This worldly yet striving music-while extremely heartfelt-was utterly black and unsalable until the Elvis of Gospel, Sam Cooke, crossed over to ""the devil's music,"" sending ""shock waves through the worlds of both gospel and pop. But woven into that are the facts that Southern freedom music and the stirrings of civil rights were gospel-based, and so soul was laced with that as well. It's enough to say that it begins in the sincere exhortations of gospel (singing to You God) that somehow married the devil (rhythm and blues and commerce) and came up with ""you found me cryin' in the chapel"" (which has ""you"" both ways, as quasi-religious, sanctified sex, or this world and the next at once). (It's exhaustingly minute here and there, with paragraphs that just go on and on as if his word processor had picked up the story on its own.) As for what is soul music-Guralnick's definition varied with his work on the book and he never does reach a reader-satisfying formulation. Guralnick spent over four years writing and interviewing for this book and the work shows, though Sweet Soul Music is not meant to be exhaustive. Serious, definitive grappling with the nature of soul music, a form of black pop derived from gospel married to rhythm and blues, and which existed in its pure state for about 10 years-from the middle 50's to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.
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