It’s conventional wisdom that modern soul music arose out of the marriage of the sacred and the profane that occurred in the 50s when Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and others melded traditional gospel with secular lyrics. The revolutionary music that resulted was a source of widespread enthusiasm, but it also bred consternation, and not only among the faithful: even veteran bluesman Big Bill Broonzy, about as undevout as they came, was uneasy with it.
Through this maelstrom of doubt and spiritual tension strides Solomon Burke like a 20th-century fusion of Bacchus and Moses. Rather than grapple with the contradictions, he’s made a career of embracing them, apparently daring both God and man to deny him his full portion of spiritual and worldly pleasure. Burke, the self-styled Bishop of Soul, is nothing less than the living incarnation of the marriage of eros and agape.
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His money-making schemes have included a fly-by-night herbal-medicine and drugstore business (immortalized by Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler as “Notions, Lotions, and Potions, Roots, Fruits, and Snoots”), a chain of funeral homes, and an outrageous plot to inundate the Apollo Theatre with 10,000 boxes of “Soul Popcorn.” He claims to have fed an entire band on a tour through the south by appealing to the generosity of kindly old ladies whose residences he located by driving slowly through alleys and looking for well-fed dogs. And there’s always been that magnificent voice, cutting through the poses and the flimflam with a virtuosity and power that are as overwhelming now as they were when he first started. (See Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music, from which most of this history was gleaned, for more on the Reverend Doctor Burke.)
Burke has often spoken of his affection for country music, and he sometimes seems to owe nearly as much to that tradition as to the black church. He borrows extensively from the C and W canon for his material, and both his timbre and harmonic ideas are often reminiscent of country gospel. Burke can incorporate all four harmony parts of a gospel quartet in the course of a single song all by himself and still make the material hang together.
Perhaps the most revealing measure of Burke’s gifts is the immediacy with which he imbues everything he sings. At East of the Ryan he drew largely from his own recorded legacy of more than 30 years, yet there was little nostalgia in the air. From the sweeping magnificence of “Down in the Valley,” his opening number, through the lovely and seductive reading of Joe Tex’s “Meet Me in Church,” and finally in the tormented salvation plea “The Price,” Burke brought everything into undeniable sharp focus.
