I suppose I should make it clear from the outset that when I speak of soul music, I am not referring to Motown, a phenomenon almost exactly contemporaneous but appealing far more to a pop, white, and industry-slanted kind of audience. Southern soul music developed out of a time and a set of social circumstances that are unlikely to be repeated. And I had most of the preconceptions with which I came to the writing of this book turned almost totally upside down. I met some of the greatest characters and made some of the closest friends (often one and the same thing) that I have ever known.
And I hope it reflects my disinclination to understand things too quickly, because there is no question in my mind of the education that I got, an education in an aspect of Americana and a facet of American business that, despite my longtime exposure to the music industry, I had never really scrutinized before. The weight of the subtext, I hope, reinforces the narrative, because however comprehensive this book may seem, however tangled its chronology and extended its text, it represents only a minuscule portion of the time that I spent with label owners, producers, booking agents, record store operators, disc jockeys, and managers, as well as the artists themselves. In the course of researching the book I interviewed well over a hundred people and traveled from Los Angeles to Mississippi, from Georgia to New York, Alabama, Philadelphia, and Tennessee.
I wanted to write a different kind of book this time, though, tending more toward narrative than toward profile, and while I recognized the impossibility of telling the whole story (Who can ever do that-who would ever want to do that? As Mark Twain once wrote, a real biography is impossible because "every day would make a whole book-365 books a year."), I wanted to present as convincing a portrait of a musical movement and a social milieu as could be deduced in retrospect.
I started out more than four years ago with the idea of writing a book on Southern soul music in the '60s, a companion volume to my two earlier books, Feel Like Going Home and Lost Highway, and the last installment in a trilogy covering my three great musical loves-blues, rockabilly/country, and soul. IT IS THE story of a particular kind of music, but I hope it is more than that.
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