Katie Gilbert on a by David Ramsey and Kevin A. González
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CELEBRATING 25 YEARS PROUDLY PUBLISHED FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS MISSISSIPPI’S SOCIALIST EXPERIMENT: KATIE GILBERT ON A RADICAL VISION FOR JACKSON GARY STEWART, HONKY-TONK MAN BY DAVID RAMSEY FICTION BY JESMYN WARD A MAGAZINE OF THE SOUTH • FALL 2017 AND KEVIN A. GONZÁLEZ KAVEH AKBAR, DANIELLE CHAPMAN, CHRIS OFFUTT, AMINA GAUTIER, DIANE ROBERTS, CORMAC McCARTHY, YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA, ROSE McLARNEY AND FREDERICK McKINDRA ON BLACK SELFHOOD IN LITTLE ROCK a mission statement for a project the men “Ben E. King,” she said, pointing at the always had a hard time defining. Pickett’s singer. “My father and Ben E. King were very question, the crux of their unfinished, un- good friends. I’m talking very good friends. titled song, was one the old friends had never He really got me through my father’s death. stopped asking in the years since they first He was very true.” She pointed to the man Soul joined together in the late sixties: Soul Clan dressed in a three-piece suit and a cowboy is . what, exactly? hat. “Solomon Burke. When my father first Meeting “Soul Clan is happiness,” Pickett sang next got sick, he was there. Very spiritual, very over the E to C-sharp minor progression. kind. He used to call me his goddaughter.” “Soul Clan is loneliness,” he tried again, be- She turned to another photo from 1981. BY fore cutting the take short. “You’re playing The quintet posed in front of the same liv- JONATHAN BERNSTEIN the wrong chord!” he shouted at the backing ing room window that was just a few feet band, who by this point had grown frustrated from where we were sitting. Ursula, who is themselves, confused as to why they hadn’t quiet and reserved, like her father, paused yet begun rehearsing their extensive set list for a moment and looked up from the scrap- for the following evening. (“We spent so book. “Let me tell you, this house brings back much time putzing around with that Soul such memories of all the personalities that Clan theme,” said Rubenhold.) have been here.” The Covay household was ilson Pickett was singing nonsense. Ben E. King took over the microphone. a place where celebrity musicians gathered It was a sunny midsummer after- “Soul Clan is love and joy,” he ventured. for barbecues and song swaps, the unofficial W noon in Englewood, New Jersey, Covay belted the next line, “Soul Clan is clubhouse for Southern soul in New York but the soul legend was toiling in his base- Ben E. King,” before the ever-humble Burke City. “You know when you watch those old ment studio, fumbling around with words to offered: “Soul Clan is Solomon Burke.” movies and everybody’s having a good time?” a song he couldn’t figure out how to finish. Burke tried again: “Soul Clan is Don Co- she said. “It was one of those.” “Soul Clan is blah-nah-nah,” he mumbled vay, Soul Clan is Don Covay.” Though we often conceptualize the soul in his sacred rasp. His band played through “Soul Clan is Wicked Pickett,” Covay sang greats—Etta, Percy, Marvin, Aretha—as as the singer tried again, “Soul Clan is dah- right back. distinct, iconic individuals, sixties r&b was nah-nah.” Pickett took up the mic once more: “A lot genuinely collaborative in spirit and com- Gathered around him were some old of y’all don’t know what the Soul Clan is,” munal in nature. During a time when the friends: Solomon Burke, Don Covay, Joe he shouted to his imaginary audience. “And music industry had cracked open its doors Tex, and Ben E. King. The five men had con- I wanna say . Soul Clan is peace and joy.” to black popular entertainers without fully vened at Pickett’s house to prepare for the His next line isn’t sung directly into the letting them in, young singers like Pickett, at-long-last reunion of the Soul Clan, the microphone, so it’s hard to tell, precisely, Burke, and Covay, relegated to the r&b charts onetime supergroup of Atlantic Records r&b what he mumbles, but it sounds a whole and the chitlin’ circuits in the small world of singers that hadn’t existed in more than a de- lot like this: “Help us with the Soul Clan.” Southern soul, came of age together in the cade. The following evening, July 24, 1981, backseats of cramped tour vans and the back the revived group would be performing at a n January, I took a train to Queens to visit stages of unkempt barrooms. When they got sold-out show at the Savoy in Manhattan. Ia secret shrine of sixties soul. The former famous, they remained the closest of friends. Leon Rubenhold, Pickett’s guitarist in the home of Don Covay sits on a quiet, sub- By the tumultuous summer of 1967, eighties, remembered that day in Englewood urban street where his daughter, Ursula, Southern soul music had become a cultural when I called him to ask about the Soul Clan. now fifty-three, has lived almost her entire force and its icons had become keenly aware “The rehearsal was very disorganized and life. It was a few days after the presidential that they were worth more than what they without much direction,” he said. “The only inauguration and the Women’s March, and were seeing in returns. For the r&b stars of person that had their shit together was Ben the city was buzzing with talk of communal Atlantic Records, it was a time of budding E. King.” Rubenhold had kept a recording of energy, the radicalism of togetherness. A political consciousness. Joe Tex had become the session, and a couple days later, he sent fitting time to think about the Soul Clan, a involved with the Nation of Islam. Burke, me a digitized copy. It’s a curious piece of pop mostly forgotten group whose chaotic com- never one to infuse politics into his music, music history: the only known live recording mitment to collectivity struck me then, more would soon debut a new verse for his version of the Soul Clan, twenty-three minutes of than ever, as profound. of the New Orleans standard “Get Out of My later recall Redding saying. “It would give nick writes of the Soul Clan in the 1986 book Fifty years later, Ursula Covay is just one fits and starts and spontaneous commentary Ursula was in a reflective mood. The two- Life, Woman.” (“Get out and vote now baby, I us more leverage in the business. No more Sweet Soul Music, one of the few available of several children of the Soul Clan, many that capture the group in all its chaotic glory, year anniversary of her father’s death was might run for President,” he sang in October getting messed over by the white promoters chronicles of the group. The artists had sold of them musicians themselves, who have a document of strained cooperation and bick- less than a week away, and she had brought ’68, a month before Nixon was elected. “Yo u and managers.” Brown declined (A union? tens of millions of records collectively, and recently begun to rediscover and fully ap- ering that, every so often, flickers into brief out a meticulously organized scrapbook that won’t have a chicken in every pot, but I’ll give Why would the Hardest Working Man in as soul was beginning to dip on the charts preciate their parents’ bond. In the past few moments of shared musical transcendence. chronicled his career. “Let’s date it back to out stamps to pay your rent.”) Show Business do that?) but Burke, Covay, after dominating through the mid-sixties, the years, they’ve reconnected with one another, For the majority of the recording, the where I remember,” she said, flipping the That summer, Otis Redding called his Tex, King, and Pickett rallied around Red- men decided to see what sort of musical po- tossed around ideas for next-generation group was working out a new tune to serve binder open to a photo of her father with friend James Brown. “I want us to form a ding’s idea. The concept had been “kicked tential, and perhaps sociopolitical influence, reunions, and, echoing the spirit of their as their reunion show’s introductory theme, his Soul Clan comrades. union of black entertainers,” Brown would around for close to two years,” Peter Gural- they could harness as a communal whole. fathers’ friendships, commiserated over - 14 - FALL 2017 “30 Invisible Visibility Portraits, Freshmen Year ’87, September” (2016), ©Shoshanna Weinberger, shoshanna.info OxfordAmerican.org - 15 - their own peculiar struggles navigating es- The idea, Burke would say years later, was father faced during the decades he spent said Solomon Burke bigger than the Soul if he’d sing on Shaffer’s new album. “How tate payments and convoluted publishing to “benefit our people, and to benefit our fighting against an industry he viewed as Clan by yourself.” about this,” Covay responded. “How about royalties. own selves and our own families, to incor- deeply hostile to black entertainers. Nonetheless, the group was deeply opti- we reunite the Soul Clan?” Speaking with Veda Pickett, Wilson’s porate our own publishing companies, to “Though the Clan’s plan died before it mistic about its second chance. The months Joe Tex had passed away, and Burke de- daughter, I was struck by how resolute she establish our own writing pool, to agree reached the communities,” writes Denise leading up to their 1981 reunion found the clined, for financial reasons, to be involved, was in her anger, not about her own father’s to do each other’s songs, and to keep each Sullivan in 2011’s Keep On Pushing: Black men at their scheming and dreaming best: but Covay began organizing once more, legacy, but about Solomon Burke’s, con- other’s names alive in the records, and the Power Music from Blues to Hip-Hop, “Burke’s talks of a Broadway engagement, an album, arranging a third coming of the group for vinced that he’s never received the credit songs and the shows.” idea for a benevolent, black-owned corpo- an educational documentary film.