A Little Bit Country

A little bit soul?!?

Reuben Howell: Funny How Time Slips Away
from Country Got Soul (Casual 2003)

Dan Penn: If Love Was Money
from Country Got Soul (Casual 2003)

Bobby Hatfield: The Feeling is Right
from Country Got Soul (Casual 2003)

Delaney & Bonnie: We Can Love
from Country Got Soul (Casual 2003)


I have a friend who if you didn't know him, would make your jaw drop at his wanton display of ignorance. He's the type of person who, because he's unable to deal with the complexities of human nature will ascribe to each person a fixed personality reducing them to flat, one-dimensional characters. In other words, if you listen to Hip-Hop music most of the time, in his eyes you become a Hip-Hop head to the exclusion of all other musical genres, and if you listen to alternative or rock, then in his eyes you're a white suburbanite whose album collection consists of nothing but Depeche Mode and Nirvana, and that's not the end of it. This friend of mine even takes it one step further. Depending on the type of personality he's ascribed to you, he'll speak to you in the respective jargon. So if you're a Hip-Hop head, he'll affect a "black" accent, using a lot of "yo's" and "yunowutahmsayin." If you fall into his "white" music category, he'll come at you with the typical black-comedian-faking-a-nasally-white-person accent, addressing you as "dude" (with faux surfer accent) and "Hey there guy" in the aforementioned "white person" accent. Even our own people aren't free from his ignorance. Whenever he's around older Filipino folks, he adopts his "fob" accent, speaking as if he grew up there and learned english as a second language. For me, I fall under the Hip-Hop genre, meaning he'll literally answer my phone calls with "yunowutahmsayin" or respond with an exclamatory remark by saying, "yo word?!?" (did I mention he's hopelessly outdated with his colloquialisms). At first this bothered me a lot, but now I just tend to ignore it, but one thing that still rubs me the wrong way is the way he resigns you to one musical genre. Despite the fact that he knows I listen to practically everything under the sun, he reserves his most incredulous shock whenever I mention anything about country music. And despite the fact that I don't know that much about the genre, or even listen to too much of it, for me to even mention it in front of him, for whatever reason, elicits shock, profanity and the widest saucer eyes you've ever seen. A lot of the times I'll bring up the subject just to push his buttons, and so for you Gil, here is my post about country music.

The selections in this post come from the excellent album Country Got Soul Vol.1". A collection of late 60's early 70's country singers whose musical performances tended to blend country, southern soul and R&B with some groovy blues into a pastiche of palatable country fried soul. All of the artists on the CD are white, but not all of them are exclusively country performers. Some of them were in fact involved or even instrumental in the success of some of the great R&B performers of the time. Reuben Howell was a Motown artist, Eddie Hinton was a session guitar player and songwriter for a lot of R&B performers, and Dan Penn wrote songs for Solomon Burke (I Can't Stop) and Aretha Franklin (Do Right Woman) and the Purify Brother's hit I'm your Puppet to name a few and even considered himself as having the mentality of a black artist. For the most part the selections on the album work, but there are some head scratchers, like Charlie Rich's gleefully funky cover of the Hank Williams classic "Hey Good Lookin" but this post will focus on four of my favorite pieces from the album.

Reuben Howell's Funny How Time Slips Away is laid back and soulful and if you had never heard the Willie Nelson original, you'd probably never would have guessed that this was originally a country song (Al Green even covered the song showing just how common a bedfellow the southern R&B and country genre's were at the time). Howell's version eschews the stripped down instrumentation of the original and opts for the ubiquitous strings and piano of the R&B sound of the time. His vocals match it as he soulfully croons and hits all of the right notes.

Songwriter extraordinaire Dan Penn's If Love Was Money is a foot pounding slice of southern R&B. From the opening drum roll to the beat break that occurs at the end, whatever the song lacks in melody is more than made up for by the stabbing horns and the crescendo that leads into the chorus. As a vocalist, Dan Penn is a capable singer, neither excelling or hindering the song but lending a plaintive enough wail to an otherwise up tempo song to make it slightly ironic. For a good, albeit brief interview with the man, check out this interview from The Box Tops website.

The Feeling is Right by Bobby Hatfield sounds like an R&B song from the 60's with the playful guitar riff that opens it and Hatfield's vocals alternates between gravelly growls to smooth crooning so it comes as a bit of a surprise that this would be included in this collection, especially considering that the original album it comes from "Messin' In Muscle Shoals" is an arguably non country album, though very soulful. Hatfield is better known as being one of the members of The Righteous Brothers and the powerful vocals that were part of there trademark don't fail him in this song.

Delaney & Bonnie, like Dan Penn and Reuben Howell, were artists whose success was miniscule in comparison to their musical contributions and output. But unlike the other artists, D&B were successful in releasing several albums, though the albums weren't very successful. Their music was enjoyed and lauded by a lot of their contemporaries including George Harrison and Eric Clapton and Bonnie Lynn O'Farrell had the prestige of being the first white Ikette (backing vocalists for Ike & Tina Turner). We Can Love, from their 1969 album Home, released on the Stax label no less (the albums failure to chart led them to be dropped), is a rolling mid-tempo ballad that comes and goes in a scant 2:24 but it's brief time is still long enough to leave an impression. Delaney's tenor smoothly meshes with his partner's vocals, coming across like a funkdafied Captain & Tenille. The brevity of the song actually works in its favor because you can feel that if it were any longer the saccharine nature of the lyrics and the melody would begin to weigh it down.

Are these tracks soulful country songs or is it R&B as interpreted by country singers? Because southern soul was an amalgamation of the regions culture, it should be no surprise that the two genres not only blended but blended well enough to allow artists to adopt and interpret each of the respective musics. In the end, the point of this post is that it doesn't really matter which genre these songs fall under, as it's all music and it's all good.