he is hyper-critical (somebody had to do it), he also genuinely loves the people and culture he came from. Incisive and witty. Somewhere in one of those books he describes a guy as being so dumb he couldn't pour piss from a boot with the instructions on the underneath. Cracked me up.
Lyle Lovett - oh yeah!
And Ray was always Ray whatever the label on the material.
He could make the direst material sound special.
(Met him once in an elevator - very cool - 'though that Joe bloke with him was sniffy)
Unky Cliff mentioned that while many themes are shared, the theme of guilt and self recrimination is county with little parallel in soul
I don't know about that - Robert Cray - Right Next Door (Because Of Me) - Bobby Womack - I Wish He Didn't Trust Me So Much - Just 2 off the top of my head - But generally yeah he's got a point
Since I read K. C.'s comments, I pulled out my Tony Joe White records and have been listening non-stop. He is a giant who defies category and left record executives in a quandary. Although very different from her, his career reminds me of Eva Cassidy's; they were both ignored by the industry because they couldn't be or simply refused to be pegged in a genre. Cassidy died in anonymity; at least Tony Joe collects the residuals from his great songs and had a few hits. There is so much soul and raw sexuality smoldering in that baritone. Even during his brief disco-ized period, he was great and Barry White probably thanked the gods that no one discovered Tony Joe's album Eyes while he was working the same shtick with much more orchestration.
Listen to Lyle Lovett's (and Robert Earl Keen's This Old Porch); Will T. Massey's "You Take the Town" or some of Steve Earle' better songs and the differences between the genres blur. I also agree with K. C. that the melding of white Southern musicians and African American singers was one of the great moments of music history in this country. Sadly that brief period of collegiality in music also embodied in the make-up of Sly And The Family Stone and the Chambers Brothers didn't survive the assassinations that my marked my teenage years.
Years ago an older African American coworker
asked me why so many in my generation were so cynical about the possibility of change. I reminded her that Malcolm X was assassinated after he went to Mecca and realized class and economic oppression could be as significant as oppression based on race; Dr. King was assassinated when he began addressing the Viet Nam war and the inequity of poverty in both the cities and Appalachia, and Bobby Kennedy was killed after he had become a candidate who could reach across class and racial lines with the promise of his candidacy. I told her that before I was fifteen, I had seen any national leader who worked to unite people across class, color, and racial lines killed. There was something happening in the music and thought of that time that was crushed by the despair of the assassinations, the endless war, and what was to follow. But those Muscle Shoals boys knew their licks and that's a part of history that can't be altered. While some jazz purists were debating whether jazz could only be experienced and played by African Americans, the Muscle Shoals boys worked behind the mike and dazzled us all behind the invisibility of being studio musicians.
I'll throw some more names in the mix: Shelby Lynne, Lucinda Williams, and J. J. Cale. Not to mention Dolly Parton at her best. Look at what
Whitney Houston did with one of her songs.
Too much talent and genius are overlooked in the effort to categorize. Williams' recordings on Smithsonian were straight blues with some gospel. I can close my eyes and hear Tony Joe White singing J. J. Cale's Magnolia. For that matter, I can hear John lee Hooker singing it as well. So much music, so little time...
The Rhythm Country & Blues album I mentioned above now available in 'Shares'
The Rhythm Country And Blues album is also available on Filetube and can be downloaded for free via Depositfile. It's worth having.
http://www.embedupload.com/?d=0IVJC5NGUW
A heartfelt thank you for this re-up KC!
Thank you so much for this! Ever since I heard of this record, I've been dying to hear it and am so glad I finally have the chance to now!
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