Not being able to sing beyond a weak sub-Ray Davies whine wobbingly icing a layered harmony, I have an elastic fascination for those who can. Like the numbers on the bathroom scales, the magnitude of those morning shakes and the proportion of nights whose memory is squirreled away into deep storage by the kindly internal archivist who looks after my self-regard, it’s growing with age. I’ve been a while getting here through those areas of a record collection tied more to a minimally cool cover image and the right array of studio technology, but will now tolerate (gripe about, roll my eyes at, mentally strip of Nashville or rototoms) the most unsinkable studio turds if a singer I love was called in somewhere along the way to hold their nose and spray the vocal air freshener.
This obsession is specifically directed at American singers, and more particularly at those from southern states who wrap themselves in the dusty vinylwear of old country, blues and soul records. There’s something about the way the language can be wrangled into rhyme and melody in a Deep South accent that makes for repeated listening to that same 20 seconds where the voice does that, whatever that might be.
So, in a bid to pogostick away from the drab insistence of other people’s texts, this is the first in a series of somethings about some moments from some voices I sometimes love. Here seems as good a point as any to note that this is no way intended as anything like the blinding scholarship of blogs such as this one, and this (is it only soul collectors who need to gather whatever wool still clings to the barbed wire of collective memory when the wind no longer blows wherever Johnny Dynamites and Denise Keebles graze?). It’s just an excuse to wander through a tiny bit of what makes me need some of my records.
So.
Exhibit one, crying in the night, is James Carr: Memphis-born and a manic depressive, condemned to a typically downhill life by sharp business practices and a malfunctioning welfare system, but possessed of? (no, by) a voice that could break artichoke hearts on an upscale pizza. Which is as well, because the material is often thin of crust and a little heavy on the cheese. Take You Got my Mind Messed Up (clearly modelled on That’s How Strong My Love Is, a ballad best, if not best-known, in the Otis Redding version). It’s a two-line chorus, some sketchy verses and a few great horn hooks, held together by the velcro scratchiness of that extraordinary voice, and a wonderful record. For now though, it’s not my favoured James Carr fix.
Pathos is, of course, as soul as soul can be; which is perhaps why current favourite These Ain’t Raindrops does what it does. It’s not a great song, suffers from some back-of-a-Muscle-Shoals-bus lyrics and the arrangement is not much more than likably functional, but I love it for the yelping whipped-dog pleading, pleading. It’s fairly easy to slip into a frame of mind where
If you tell me you love me, everything will be ok
can taste like distilled experience. And the delivery is archetypal southern soul – highly stylised, but wringing everything out of an emotional magic sponge of a song, without the vinegary melismatic horrors we’re daily conditioned to think of as singing.
Here it is:
