Ward — Just My Soul Responding

Author: Brian Ward
Title: Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations
Year: 1998
Type: Academic book (University of California Press)

Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations is a history by the historian Brian Ward, published by the University of California Press in 1998. It reads Black popular music of the civil rights and Black Power years, from the rhythm and blues of the mid-1950s through soul and funk to the disco of the late 1970s, for what it shows about how Black Americans’ collective outlook changed. Ward reads Black listeners’ changing tastes in sound as evidence of how they saw themselves, and he documents the musicians’ part in the civil rights movement, including the money that stars raised for it. Reviewers praised its range and its archival research and found fault with parts of its method. It won the Organization of American Historians’ James A. Rawley Prize and an American Book Award in 1999.

Ward taught American history at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne when the book appeared.¹ The University of California Press published it in Berkeley in 1998.² Murray Forman, reviewing it, set its span at “between 1954 and 1979,” from Brown v. Board of Education and the Chords’ “Sh-Boom” in 1954 to the end of the 1970s.²

The book’s central term is “mass black consciousness.” “The third key proposition in this book,” Ward writes, “is that in America there exists a conventionally recognized spectrum of musical techniques and devices which ranges from nominally ‘black’ to nominally ‘white’ poles.”³ Shifts in Black listeners’ tastes, he writes, “deserve to be interrogated for what they might reveal about the changing state of mass black consciousness,” and he adds that “the analytical perils of this sort of ‘black’ versus ‘white’ schema have been fully exposed by” the musicologist Philip Tagg.³ A chapter titled “‘Our day will come’: black pop, white pop and the sounds of integration” covers the years when Black records crossed into the white market. Of the later turn to soul he writes that “soul style, as manifested in distinctively black ways of walking, talking, eating, dressing, joking, thinking, working, playing, dancing and making music, defied easy analysis or imitation by outsiders.”³

Ward’s evidence includes financial records. Forman describes him “exhuming bank deposit slips from June to December, 1965” to trace the money from a benefit concert organized by Sammy Davis Jr. to civil rights groups.² Robert Christgau, reviewing it in the New York Times Book Review, singled out Ward’s account of Harry Belafonte, whom the book “establishes” as “the angel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.”¹

Ward writes that “the story of Rhythm and Blues reveals the inadequacy of both excessive romanticizations of the counter-hegemonic power of black popular culture, and of Frankfurt School-style critiques of mass culture.”³ Christgau answered that the earlier histories Ward set out to supersede, among them Nelson George’s The Death of Rhythm and Blues, commit neither error.¹

Reviewers praised the book’s range and research and found fault with parts of its method. Christgau called it “an uncommonly comprehensive introduction to the formative decades of black rock-and-roll,” though he wrote that “Ward overplays an unrepresentative smattering of personal interviews,” and he judged its theorizing about mass Black consciousness “tendentious by definition” yet “credible.”¹ Forman, in CJS Online, wrote that it “deserves to be read,” while faulting “a brief and flimsy epilogue” and wishing for a fuller theory of race.² The book won the Organization of American Historians’ James A. Rawley Prize and an American Book Award in 1999.^{4, 5}

Key contributions

• Black popular music of the civil rights and Black Power years read for what it shows about changes in Black Americans’ collective outlook.
• The black–white “spectrum of musical techniques and devices,” used to read listeners’ tastes.
• Archival evidence of the money and celebrity that musicians brought to the civil rights movement.

See also

• The Death of Rhythm and Blues — Nelson George’s 1988 history of Black music and crossover
• Dancing in the Street — Suzanne E. Smith’s 1999 history of Motown and the politics of Detroit
• Country Soul — Charles L. Hughes’s 2015 history of race in the studios of country and soul
• Categorizing Sound — David Brackett’s 2016 study of genre and race in American popular music
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music