Showing posts with label Soul Train. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soul Train. Show all posts

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Bobby Womack, RIP


This, in your Mighty Favog's humble opinion, is damned near a perfect song.

Friday, we lost the great soul singer/songwriter who gave it to us, Bobby Womack. Dammit, we're losing way too many great artists these days, and Bobby Womack is near the top of the list.

Again . . . dammit.

From the obituary in The New York Times:
Bobby Womack, who spanned the American soul music era, touring as a gospel singer in the 1950s, playing guitar in Sam Cooke’s backup band in the early ’60s, writing hit songs recorded by Wilson Pickett and the Rolling Stones and composing music that broke onto the pop charts, has died, a spokeswoman for his record label said on Friday night. He was 70.

Sonya Kolowrat, Mr. Womack’s publicist at XL Recordings, said further details about the death were not immediately available.

Mr. Womack, nicknamed the Preacher for his authoritative, church-trained voice and the way he introduced songs with long discourses on life, never had the million-record success of contemporaries like Pickett, Marvin Gaye, Al Green and Otis Redding. His sandpaper vocal style made him more popular in England, where audiences revere what they consider authentic traditional American music, than in the United States.
 


But the pop stars of his time considered Mr. Womack royalty. His admirers included Keith Richards, Rod Stewart and Stevie Wonder, all of whom acknowledged their debt with guest performances on albums he made in his later years.

Thursday, February 02, 2012

Love. Peace. Sooooooooul Traaaaaain!


"The hippest trip in America" is no more, and now the hippest tripper, Don Cornelius, is dead by his own hand.

Our present sadness keeps giving folks reasons to really miss the Seventies. I'm even starting to miss the clothes -- at least the kind of threads one might see on Soul Train.

Listen, I'm a white guy from the Deep South, born in the year of our Lord Jim Crow, Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-One. In the early '70s as they existed in my corner of the world, could there have been a more subversive --
wonderfully, funkily, groovily, terrifyingly (to some) subversive -- program on television?

If 1973 had been 1963 and Baton Rouge had been Birmingham, a TV transmitter would have been blowed up good.

An
NPR blog post by Dan Charnas sums up Why Don Cornelius Matters quite nicely:
It was the Godfather of Soul's first appearance on Cornelius' then-nascent syndicated TV show — designed to do for soul music and black audiences what American Bandstand had long done for pop music and mainstream audiences. Brown marveled at the professionalism of the production, the flawlessness of its execution.

He turned to Cornelius and asked, "Who's backing you on this, man?"

"It's just me, James," Cornelius answered.

Brown, nonplused, acted as if Cornelius didn't understand the question. He asked it two more times, and Cornelius answered twice again: "It's just me, James."

That the man who wrote the song "Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud" and who recorded the soundtrack to the Black Power movement could scarcely comprehend that a black man like Cornelius both owned and helmed this kind of enterprise without white patronage is a testament to the magnitude and the improbability of Cornelius' achievements.


REST IN LOVE, peace and soul, Don Cornelius.