Hughes — Country Soul

Author: Charles L. Hughes
Title: Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South
Year: 2015
Type: Academic book (University of North Carolina Press)

Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South is a book by the historian Charles L. Hughes, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. It describes what Hughes calls the country-soul triangle, the studios of Memphis, Nashville and Muscle Shoals where Black and white musicians made both country and soul records in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when, in Kirkus’s summary, a “musical color line” separated Black soul from white country. Hughes argues that the triangle rested from its beginnings on an unequal relationship that both made interracial collaboration possible and limited it, and that it was far easier to cross the musical color line if you were white. Its evidence is the working history of the studios, from Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On,” recorded with the musicians of FAME in Muscle Shoals in 1961, through the 1970s, with a coda on Brad Paisley and LL Cool J’s song “Accidental Racist.” Hughes disputes the memory of those studios as places where race did not matter. Kirkus called it essential Southern musical history, Rolling Stone and No Depression named it among the best music books of 2015, and Erik Loomis, on the blog Lawyers, Guns & Money, wrote that it argues convincingly against the narrative of racial harmony in the Southern studios.

Hughes, now an associate professor of history and urban studies at Rhodes College, published the book with the University of North Carolina Press in March 2015.¹ He describes the triangle as a network of studios in Memphis, Nashville and Muscle Shoals between which “sounds and players traveled back and forth,” and says the book discusses soul stars from Aretha Franklin to the Staple Singers and Joe Tex and country artists including Willie Nelson, Charley Pride and Dolly Parton.² Kirkus summarized the book’s starting point as the racial tension between country and soul, kept up by a “musical color line” separating Black soul from white country.³

Hughes writes that “from its beginnings, the triangle was built on a fundamentally unequal relationship that simultaneously created and restricted the possibility of interracial collaboration.”⁴ He calls the memory of the studios as “a kind of ahistorical interracial dreamland” a fallacy, and writes that “nothing mattered more to these musicians than race.”⁴ Musicians who worked in integrated studios, he writes, structured their work around their recognition of the musical color line, and “it was far easier to transcend the ‘musical color line’ if you were white”: white musicians had greater opportunities to move into Black-identified styles like soul than Black musicians had with white-identified genres, especially country.⁴

The Muscle Shoals breakthrough came when the Black singer Arthur Alexander went to Muscle Shoals in 1961 to record his song “You Better Move On” with Rick Hall and his colleagues at FAME, and in Hughes’s account the record carries a noticeable country flavor. It was released in January 1962.⁴ The book’s later chapters include “Take the White Music and Make It Sound Black: The Muscle Shoals Sound in the 1970s,” “Pride and Prejudice: Race and Country Music in the Era of Backlash” and “Disco and Down Home Blues: Country and Soul at the End of the 1970s,” and its coda, “On Accidental Racists,” turns to Brad Paisley and LL Cool J’s song “Accidental Racist.”^{5, 3} In an interview Hughes said that the documentary Muscle Shoals presents the studios “as something of a utopia where race wasn’t an issue,” and that “the story of the country-soul triangle doesn’t have a happy ending.”²

Kirkus, in its issue of January 15, 2015, called the book “an essential piece of Southern musical history.”³ Rolling Stone and No Depression named it among the best music books of 2015.¹ Erik Loomis, on Lawyers, Guns & Money, wrote that Hughes “pushes back against this narrative convincingly,” the narrative of racial harmony in the region’s studios, which Hughes traces to Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music (1986).⁶ Leonard Gill, in the Memphis Flyer, called it “an eye-opening corrective to notions of racial harmony in the recording studio,” though he found that it can lapse into terminology suited to the seminar room.⁷

Key contributions

• The country-soul triangle: Memphis, Nashville and Muscle Shoals as one production world, divided by a musical color line.
• An unequal color line: white musicians moved into Black-identified styles more easily than Black musicians moved into country.
• A challenge to the memory of the Southern studios as places where race did not matter.

See also

• The Death of Rhythm and Blues — Nelson George’s 1988 history of Black music and crossover
• Just My Soul Responding — Brian Ward’s 1998 history of rhythm and blues and race relations
• Segregating Sound — Karl Hagstrom Miller’s 2010 history of the division of Southern music by race
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats