Soul Power
“I have a great tape of old blues singers recorded in Yazoo City, Mississippi, that I got down in Oxford at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss. It’s called Bothered All the Time. I like Jimmy Reed, Big Maybelle, Dorothy Love Coates, a lot of singers from the old Stax/Volt series, the early Verve recordings, a lot of Southern blues, Chicago blues. What I like about this music, well, it’s the difference between holding a note longer than a commercial singer would hold it or putting the stress on it in a place where a commercial singer wouldn’t. An unexpected place. Barry Hannah has this great comment about how Bob Dylan can’t sing but he has the desperation of not being able to sing, which is better than Glenn Campbell, who can sing.“—Amy Hempel in a Paris Review interview
“In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.”—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
