Soul Man Revived: Bobby Womack’s The Bravest Man in the Universe

Soul Man Revived: 

Bobby Womack’s The Bravest Man in the Universe

by Mark Anthony Neal | Ebony.com

“As a singer grows older, his conception goes a little bit deeper, because he lives life and he understands what he is trying to say a little more”—Smokey Robinson Sam Cooke

The above quote from William “Smokey” Robinson Sam Cooke, a  could have been directed at any number of his still contemporaries, such as Al Green or Ronald Isley.  Green’s psychic and spiritual conversion over a pot of grits (and a suicide) and Isley’s recent tax conviction are well known to the public.  Bobby Womack’s story is less well- known, thus it is fitting that Robinson’s quote is heard on Womack’s new recording The Bravest Man in the Universe—his first studio recording in twelve years.

For the uninitiated, Bobby Womack was born in Cleveland, OH  in 1944, and first came to prominence as a teen recording with his brothers as The Valentino’s.  The group caught the attention of Soul legend Sam Cooke, who managed and mentored the group, and encouraged Womack to allow The Rolling Stones to record his song, “It’s All Over Now,” which became the group’s first number one record in the UK.  

Cooke and Womack developed a particularly close friendship, which is perhaps why Womack, thought it was logical to marry Cooke’s widow, Barbara Campbell, only months after the singer’s murder in December of 1964. The couple only waited that long, because Womack was still too young to get married without a parent’s permission. Womack publicly hints at the relationship on his 1985 track “I Wish He Didn’t Trust Me So Much,” which is about a man who falls in love with his best friend’s wife.

Womack and Campbell shared a tumultuous relationship for five years, including an affair with Campbell’s daughter Linda (his step-daughter), that Womack documents in his memoir Midnight Mover: The True Story of the Greatest Soul Singer in the World. The relationship ended when Campbell shot Womack. Womack’s only son with Campbell, committed suicide in the mid-1980s, an infant son he had with his second wife died a crib death, and a third son is incarcerated for second-degree murder.  Add to the mix, his struggles with drug addition, and his recent bout with a benign tumor in his colon and pneumonia, and Bobby Womack’s life seems like a reality show in the making.

Read More at Ebony.com

From the Digital Crate: Bobby Womack—The Last Soul Man

From the Digital Crate:

Bobby Womack—The Last Soul Man

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

Mention the phrase “Soul Man,” and a litany of names are conjured such as Otis Redding, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Al Green, Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye, Jackie Wilson, Teddy Pendergrass and of course Sam Cooke.  Even newbies like Anthony Hamilton and Jaheim are likely to make the cut, particularly for those for who like their contemporary Soul, down home and gritty.  For far too many, Bobby Womack is unfortunately an afterthought.

At the height of Soul Music’s popularity in the 1960s and early 1970s, the male Soul singer’s status rivaled that of his “race man” peer. The Soul Man icons of that era congealed grand narratives of tragedy—shot dead in a motel; shot dead by your father; shot dead in a game of Russian Roulette; killed in an airplane crash; scorched by a pot of boiling grits—wedded to even more complicated personal demons—physical abuse of wives and girlfriends; sexual assault of younger female artists; sex with underage girls. 

These dynamics reflected the binary tensions of the foundational myth of the Soul Man tradition; namely that this was the price that these men were damned to pay for offering their Godly gifts of song for sale in the marketplace of the flesh.  Thus in an era when Martin Luther King, Jr. and others made the claim that African-Americans were the moral compass of American society, the Soul Man becomes the shifting locus for a noble struggle—decidedly secular—against good and evil.

Though Ray Charles is thought to be the most important creative force in the development of Soul Music, it was Sam Cooke who was the template for the Soul Man. Possessing good looks and a virile masculinity Cooke had emerged from his apprenticeships as lead vocalist of the gospel groups the Highway QCs and The Soul Stirrers, very much as Gospel music’s first  sex symbol.  And it was this particular appeal that helped solidify the foundational myth of the Soul Man; While Cooke clearly sang of the lord—often in that fluttering feathery riff that became his signature—he clearly desired the flesh as evidenced by the philandering that purportedly instigated (in part) his murder in 1964. That Cooke was murdered as he was transitioning from his status as a popular balladeer into a more formal role as a race man—his posthumously released “A Change is Gonna Come” is seen as a core text among Civil Rights era anthems—only heightens the gravitas associated with his role as a Soul Man.  

Cooke’s death, along with a decade of bad romantic relationships and near fatal accidents before, was affirmation to many of the “true believers” that he was being disciplined for the sin of not only breaking ranks with the Gospel world, but literally opening up the floodgates for many others—most  famously Aretha Franklin—to do so.  One of those who came on through, was Bobby Womack.  Recording  as the Valentino’s in the early 1960s, Womack and his brothers were tutored by Cooke about the professional aspects of the recording industry.  Womack’s own musical sensibilities were greatly influenced by Cooke, as the latter became a father figure.  

Womack’s instincts in the aftermath of Cooke’s death, was to offer counsel and comfort to Cooke’s widow Barbara, but three months after Cooke’s death and just as Womack  turned 21-years of age, he went a step further, marrying  Cooke’s still grieving wife.  “They didn’t let his body get cold in the ground” was how the Pittsburgh Courier quoted family members in response to Womack and Barbara Cooke’s marriage, as Cooke’s young charge and his widow were easily cast as deviants in opposition to the fallen Soul Man.

It was in the context of this drama that Womack began a solo career of some distinction, initially establishing himself as a solid session musician (he played guitar on Aretha Franklin’s classic I Have Never Loved a Man) and an in demand songwriter, whose credits include tunes recorded by Wilson Pickett, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, George Benson (“Breezin’”) and the aforementioned Franklin. 

After releasing a string of singles, beginning with “I Found a True Love” in 1965 for the legendary Chess label, Womack released his first solo album in 1968 with Fly Me to the Moon on the Minit label.  It would still be a few years before Womack would hit his artistic stride, recording a sequence of stellar recordings for the United Artist label in the early 1970s that included signature tracks such as “I Can Understand It,” “That’s the Way I Feel About Cha,” “Woman’s Gotta Have It,”  “Across 110^th Street” (from the movie soundtrack of the same name) and “Lookin’ for a Love,” a song which Womack originally recorded with his brothers in 1962.

Though Womack’s music was well regarded by black audiences and received the support of black radio, he never made the crossover inroads that his friend and mentor Sam Cooke did.  On his nearly 10-minute version of The Carpenters’ “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” recorded on his 1971 album Communication, Womack gives some insight into his commercial struggles.  In the song’s opening monologue, Womack recounts a record executive who walked into one of his recording sessions and admonished Womack for not being “commercial enough.”  According to Womack, “I don’t care what it is, if I can get into it, it’s commercial enough to me.” Indeed that was Womack’s mantra, as the Disco era hit in the mid-1970s and a generation of Soul Singers were tossed to the side by record labels, save the few who adapted, like Johnnie Taylor, who scored the biggest hit of his career with “Disco Lady.”

Womack kept recording and made a bit of a comeback in the early 1980s recording for the independent label Beverly Glen.  On his first album for the label The Poet, Womack recorded what is perhaps his most recognizable tune, “If You Think You’re Lonely Now,” a song that was rumored to be one of the late Richard Pryor’s favorites. It was during the midst of this resurgence that Womack finally responded musically to the drama that initially unfolded in the months after his mentor’s demise.  “

I Wish You Wouldn’t Trust Me So,” rather casually tells the story of a man who has fallen in love with his best friend’s wife.  By the time the song was released in the summer of 1985, most listeners were not privy to the singer’s relationship with Cooke’s widow, who Womack had divorced a decade earlier.  To complicate matters, Womack’s brother Cecil married Linda Cooke, the daughter of Sam and Barbara Cooke.  During the time that Bobby Womack recorded “I Wish I Wouldn’t Trust You So Much,” Curtis and Linda Womack were popular songwriters and artist in their own right  recording as “Womack & Womack”; the duo, for example, penned Teddy Pendergrass’s hit “Love T.K.O.”

Arguably Womack’s last great hit, “I Wish You Wouldn’t Trust So Much” captures all of the dramatic tension that that made Womack’s music so compelling in the first place, but it was also a reminder of the kinds of secrets that likely kept Womack from being fully embraced by the listening public.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press) and Professor of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. He is founder and managing editor of NewBlackMan and host of the weekly webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

The Life and Times of Eddie King, Jr.

The Life and Times of Eddie King, Jr.
by Mark Anthony Neal

Filmmaker Robert Townsend didn’t have to conjure Eddie King, Jr., the lead singer from the fictional soul group The Five Heartbeats, the subjects of Townsend’s 1991 film of the same title. Well known at the time was the role of The Dells, legendary hit-makers with songs like “Oh What a Night” and “Stay (In my Corner),” as the film’s consultants. And while the Dells’ career resembles nothing like the drama that shapes The Five Heartbeats, as veterans of the chitlin’ circuit, they of course had stories to share.

Townsend also could draw on the tradition of the male Soul singer—the proverbial Soul Man—an iconic figure from the 1960s and 1970s that congealed grand narratives of tragedy—shot dead in a motel; shot dead by your father; shot dead in a game of Russian Roulette; killed in an airplane crash; scorched by a pot of boiling grits, paralyzed in a car accident, marrying your dead mentor’s wife months after his death—wedded to even more complicated personal demons—physical abuse of wives and girlfriends; sexual assault of younger female artists; sex with underage girls.

Conventional wisdom is that these tragedies were the price that these men were damned to pay for offering their Godly gifts of voice for sale in the marketplace of the flesh. And immediately we can see Choir Boy, the Five Heartbeats’ falsetto voiced singer, arguing with his preacher dad about the temptations of being out on the road. What was Choir Boy’s story line was likely applicable for the majority of these men who took a leap of faith—literally—and hoped that those gifts from God would translate into some modicum of fame and the ability to live the “good life,” for a generation of black folk, for which such themes were always simply an ideal. The glitz and glamour of those early Motown days were more wishful thinking than anything—just look at the building in Detroit that housed the famed “Hitsville, USA.”

And whatever the tragedies that befell these men, they were not occur in isolation; in the decades before the internet and 24-hour new cycles, and when Jet Magazine was effectively Black America’s social media, the Soul Man was the secular brethren of the equally iconic Race Man—figures who were dually in a noble (and decidedly patriarchal) struggle against good and evil; blackness and whiteness; military aggression and pacifism; sex and love; and “class and crass” to quote another fictional Soul Man, Dream Girls’ Curtis Taylor. These men existed at the same crossroads where legendary Bluesman Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil (and damn if his BET founding namesake ain’t been every bit the devil); a subtle reminder that if Huey Newton or Medgar Evers had been able to carry a tune or two over a Motown backbeat or a Stax horn chart, they might have still been in the line of fire.

When Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats was released in March of 1991, audiences might have still been aching over the shocking murder of Marvin Gaye, 6 years and 362 days earlier. In truth, Michael Wright’s Eddie King, Jr., most evoked the troubled and tragic soul that was David Ruffin, lead singer of the most classic Temptations’ lineup from 1964, until his ouster in 1968, though Five Heartbeats cast-mate Leon would better perfect Ruffin’s cavalier brilliance in his portrait of him for the television mini-series The Temptations (1997).



Townsend’s movie was released only months after the first of two box-set collections of Gaye’s musical career was released, a moment that demanded a re-evaluation of Gaye’s career, which could be heard in the generation of R&B singers that emerged in the 1990s including Kenny Lattimore, Maxwell, D’Angelo and perhaps, most dramatically, Robert Sylvester Kelly. As the quintessential Soul Man (save Sam Cooke, who served as the template), it was not difficult to read Gaye onto Eddie King, Jr. or a generation later, Eddie Murphy’s stellar portrait of the fictional James “Thunder” Early in the film adaptation of Dreamgirls.



In many ways the specter of Marvin Gaye continues to haunt contemporary imaginations of Soul Men. Perhaps it’s because Marvin Gaye was a project incomplete—we all long for what Gaye might have had to say about the Hip-hop generation that was just emerging when he took his last breathe and how he might have engaged the music that was produced in its wake. I for one, wonder what Gaye might have had to say to Mr. Kelly—men who could be accused of, but never convicted of the same crime; like I said there are stories to tell.

But what makes Gaye’s music so singular, is that he never seemed to seek redemption—he seemed almost tragically comfortable with the duality of his experiences and his duel lust for God and the flesh—thinking of his description of sex, fucking really, as “something like sanctified.” Indeed figures as diverse as Al Green, Teddy Pendergrass, Ronald Isley, Charlie Wilson—and yes, even Mr. Kelley, have actively sought, and in some cases found redemption.

Even Eddie King, Jr. found his redemption, singing Rance Allen’s “I Feel Like Going On” in one of the most memorable scenes from The Five Heartbeats. There are no such moments in Gaye’s career—even his most lasting performance, singing the National Anthem at the 1983 All-star game in Los Angeles, was not so much an attempt at redemption, as it was one last dig at the failings of American Democracy—that programmed back-beat a reminder of the Black humanity that lie at the center of a radical Democratic project.

And it is perhaps this lack of resolution that makes Marvin Gaye such a difficult cinematic subject—and perhaps the very reason the idea of Eddie King, Jr.—and all the men who contributed to his mythic creation, will continue to resonate well after The Five Heartbeats are forgotten.

K-Ci and JoJo Seek Redemption

Are the Hailey brothers continuing a sad tradition of the tragic 'Soul Man?'

K-Ci and JoJo Seek Redemption on Reality TV
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

Robert Townsend’s 1991 film 'The Five Heartbeats', chronicled the lives and careers of a fiction R&B group, The Five Heartbeats. At the center of the story was the character of Eddie King, Jr. (portrayed by the underrated Michael Wright), a dark shadowy figure, who was magnetic on stage, but self-destructive off stage. Eddie King. Jr. was a metaphor for the ‘Soul Man’, a tragic figure in African-American lore. Nearly 20 years later singers and brothers K-Ci and JoJo Hailey seem to follow a script that is all too known for far too many Black male singers.

The Brothers Hailey are currently the stars of the TV-One reality series K-Ci & JoJo ‘Come Clean’ which features the former Jodeci lead singers in recovery from alcohol (and presumably drug) addiction. At their peak in the mid-1990s, Jodeci were the bad-boys of R&B, thuggish counterparts to the January “white sale” clean of Boyz II Men. K-Ci and JoJo seemed to live up to that reputation in every way, including widespread rumors that K-Ci was physically abusive to then romantic partner Mary J. Blige. By the early 2000s, enough stories had begun to circulate about their personal and professional unraveling, that the worst was feared when a video of JoJo collapsing on stage hit the internet in 2008.

Gifted vocalists, whose performances always remained in conversation with their musical roots in the Black Church, the travails of K-Ci and JoJo were all too reminiscent of the many Black male singers who had struggled to balance their artistic gifts with the pressures of celebrity and dysfunctional family lives.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com