Paul Newman was a man of many talents. Acting was only one of them. He was a race car driver and founded the Dressing Room, a fine restaurant next to the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut. He created Newman’s Own Foundation, a food company whose profits go to charities. Even my cat, Willow, likes his cat food. He also founded Hole in the Wall Camps, a place where children with serious illnesses are understood and accepted. There are now ten of them around the world.
Last night, at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, there was a celebration of these camps. It was a terrific show, directed by James Naughton. The star power was rich. Meryl Streep, Renee Zellweger, Bill Cosby, John Mellencamp, Keb’ Mo’, Lyle Lovett, Hilary Hahn, Bette Midler, Emmylou Harris all performed. But the killer final act was Stevie Wonder. He blew the house away.
Even after his death in 2008, Paul Newman continues his legacy of quality.
General Johnson, one of the great Southern “Beach Music” singer-songwriters, has died at his home in Georgia. A Grammy winner and former lead vocalist for the Showmen and Chairman of the Board, Johnson was lead vocalist on the hits “It Will Stand” and “39-21-40 Shape.”
A very young Allen Toussaint produced Johnson’s early hits. He recorded for Atlantic Records, Minit and Swan, and Johnson's career was steered by the great songwriter-producers Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland.
General Johnson was a major help to me in coming to understand the draw of whites to R&B music and the nuances of Southern culture in the Carolina coastal communities. He understood what the Southerners didn’t about their attraction to beach music and the dance, the Shag. I wrote about Johnson in “Charlie’s Place,” a story in my book “Whitewash: A Southern Journey through Music, Mayhem and Murder.”
General Johnson knew his history and understood the resistance to black music from the Ku Klux Klan and Southern leaders following World War II. But he also understood the unspoken attraction of Southern white kids to black music.
“Beach music…the average person of the Caucasian race could not listen to that music because it was blue music...if you listened to blue music you were scorned,” Johnson told me.“But that same music was on the juke boxes down in Myrtle Beach. And... if you listened to John R (on WLAC in Nashville) you could go down to Myrtle Beach and nobody looked down on you. That's basically why it's called beach music—though it was actually rhythm and blues.”
The raw attraction of white kids to black performers, Johnson said, could be summed up in one word: feeling. “Black artists were able to communicate the feeling of the song they were singing both lyrically and musically. You can call it soul or whatever, but basically it is feeling,” he said.
As to his group, Chairman of the Board, Johnson said “our music is like a drug. People say they come to get high on a show. Our show is an outlet. Our show is full of energy.”
As an example, Johnson offered this story: “ I had a lady come up to me at a concert who said she wanted to thank me for a song that I had written. At the time she was in a divorce and was going through hard times and having second thoughts about whether she was making the right decisions. I had written a song called “Gone Fishing.”
“This song became her theme song, her philosophy. That's because my songs tell a story. A lot of songs today don't tell a story. But you listen to the lyrics and the content means something. At the same time the groove is laid back and mellow or its very happy. You get a good feeling lyrically and for the music. And none of it is threatening. The music is to paint a picture of what you’re singing about. That’s my secret.”
Johnson credited Barry Gordy, founder of Motown, as the one who made black music a very intellectual thing. “It was no more gut bucket. I was more or less taught by the best people and most of them were taught by Barry Gordy.”
Though Johnson found his greatest success in the South, he said his music—rhythm and blues—is equally successful everywhere—especially in Europe. “This is not a regional music. The South is the only area that plays the music. You can’t get interested in what you don’t hear. That why Northerners come down South to hear this music.”
Once, during his 50 years on the road, Solomon Burke had enough of an argument between his side men on whether or not he was a real undertaker. He spotted a funeral home along the road, ordered the bus to stop and went inside. A few minutes later the band members were ordered inside to watch Solomon embalm a body. That ended the argument forever!
Burke, who wrote “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love” in 1964, died Sunday on an airplane flying to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam for a performance at Paradiso with the Dutch band, De Dijk, on October 12. He was known as the “King of Rock and Soul” and, to me, was the living performer who best symbolizes the synthesis of the black church with the R&B hits I grew up with in the 1960s.
Both a Grammy winner and a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Burke began as a preacher in Philadelphia and was a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His life was always over the top. He claimed to be born on March 21, 1940 “to the sounds of horns and bass drums” at the United Praying Band The House of God for All People in West Philadelphia.
"From day one, literally God and gospel were the driving forces behind the man and his music," Burke’s website proclaimed.
As an adult, he began a gospel radio show and was soon signed to Atlantic Records. Atlantic’s producer Jerry Wexler soon called Burke “the best soul singer of all time,” and he become one of the label’s enduring artists.
Other major artists like the Rolling Stones and Wilson Pickett covered his songs, while performers including Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Ben Harper and Eric Clapton wrote songs for him to record.
Burke loved to clown around on the road and his band would play without set lists, instead performing whatever the audience wanted to hear. In most concerts, he’d invite fans on stage to sing with him. Here, I took these photos of him performing at B.B. Kings Club in New York City on March 5, 2005.
Burke continued to the end as a preacher and the patriarch of a huge family of 21 children (14 daughters and seven sons), 90 grandchildren and 19 great grandchildren. “Loving people,” he said at a recent performance, “is what I do.”
The true story of the Ku Klux Klan’s violent attempt in South Carolina in the post World War II years to stop dirty dancing and kill the emerging black music behind it—rhythm & blues. E-book in all platforms.
On the morning of Sept. 6, 1934, in the tiny town of Honea Path, S.C., friends and neighbors came to blows in a labor dispute. When it was over, seven people were dead and 30 others wounded. The bloody riot at the town’s cotton mill shaped the lives of two generations to follow—not because of the shock of what was known, but by what was unknown. E-book available on all platforms.
