All Hail the king
Soul music architect Solomon Burke to play rare show in town
by Edd Hurt
It’s something of a paradox: soul music, one of the most formally delineated of all musical genres, has boasted some of popular music’s most colorful characters. It’s almost as if outsized personalities like Al Green, Wilson Pickett and The Spinners’ Phillipe Wynne have needed to strain against the confines of the style itself. But of all the larger-than-life figures who have worked within the genre, maybe none has made more of a musical contribution, or collected more of an extra-musical mythology around himself, than Solomon Burke, who appears at the Mercy Lounge Sept. 8 as part of an Americana Music Association showcase.
A licensed mortician, father of over 20 children, a master preacher and salesman—stories abound about his selling food at inflated prices to touring musicians and leaving recording studios to tend to his snow-shovel business—Burke is also one of the few singers who can lay claim to codifying soul music. Although James Brown, Ray Charles and Sam Cooke helped lay the foundations, Burke’s 1960s recordings for Atlantic represent perhaps the first true body of soul music. As Peter Guralnick writes, “Soul started, in a sense, with the 1961 success of Solomon Burke’s ‘Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Open Arms).’ ”
Even if Burke had never recorded anything after he left Atlantic in 1968, his place in history would be secure. “Just Out of Reach” anticipated Ray Charles’ fusion of country and soul music, and it’s arguable that Burke’s synthesis was more affecting. “Cry to Me,” which barely missed the pop Top 40 in 1962, became a staple in the repertoire of many British beat groups, including the Rolling Stones and the Pretty Things. It’s difficult to imagine a more impassioned song than Burke’s hard-rocking “Home in Your Heart,” or a more subtly modulated piece of secular gospel than “Someone Is Watching,” which stands as the apogee not only of Burke’s art but of the Atlantic soul style.
After leaving Atlantic, he signed with Bell and recorded a minor classic, 1969’s Proud Mary, which found him successfully negotiating the funk arrangements of the day on the title track and “I Can’t Stop.” At MGM in the early ’70s, Burke veered from the modernized country-soul of “The Electronic Magnetism (That’s Heavy, Baby)” to the outright kitsch of Elton John’s “Take Me to the Pilot” and “Border Song.” After all, bad taste often is part of being an outsized personality, and who can resist it when Burke, on 1972’s We’re Almost Home, rides out a ridiculous bongo-boogaloo arrangement of “Misty” by shouting “Somebody play ‘Misty’ for me!”?
Which isn’t to say that these recordings constitute the essential Solomon Burke—listeners should start with his classic King Solomon, from 1968, or 1986’s A Change Is Gonna Come—but that, in the case of giants like Burke, the sublime neatly coexists with the risible. On his recent records Don’t Give Up on Me and Make Do With What You’ve Got, there’s too much reverence, too many ill-chosen cover versions. It’s also unfortunately true that Burke, once the possessor of one of popular music’s most powerful voices, has lost much of his vocal range and dynamics.
Still, none of it really matters. For the soul-music audience, simply having the great man show up is enough. Despite their flaws, Burke’s later recordings reveal the same huge personality we hear on his classics. With Solomon Burke, life and music are one and the same, just as his God has always intended them to be.
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