The song of my soul

While Motown was crossing over into everyone’s listening, the music that I thought of as ‘soul” music, although I kept my mouth shut to avoid controversy, I didn’t think Motown very soulful whatsoever. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like the music but it sure as hell wasn’t soulful or “black”. It was black singers being performed in whiteface and less “black” than the early days when popular whites would sing in blackface.

My internal being rejected it, in other words. But it was good, it was rhythmic, it had great musicians Barry Gordy plucked from the Detroit jazz scene great musician, and as bop was dying in popularity, transformed their great melodic bop rhythms into great melodic pop rhythms. Choreographers and even an etiquette teacher were brought in to teach theses young Detroit singers, how to make sexiness into unprovocativeness; how to harmonize their movements as if they were in a broadway chorus line; and to appeal to white sensitivities so those whites could say , “Hey isn’t soul music grand”.

Gordy spectorized soul into a great wall of sound and music colors and I loved a great deal of it. It appealed to my love of musical color and it appealed to my need of being multi-stimulated but the only way to dance to it was thorough sterility and I could not feel anything. I can dance to choreographed movements, but I prefer dancing to what some termed “spasmodic”, stomping, jumping, leaping, to whatever motions the music seemed to present to my emotions; clinching myself into knots when the music made me feel its pain, opening up my movements when the music was exciting.

I wanted to dance with the mood and feeling, just as I moved through life by responding to the moods and feelings of my environment—running and jumping and weeping in the arms of others. I was often considered cold-hearted I suppose and I understood that because I was never the one to make a pass at women, but always the one women wanted to cry with when they felt broken or threatened (mostly women; men don’t want to be perceived as broken or threatened). The country music refrain, “tonight I turned to the bottle”, et al. is the only way men were supposed to emote.

These artists of Motown were good voices, tight music and a stable of interchangeable Nat would-be-king Coles.

And so the pop radio of my day was not generally my preferred method of listening. I would, during summers, try to find the obscure blues stations from Chicago and my grandfather put up an antenna so I could hear the music coming out of Memphis at night. Ah to me there was soul. There was the Carla and Otis and Wilson but also Mable John, Little Milton, Jean Knight, Albert King and many nobody remembers. And of course Sam Moore and David Porter who would later join to form Sam and Dave.

I guess though there is no real way to compare Motown and Stax, you like what you like. The music of Atlantic, Stax, the music that come out of Muscle Shoals, this was the music that gave me freedom of expression in the depths of my being. And then there was Chess and Vee-Jay, the blues and pop music of Chicago. Vee-Jay, not Motown was the first (successful) black-owned music station.

A little bit of trivia–a Vee-Jay producer or sales person, or whatever he was doing there, was in England and heard a young British band, he recorded some songs with these British guys that were called the Beatles. Brian Epstein then got a contract with EMI and George Martin and they contracted with Capital as the American distributor who put the kibosh to Vee-Jay’s recordings, even gaining control of their tapes and releasing them as their own. But what could Vee-Jay do against big Capital records in a court of law.?

But Vee-Jay and Stax, unlike Motown, were however, not race-conscious. Stax released the Limeliters whom the Kingston Trio couldn’t hold a candle too I thought. The Kingston Trio, to me, were to Folk what Motown was to black music. They were a slicked-up version and not at all folkish. So of course young Dylan was like a shot into the past of folk to everyone, not just me.

It’s not that I didn’t like the Kingston Trio but they were not the music I related to inwardly; only outwardly.

I connect to my feelings more than to the outward exhibitions of behavioral guidelines. And so I acted as my feelings led me, I guess some thought me over-passionate in the intensity of my behavior. But I still participated in “normal” society by trying to get along with everyone.

When I was hired by the secretarial union in Cleveland, 9 to 5 (movie named for union, not vice-versa), the movie had come out and I was hired as a “male” to an otherwise all female union staff. Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda came (separately) during my short tenure.

Now of course I had heard about Hanoi Jane and contentious and difficult Lily. Jane was snobbish, wouldn’t take questions and seemed to be telling us what we needed to do. Lily and I hit it off. She was passionate about everything said and responsive to everyone. Jane was a sterilized better than you liberal and Lily was heightened by her passion to lift {women} from being an underclass. Lily excited me with the energy for the work I had been hired and Jane came and that’s all I remember, I might as well not even have been in the room. She talked to and about herself not to us.

And so in my youth (60’s–12 to 21) Motown was passionless and never spoke to me. It’s not about black and white. Sure the black musicians were really talented; they were educated by Gordy to appeal to white audiences and they laid down great tracks and the singers were all pleasant and as appealing as Bing Crosby. But Barbra Streisand turned “Happy Days Are Here Again” into a plea for happy days to be here again instead of a sing-along to the bouncing ball and Motown just couldn’t do that for me.

Barbra, however, could have sung for Stax. And as everyone surely knows the house band was a racially mixed band. And then at the Muscle Shoals studio almost exclusively white musicians. But they sounded good because they felt their music and the better “qualified” musicians at Motown read their music.

And yet Motown brought black and whites together and gave hope to people of both races. White people, even “unracist” white people hated Stokely and Malcolm, but Martin became a hero to them.

Martin gave hope to millions of blacks and whites, just as did Motown. And then on April 4, 1968 everything fractured. “Look at them niggers rioting in the street, Martin may have been a good boy working for peace, but he shouldn’t teach those boys anything should he?”

As the music of Motown began to die, as the culture of black conciliation began to be recognized as that more than Martin’s hoped for reconciliation, it began to be increasingly evident that Motown had been conciliatory to whites and not reconciliatory with whites. And then on April 4, probably early morning April 5, I and woman cried together. We cried together because we felt the future we didn’t want. We felt Martin’s death meant white people wouldn’t need to pretend.

Oh sure—white people were still attracted to George Wallace: the hope of Martin and the whitefaced black musician, were really never going to bring us together after all.

What we felt that night was the loneliness that would separate us and the feelings that even though George Wallace couldn’t win the presidency, he would in the future; or some kin of his hatefulness.

What I didn’t expect, and what I expect she wouldn’t have had she still been alive was that that George Wallace would be a black man

Barack Obama’s signature legislature will never be the ACA. It was his bail-out of the corporations. And all of my family and all of my wife’s family that includes black, hispanic and white—as a unit they had all voted for Barack Obama. And as they lost their homes (to a man and woman, except my father who lost almost everything) Obama was not the first black American to be elected president, that they had voted for—and reiterating here, the black and hispanics as well as the whites in my wife’s multi-racial family, Obama to them was now the incarnate demon who unleashed their venom, in broad daylight of the deepest moonless nights.

And then in 2016 they found hope in Sanders; many were planning to vote for Sanders—and then they couldn’t because he was denied to them, and Trump was the alternative to the Clinton-Obama coalition.

Okay, I could be wrong, maybe am wrong for half of Americans apparently. But it’s not the half I now know. It was the half that excluded me when they kicked me out of the convention in 1984. That night I cried in the arms of the same women I had cried with on the night MLK had died. For the last time. Because I had been snuffed out that night.

I was emphatically informed I didn’t have the qualifications to understand the neo-liberalism. I didn’t. They were right. I was the old 60’s hopeful guy, the one who hadn’t changed at the reunion. I could only be Bill Hurt, no longer welcome at the party (see movie The Big Chill). My hands remained calloused and no matter how much I might scrub the dirt was still under the fingernails. My voice was no longer wanted. The democratic party no longer wanted to appeal to me or any others like me. They told me in no uncertain terms I was out of step.

So I cried that night, but she couldn’t cry with me because I was crying out of loneliness for my own future of voicelessness and she now had a presence for her voice on a San Francisco radio. She could speak out and I had to remain silent.

I had spent my life believing that hope was not in the generalities but that my role in life–if i had one at all, was to show that group and this group that theory belonged together:

“There’s no place in this world where I’ll belong when I’m gone

And I won’t know the right from the wrong when I’m gone

And you won’t find me singin’ on this song when I’m gone

So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.”

-Phil Ochs.

But my song had ended and I was still here. Just as Motown had ended as a black music for whites. Motown artists left and found a different song to black people. But what song could I sing to the calloused hands people when my song had always been you will be welcomed when I had just been told that song was not wanted. Don’t go singing about us joining you, we are the smart ones and they got slaughtered in the ‘84 election, but really they didn’t . Only in the electoral vote. The popular vote was really not that different, just barely only half of the populace.

And so I chewed myself up and couldn’t swallow hopelessness. So mostly I shut my mouth for thirty-six years and put more callouses on my hands and my brain concussed into the silence of never expressing an opinion. But that was not so really different. I had always preferred questioning people and not stating my opinion. And then armed with my college degree for five years (79-84) I thought I could actually have an opinion.

But I found that was not popular with anyone. Because my opinion was to not put the meat between two slices of bread and fight over whether the meat should be ham or beef put to remove the meat and have everyone enjoy the sandwich whatever meat they might prefer.

And rarely unless pushed into an extreme situation, did my old tendency to kick in and act to prevent violence between ideas or actions of violence occur. I abandoned movies. I listened to “cultural roots” music–American music before the 30’s or traditional music of Africa and the far east or native American music.

I tried to start a business that offered independence to people who were not employed by me. I sold everything at wholesale and only charged a weekly lease fee for my vehicles or to stationary businesses that I stocked with supplies.

And then I realized that even that was too oppressive. They called me boss, they found my contract itself oppressive. But most of them benefitted well. They made more money than other other ice cream truck company drivers and some folded and some of the drivers came to work with (I thought, but they thought for) me. One driver who had worked for another company told me he was earning eightfold than when he was working for the the 50-50 split.

And then he led the mutiny that gave rise to the idea that the drivers didn’t think my lease was fair because I assigned people regions so they didn’t have to compete with each other. So fine, it’s yours, here’s the bank account, go buy your own product, I’ll put the trucks in your name. You buy your own insurance; your own product, and I took all of the stock and divided it up and went to work for Circle K. Put my money in a Circle K credit union. Within a month they had depleted the bank account and they all wanted to sell me the trucks—the trucks I had given them, I had to buy back, and then resell at a lost. There was no where to turn but my father who had retired and bought a house in Texas where several of his old teacher buddies had retired to.

And then I knew everything. I knew my own dirty hands didn’t equate with their dirty hands and I knew why the neo-liberals found me intolerable. They didn’t like the looks of my callouses, and those that had callouses didn’t like their callouses because those that didn’t have callouses thought callouses were non-intelligent.

I failed to bring people together because they understood they didn’t belong together.

But those with soft hands; they could snub the calloused and believe they represented them; or they could use them to maintain their snubbing by encouraging them to despise each other.

But those with calloused hands really despised being snubbed by the emperors but they couldn’t survive if they didn’t listen to the their enchainers and sing their songs of hate.

No one could sing these songs of freedom because they could never be the songs they ever had. Even the songs of freedom felt denied.

And so the silenced voices, the voices cast out of the decisions have no songs to sing. No Motown Songs , No Stax Songs, only these songs of hatred because that’s the only songs they ever had—but not the songs of the delta bluesman or the mountaineer country; but the drinking brawling music of the permanently unsatisfied; or the rap of the streets; or the death metal; or meaningless loss of all music in the netherland of the disharmonies of the alternative and cordless brittle of electronica, the rap of ultimate musicless despair…

But the most damaged of all, are the emperors in America. The kings who import themselves as the minds of corporations who must take over everything out of the same constant fears that led the cousins of Europe into constant war ; the same insecurities of leadership that needs to rape power from others and each other.

But I refuse to think we can not end our mentally ill society by joining ourselves against these Emperors and realizing the truth that they can only bring division because they can only lead by destroying each other.

The image remains. Michael Moore running down the hall after Roger Smith. Danid Letterman being escorted from the building where his new studio was to be for bringing gifts to the building’s executives.

And that is what it is all about, Alfie. That’s why we are alone. That’s why there must be a someday when we realize we don’t have to be alone and the only thing we really need to learn is it doesn’t need be this way. No one with soft hands could have their manicure without the calloused labors of those serving them.

So my song has returned because I have to sing it now because very soon, this year, next year, I will be gone. I have no choir to preach to but the song has already been sung because these songs of freedom are all we will ever have unless we can turn the chorus into All together now and “she” doesn’t have to leave home after everything we’ve given to her has made her life one of living alone.

Must leaving home be the only answer because we are living alone in our home; or can we build a home where no one is alone. And so my song; or the song I want to end upon is that blackfaced, whitefaced, orange polka-dot-faced should find peace together only when the green-faced become the unenvied faces and the only faces that can’t find a home.

And my own face, I’ve been told, is so ugly even a mother couldn’t love. But that’s all right. If you can build a home for everyone else, that’s all right, I can rest easily in the ground below the mansion not in the sky or on the hill, but the mansion of acceptance and respect for each.

And then my song will become upbeat and the tracks of my tears will dry.

Who cares about me because I have only cared about you. But I will down my life only if you will pick yours up. There is no heaven waiting for you but what you can do to conquer what defeats you. There is no savior, not me; but you and you singing together can solve what ails you; but the green-faced emperors will only make you ill.

No one really cast me out of any society. I did that myself. I walked that lonesome valley and became my own nowhere man. Don’t emulate me. Don’t emulate anyone, tear down the altars of despair and build a campfire and sing together and when the harmony is out of tune, sit around another campfire where all can come and sing and all can leave to sing again elsewhere.

But don’t need your song to soar to the top of the charts, but sing to each other, always to each other and try to fine the common tune you can all sing.

All together Now.

These songs of freedom are all you will ever have.

But they must be sung.

All together Now. We can sing ourselves not into a utopia or heaven. Those songs are only needed if their are only songs are of sorrow.

But we can sing the world together if we sing together and even though the platter may become scratched at times, don’t throw it away but keep on singing new songs on top of old vinyl. But share the vinyl, don’t sale it because wealth can only come when it is given not when it is taken.

But it’s never been how much anybody had.

How much anyone has will not break any record. It’s always been about trying to prevent anyone else from having. And then the record breaks the heart of the hoarder.

But if everyone shares their own song no one will care who sings the most songs. And I guess the last thing I will sing in 2024 is every song will be a hit when everyone can sing their own song and then the songs will sound more and more like a song of

Respect.

Ebook now available. Thoughts & Essays on Developing Personalities v.1 The Thoughts

by ken taylor

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