Souls intact: The soul performances of Audre Lorde, Aretha Franklin, and Nina Simone

Abstract

This article redefines and regenders the meaning of soul in black expressive culture. The author argues that by the late 1960s the term encodes a narrative whereby racialized struggle yields a culturally superior style, and it shows how black women artists use literary and musical techniques to perform this recuperative alchemy. Reading Audre Lorde’s 1982 biomythography Zami as a paradigmatic soul text, the author contends that this text invites us to deprioritize concerns about the commodification of soul and to show instead how precisely black women artists such as Lorde, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin draw energy from the movement of the spiritual into the secular to create virtuosic, inclusive, and transformative forms of survivorship; the article suggests that they do so by weaving many genres together to create a home out of no home in the body, on the page, and on the stage. This analysis challenges interpretations of soul that privilege its marketization and appropriation and that reproduce a masculinist, heteronormative account, either as “fact,” in histories of popular music, or as the grounds for critique, in recent scholarship on “post-soul aesthetics.”

Keywords:

• black women
• performance
• soul
• Audre Lorde
• Nina Simone
• Aretha Franklin

Note on contributor

Emily J. Lordi is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature (2013) and Donny Hathaway Live (2016). She is writing a book about soul aesthetics.

Notes

1. Kelley (1997, 25). As Gayle Wald writes: “That one can have soul, be soulful and play soul music demonstrates soul’s compass over varied terrains of style, politics, ideology, subjectivity, and spirituality” (1998, 147). Franklin qtd. in Guillory and Green (1998, 1).

2. Time was not alone in this endeavor; in 1968 Esquire and Book World also featured stories on soul, prompting music journalist Phyl Garland to “wonder exactly what it is that has provoked this strange inner odyssey on the part of the American mainstream in its quest for soul” (Garland 1969, 10).

3. Porterfield (1968, 62).

4. See Awkward (2007, 42–54) for Franklin’s response to this article.

5. Jones qtd. in Porterfield (1968, 62).

6. Cambridge qtd. in Porterfield (1968, 66).

7. Cambridge re-drew the lines between soulful (black) insiders and curious (white) outsiders that the Time story exploited but also presumably aimed to ease. The article includes a page-length box chart titled “an arbitrary guide to soul,” which the authors describe as a random “gallery of familiar figures from legend, history, and the arts” who do and do not have soul (soulful Charlie Brown vs. Orphan Annie; Huck Finn vs. Tom Sawyer; Kierkegaard vs. Hegel). Of the 100-plus “familiar figures,” only one – Nat Turner – is black (Porterfield 1968, 66).

8. Smitherman (2000, 266).

9. It is well known that Civil Rights and Black Power organizations often suppressed and subordinated queer and female voices so that, as Ruth Feldstein writes: “Assertions of black male pride and a celebration of aggressive masculinity remained at the rhetorical and visual center of many expressions of black power, regardless of all that women activists were doing” (Feldstein 2013, 100). A growing body of scholarship on Simone illuminates her cultural leadership in these movements, and I follow Feldstein, Tammy Kernodle (2008), Daphne Brooks (2011), Shana Redmond (2014), and Salamishah Tillet (2014) in highlighting Simone’s black feminist musical politics. However, I also weave these insights about Simone into a larger story about soul itself, one that includes other musicians as well as writers.

10. For literary critical and queer theoretical analyses of the trope of “home” in Zami, see Pearl (2009) and Bolaki (2011), respectively.

11. On one end of the spectrum, Mark Anthony Neal (2013) follows Nelson George in claiming that in the late 1960s soul was “divorced from its politicized and organic conations” and “became a malleable market resource merchandised to black and white consumers alike in the form of music, television shows, and hair-care products” through a process that “reduced blackness to a commodity that could be bought and sold” (94–95). On the other end, Paul Gilroy claims that soul stands for “black sublimity,” especially through the “musical event”’ (252); it signifies “a distinctive unassimilable style” that “resists the reach of economic rationality and the commodifying process” (251).

12. An advertisement for Nina Simone’s album Black Gold (RCA) demonstrates this process. Published in Rolling Stone in 1970, the ad exhorts the magazine’s (presumably nonblack) readers to “listen to what you miss out on by not being black,” and ends by venturing that, with this album, “if you can’t feel what it’s like, at least you may understand. Perhaps for the first time.” See Thomas (2012, 25). Thanks to Alexander Ponomareff for calling this ad to my attention.

13. I extend thanks to my peer reviewer for a version of this formulation.

14. Soul music is often imagined as an aggressively masculine and heterosexual domain best represented by Ray Charles (“the Father of Soul”), Otis Redding (“the King of Soul”), and James Brown (“Soul Brother No. 1″). In Looking for Leroy (2013), Mark Anthony Neal additionally cites Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Isaac Hayes, Teddy Pendergrass, Eldridge Cleaver, and George Jackson as representatives of the hyper-hetero-sexual “soul man” archetype. See Neal (2013, 125, 143, 152). Michael Haralambos’s 1974 history of soul music is one useful index of the male bias of soul historians, as Haralambos cites about a dozen women artists amidst hundreds of men.

15. Brian Ward (1998, 201).

16. Young (2012, 251).

17. Carolyn Franklin qtd. in Ritz (2014, 38).

18. Lorde (1982, 241–253); Franklin qtd. Porterfield (1968, 66); Simone qtd. in Taylor (1993, 151).

19. Lorde conversation with Claudia Tate in Hall (2004, 99).

20. Redmond (2014, 221).

21. Billed as “The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” “Hair” premiered in 1967 and was staged at the Public Theater in New York in 1968. As the first “rock musical,” the show itself constitutes an innovative hybrid theatrical form.

22. Lorde conversation with Tate in Hall (2004, 99).

23. Cf. Lorde’s remark in The Cancer Journals (1980, 40), that “Growing up Fat Black Female and almost blind in America requires so much surviving that you have to learn from it or die” (qtd. in Elizabeth Alexander [2007, 105]).

24. For Lorde’s experimental form and syntax as modes of self-making through poetry, see Rudnitsky (2003) and Leonard (2012). The best discussion of Lorde’s formal experimental in prose is Alexander (2007).

25. Lorde qtd. in Alexander (2007, 95).

26. Lorde conversation with Karen Nölle-Fischer in Hall (2004, 155).

27. Alexander (2007, 97).

28. Lorde (1996, 57) (italics in original).

29. Redmond’s important insight into the “queering of [Simone’s] gender performance through her voice,” which was often mistaken as male on record, suggests that her voice itself could be conceived as such as house of difference (2014, 208).

30. Simone with Stephen Cleary (2003, ix, 166, 167, 168).

31. Garland (1969, 170).

32. Taylor (1993, 148).

33. Feldstein (2013, 88–89).

34. Taylor (1993, 149).

35. Simone with Cleary (2003, 50).

36. See Tillet (2014, 120); Brooks (2011, 176, 178).

37. See The Great Live Show in Paris (Trip Records); the album was released in 1974 although recorded in 1968.

38. For Simone’s philosophy on audience-performer relations, see Simone with Cleary (2003, 52).

39. Dobie (1997, 232) qtd. in Brooks (2011, 176).

40. Ibid., 92–93.

41. Ibid., 94.

42. As Farah Jasmine Griffin writes, Simone’s vocal work does not cordon bodily labor off from spiritual experience but instead reveals “that transcendence is acquired through the manipulation of bodily functions (chanting, singing, breathing, shouting, dancing)” (2004, 109).

43. Nina: A Historical Perspective is available on the CD/DVD box set, To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story (Sony BMG, 2008). See www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4CbuE6--as.

44. Feldstein (2013, 103).

45. Tillet (2012).

46. See Carby (1998, 469–482). Franklin herself refused the designation of “Dr. Feelgood” as a “sexy song,” telling one reporter that “it’s about romance, not sex,” and thus aiming to control the narrative about her own music despite industry demands and expectations. See Ritz (2014, 215).

47. Simone with Cleary (2003, 117).

48. Aretha Live at Fillmore West (Atlantic, 1971). A similar performance can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYPfU8Ggxro.

49. Franklin with David Ritz (1999, 110–111).

50. Pianist and composer Bobby Scott qtd. in Ritz (2014) 116); see too the remarks of Franklin’s brother Cecil, who described her as “a great blues singer,” “a great gospel singer,” and “a great jazz singer”—“she’s all three at once. And in the language of the jazzman, that’s what’s called a motherfucker” (ibid); Franklin with Ritz (1999, 138).

51. Ibid., 139.

52. Preston qtd. in Ritz (2014, 235).

53. For a different discussion of Franklin’s support of queer cultures and same-sex marriage, see Anthony Heilbut (2012, 155–156).

54. Shange (1989, 63).

55. This principle, which appears throughout Baldwin’s work, is encapsulated in a 1989 exchange with a white British interviewer: “Now when you were starting out as a writer, you were black, impoverished, homosexual. You must have said to yourself, ‘Gee, how disadvantaged can I get?’” Baldwin responds, laughing, “No, I thought I’d hit the jackpot … It was so outrageous you could not go any further, you know. So you had to find a way to use it” (Thorsen 1989). On jazz and blues, see Baldwin (1993, 41–42). For more on Baldwin’s innovative contributions to the discourse of soul, see Lordi, “James Baldwin and the Sound of Soul,” New Centennial Review, forthcoming 2016.

56. W. E. B. Du Bois (2008, 8).

57. See Royster (2012).

58. Ibid., 9.

59. Ashe (2007, 615).

60. Ashe with C. Anderson, M. A. Neal, E. Shockley, and A. Weheliye (2007, 788).

61. King (1991, 17).

62. Reagon qtd. in Redmond (2014, 207). Toni Morrison concurred, attesting in the wake of Simone’s death that “she saved our lives” (Holden 2004). Thanks to Salamishah Tillet for this reference.

63. See DeVeaux's biography of Lorde, titled Warrior Poet (2006).

64. Ellison (2001, 100).