Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Remakes and the Struggle for Artistic Identity (review)

Soul Covers is a welcome contribution to the growing body of interdisciplinary critical work on soul music of the 60s and 70s. The book is, as the author states, "clearly and intentionally the product of a scholar of literature" (xviii) and applies the principle of intertextuality to Aretha Franklin's, Al Green's, and Phoebe Snow's "remakes" of well known R&B songs. Devoting fairly equal sections to each singer, Awkward demonstrates how the cover versions "speak" to their originals and work to construct the artistic identities of Franklin, Green, and Snow. Examining Franklin's "combative entry into the regal black vocal tradition," Green's "conflicted location at the sacred/secular divide" and "sense of himself as a 'country boy,'" and Snow's "vexed interrogations of her right, as a white female, to 'sing the postblues'" (xxvii), Awkward analyzes in detail one album by each singer: Franklin's Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington , Green's Call Me, and Phoebe Snow's Second Childhood. By focusing on the singers' deliberate self-fashioning and placing the notion of the singers' personae at the center of the study, Awkward cedes to the singer no small part of the authorial function that is usually reserved for composers and lyricists. That some form of authorship can and does take place in performance (not only in the sense of free improvisation but in the sense of resignifying preexisting works) is an extremely valuable conceptual point that Awkward makes throughout his book, though without ever saying so explicitly. While Awkward claims to advance no "overarching perspective on or theory about the cultural meanings or historical significance" (xiv) of soul covers, his close readings of Franklin, Green, and Snow offer, perhaps, the building blocks of such perspectives or theories. Indeed, in dialogue with the work of music scholars whose work he cites (Nelson George, David Brackett, Peter Guralnick, Gerri Hirshey, Gerald Early, Andrew Ward, Simon Frith, Mark Anthony Neal, Craig Werner, and others) Awkward presents a fresh dimension of inquiry that, one suspects, could only have come from outside the narrow interpretive confines of professional musical scholarship. Awkward's approach illustrates the value in "utilizing eclectic clusters of investigative strategies drawn from critical theory, cultural studies, and disciplines often viewed by their methodologically more conservative departmental colleagues with at least some suspicion, if not downright contempt" (xviii). It has yielded a sophisticated discussion of the kind of identity construction and reconstruction that occurs in the work of gifted singers like Franklin, Green, and Snow. When taken together with the work of Tia deNora and Angela McRobbie, for example, on the processes by which listeners use popular music to craft their own identities, such investigations into singers' self-fashioning reveal popular music's important functions not only in creating local meaning, but historical meaning as well. By engaging in the practice of the "remake" Franklin, Green, and Snow position themselves within historical and musical narratives, as do their listeners, in turn. These narratives are informed richly by notions of racial, regional, religious identity, each of which, as Awkward shows, has long historical and cultural roots as well as past and present musical expression.