Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1381194 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 246 pages

Review
“[V]aluable insights into these three albums encourage listeners to pick them up and listen to them again in light of [Awkward’s] examination of them; just what all good music books should do.”
--Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Foreword Magazine

From the Publisher
"With Soul Covers, Michael Awkward weds his devotion to close reading to his appreciation of rhythm and blues and soul music, creating a book that stands out as unique among the scholarship and criticism on black popular music."--Mark Anthony Neal, author of Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation

From the Back Cover

“With Soul Covers, Michael Awkward weds his devotion to close reading to his appreciation of rhythm and blues and soul music, creating a book that stands out as unique among the scholarship and criticism on black popular music.”—Mark Anthony Neal, author of Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation

“Michael Awkward’s Soul Covers signals the beginning of a new era in the critical engagement with African American music of the 1960s and 1970s. Moving beyond the historical overviews and critical biographies that have defined the field, he provides three crucial albums with the kinds of close reading usually reserved for canonical literary texts. His choices are unusual and inspired, offering pathways into a richer understanding of Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and the greatly underappreciated Phoebe Snow. Awkward captures the complex music of the era in writing that, like its subjects, has real soul.”—Craig Werner, author of A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America

Customer Reviews

But it's Phoebe Snow
I am a huge Phoebe Snow fan. I will listen to anything, read anything, if it has to do with Phoebe Snow. This book isn't what I thought it was going to be, but it is totally worth the read. Three of my favorite artists, Aretha Franklin, Al Green and Phoebe Snow, what could be better? Soul music lovers should find this a must in their library.