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WORK TITLE: We Gotta Get Out of This Place
WORK NOTES: with Doug Bradley
PSEUDONYM(S): Werner, Craig Hansen
BIRTHDATE: 5/13/1952
WEBSITE: http://www.craighwerner.com/
CITY: Madison
STATE: WI
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.craighwerner.com/about-craig/ * http://afroamericanstudies.wisc.edu/people/werner.html * http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/we-gotta-get-out-place * http://wggootp.com/about-craig-werner/ * http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/10-best-music-books-of-2015-20151221/we-gotta-get-outta-this-place-the-soundtrack-of-the-vietnam-war-by-doug-bradley-and-craig-werner-20151220 * https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/11/we-gotta-get-out-of-this-place-the-soundtrack-of-t.html *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born May 13, 1952, in Colorado Springs, CO; married Leslee Nelson (a visual artist).
EDUCATION:Colorado College, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1973; University of Illinois, M.A., 1975, Ph.D., 1979.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, educator, and historian. University of Wisconsin, Madison, instructor, chair of Department of Afro-American Studies. Member of nominating committee for Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Has worked on radio and television documentaries.
AWARDS:Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, English Graduate Student Association’s Teaching Excellence Award, both University of Wisconsin, Madison; Best Summer School Course, National Association of Summer School Sessions.
WRITINGS
Has written liner notes for music albums. Contributor of articles to publications, including Virginia Quarterly Review. Contributor of chapters to books, including The Creation and Revision of Racial Thinking and The Columbia Guide to African American History.
SIDELIGHTS
Craig Werner is a writer, historian, and educator. He is an instructor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he also serves as the chair of the school’s Department of Afro-American Studies. Werner has written books, many of which focus on the history of American music.
Playing the Changes and Up Around the Bend
In Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse, Werner finds similarities between the literary movement and the music style. He emphasizes the importance of both in the lives of black Americans throughout history. Maurice Wallace, reviewer in Contemporary Literature, commented: “Werner … is a meticulous expositor of the relationship between African American culture and its canonical modernist literature, from Charles Chesnutt and the revised plantation tradition to August Wilson and neoclassicism.” Wallace added: “Werner’s musicological aesthetic of African American literature brilliantly participates in–plays a change on, if you will–the ensemble of critical voices initiated by Du Bois about the importance of black musical aesthetics for ‘engag[ing] basic (post)modernist concerns’ of life and literature.”
In his 1999 book, Up around the Bend: The Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Werner includes stories from members of the seminal rock group. The members explain how the group came together, the difficulties they faced as a band, and the issues that caused them to break up.
A Change Is Gonna Come
Werner chronicles the history of black music in America in A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, & the Soul of America. He has also released a revised and updated edition of the work.
A Publishers Weekly contributor suggested: “An ambitious and comprehensive look at the deep connection between race and music in America, Werner’s book is filled with provocative insights.” “His observations and semiotic connections prove insightful,” asserted Mike Tribby in Booklist. Library Journal writer, David P. Szatmary called the book “a provocative, passionate glimpse at the core meaning and effects of postwar American popular music.” Robert Cochran, critic in the African American Review, remarked: “A Change Is Gonna Come is on balance a very impressive study. For its scale, for its detail, for its close attention to musics all too often attacked (rap) or dismissed (disco, funk), for the coherent passion of its argument–for all these virtues Werner’s book deserves its prominence and its praise.” Another contributor to the African American Review, Kofi Natambu, noted that the book possessed “an intellectual and emotional depth often missing in contemporary discussions of what American music is as art, science, and social/spiritual force. As both readers and lovers of music in all of its dimensions, we owe Craig Werner a great debt for writing about its mysteries and realities with the passion, clarity, and knowledge that the music so richly deserves.” Reviewing the book in Notes, Mark Anthony Neal stated: “Readers should approach with caution any book that champions itself as the definitive view of black popular music. Yet A Change Is Gonna Come, though not a comprehensive account, is extraordinarily far-reaching. It is also highly accessible and would be suitable for an introductory course in African American music and culture.” A writer in Internet Bookwatch called the volume “an informative and ‘reader friendly’ survey.”
Higher Ground
In Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul, Werner profiles these three important African American musicians. He also comments on the soul music genre as a whole.
A critic in Kirkus Reviews described the book as “a trip down the ‘gospel road’ that’s long, meandering, and generally unrewarding.” However, a reviewer in Publishers Weekly remarked: “Werner’s exquisite prose and his richly informed music history offer a deeply felt love letter to three of soul music’s greatest.” “Higher Ground is a welcome addition to the literature of works on rhythm and blues that exhibit a true critical stance,” asserted Andrew Flory in Notes. Flory added: “Werner has a deep grasp of the issues that surround the music of this time and place, and any student of African American music will find this book unique and thought provoking.” Curtis Ross, contributor to the Tampa Tribune, commented: “Werner’s book suffers only from its lack of firsthand interviews, only Mayfield talked to Werner, in 1997. But he draws from a variety of sources to portray not only three great talents but an era and its lingering effects on the nation.”
We Gotta Get Out of This Place
Werner collaborated with Doug Bradley on the 2015 book, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War. In an interview with Sean Moores, contributor to the Stripes Web site, Werner and Bradley explained discussed their writing process. Werner stated: “When we started out we thought we were going to organize it around a Vietnam vets’ Top Twenty—choose twenty songs and use those to tell the story. And then we started interviewing people and it became a Top 200 or a Top 2,000 or something like that very, very rapidly. Ten years later, we decided it was just time to finish writing the book, and part of that was way too many of the guys who we talked to were starting to die. We wanted to get it out while as many as possible were still with us.” Bradley told Moores: “I think the legacy of the book is that—maybe forty years too late—we found a way to have a dialogue with the men and women who fought in Vietnam, and that music was essential to enabling them to heal”
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place is a fine introduction to the role of music during the Vietnam War,” asserted R.D. Cohen in Choice. Steve Nathans-Kelly, critic on the Paste Web site, suggested: “No single book could capture that many Vietnams, or the multitude of voices needed to describe them, any more than you could squeeze that many singers onto a single 45 RPM record or write a song to evoke all of their experiences. But the remarkable achievement of Bradley and Werner’s We Gotta Get Out of This Place is how close they’ve come to making that many voices of Vietnam veterans heard.” A writer on the Rolling Stone Web site described the book as “nuanced and frequently moving.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
African American Review, winter, 1996, John Lowe, review of Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse, p. 678; winter, 2000, Robert Cochran, review of A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America, p. 713; winter, 2000, Kofi Natambu, review of A Change Is Gonna Come, p. 715.
Booklist, February 15, 1999, Mike Tribby, review of A Change Is Gonna Come, p. 1024.
Choice, April, 2016, R.D. Cohen, review of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, p. 1176.
Contemporary Literature, spring, 1997, Maurice Wallace, review of Playing the Changes, p. 198.
Internet Bookwatch, April, 2006, review of A Change Is Gonna Come.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2003, review of Higher Ground, p. 1443.
Library Journal, January, 1999, David P. Szatmary, review of A Change Is Gonna Come, p. 102; February 15, 2004, Bill Piekarski, review of Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul, p. 129.
Notes, June, 2000, Mark Anthony Neal, review of A Change Is Gonna Come, p. 958; March, 2005, Andrew Flory, review of Higher Ground, p. 752.
Publishers Weekly, February 8, 1999, review of Up Around the Bend, p. 204; March 8, 1999, review of A Change Is Gonna Come, p. 58; February 2, 2004, review of Higher Ground, p. 68.
Reference & Research Book News, August, 2006, review of A Change Is Gonna Come.
Tampa Tribune, April 18, 2004, Curtis Ross, “Riding The Soul Train,” review of Higher Ground, p. 4.
ONLINE
Craig Werner Home Page, http://www.craighwerner.com (March 23, 2017).
MyCentralJersey.com, http://www.mycentraljersey.com/ (January 24, 2016), Tricia Vanderhoof, interview with author and Bradley.
National Public Radio Online, http://www.npr.org/ (November 11, 2010), Melissa Block, author interview.
Paste Online, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (November 9, 2015), Steve Nathans-Kelly, review of We Gotta Get Out of This Place.
Rolling Stone Online, http://www.rollingstone.com/ (December 21, 2015), review of We Gotta Get Out of This Place.
Stripes, http://www.stripes.com/ (November 8, 2016), Sean Moores, interview with author and Bradley.
University of Wisconsin, Department of Afro-American Studies Web site, http://afroamericanstudies.wisc.edu/ (March 23, 2017), author faculty profile.
We Gotta Get Out of This Place Web site, http://wggootp.com/ (March 23, 2017), author profile.*
Craig Werner is a cultural historian whose books include Up Around the Bend: An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival; Higher Ground: Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield and the Rise & Fall of American Soul; and A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America. A member of the Nominating Committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he chairs the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A native of Colorado Springs, he was a member of a rock band that often played for GIs stationed at Fort Carson.
LC control no.: n 81063661
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Werner, Craig Hansen, 1952-
Variant(s): Werner, Craig, 1952-
Associated country:
United States
Birth date: 19520513
Field of activity: American literature--History and criticism
Affiliation: University of Wisconsin--Madison
Found in: His Paradoxical resolutions, Amer. fiction since James
Joyce, c1982: t.p. (Craig Hansen Werner) CIP data sheet
(b. 5/13/52)
His Adrienne Rich, 1988: CIP t.p. (Craig Werner)
University of Wisconsin--Madison, Department of
Afro-American Studies WWW site, Mar. 31, 2015 (Craig
Werner; faculty member at University of
Wisconsin--Madison; teaches literature, music and
cultural history)
http://afroamericanstudies.wisc.edu/people/werner.html
Email from Craig Werner, Mar. 31, 2015 (he is the performer
on 'Til we outnumber 'em--; prefers to keep the middle
name in his heading to differentiate himself from
another Craig Werner)
Guthrie, W. 'Til we outnumber 'em-- [SR] p2000: container
(Craig Werner)
Associated language:
eng
Invalid LCCN: no 00096717
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Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
My writing and teaching are dedicated to nurturing conversations that cross the lines that keep us from telling the truth…
Craig WernerI’m a writer and teacher based in Madison, Wisconsin, where I teach in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin. I believe deeply that education—especially the kind that takes places outside the walls of the classroom—is the key to a healthy democratic society. My writing and teaching are dedicated to nurturing conversations that cross the lines that keep us from telling the truth about ourselves and the world we live in. I take Bob Dylan as seriously as James Joyce, Aretha Franklin as seriously as Shakespeare. If we’re going to create the kind of society we want our children to live in, we’re going to have to start paying attention to each other a whole lot more carefully than we do. As I tell my students and every public audience I speak to, when you hear me it may sounds like a solo, but it’s really a chorus of the voices that have taught me over the years.
I’m a native of Colorado who spends as much time as possible each summer working with K-12 teachers in my hometown of Colorado Springs and savoring the silence of the Nada Hermitage outside Crestone, Colorado, with my wife, the visual artist, Leslee Nelson.
Writer
Love and Happiness: Eros According to Dante, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and the Reverend Al Green, with Rhonda Mawhood Lee (White Cloud Press, October 2014)
We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Music and the Vietnam Experience, with Doug Bradley (forthcoming, 2015)
A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America — Uncut Magazine Book of the Year, 2000
Higher Ground: Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield and the Rise and Fall of American Soul
Up Around the Bend: An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival
Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse
Craig Werner
4143 Helen C. White Hall
608-263-1642 (Department Office)
cwerner@wisc.edu
Craig Werner teaches literature, music and cultural history. A member of the Nominating Committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he has written liner notes for re-releases of classic soul albums and contributed to numerous radio and television documentaries on topics ranging from the Harlem Renaissance to Motown. He has won numerous teaching awards including the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching; the English Graduate Student Association's Teaching Excellence Award; Best Summer School Course from the National Association of Summer School Sessions as part of the teaching team for "Sites and Sounds of the Freedom Struggle."
Education
B.A., summa cum laude, Colorado College, 1973
M.A., in American Literature, University of Illinois, 1975
Ph.D., in English, University of Illinois, 1979
Books
Higher Ground: Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield and the Rise & Fall of American Soul
A Change Is Gonna Come Music, Race & the Soul of America (revised edition)
Up Around the Bend An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival
Playing the Changes From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse
Gold-bugs and the Power of Blackness Re-reading Poe
Black Women Novelists An Annotated Bibliography
Adrienne Rich The Poet and Her Critics
James Joyce's Dubliners A Pluralistic World
Paradoxical Resolutions James Joyce and Contemporary American Fiction
Publications
“The Usonian Journals: Adrienne Rich's Political Vision,” Virginia Quarterly Review (April 2006)
“Critical Issues in African American Music,” forthcoming in The Columbia Guide to African American History, ed. John Bracey, Cornell University Press, 2006
“The Black Seventies,” liner notes to Can You Dig It? The Seventies Soul Box, Rhino Records, 2002.
Thornton, M. C. (expected- 2007). “Race and Multiraciality: Multiracial Challenges to Monoracialism.” In P. Spickard and R. Daniels, eds., Uncompleted Independence: The Creation and Revision of Racial Thinking. Notre Dame University Press. (Forthcoming)
Interests
African American music, cultural history and literature; multicultural literature; multicultural responses to Joyce, Faulkner, Whitman, and Shakespeare.
Courses Taught
Afro-American Studies 155: Multicultural Literature
Afro-American Studies 156: Black Music and American Cultural History
Afro-American Studies 525: Major Authors James Baldwin Richard Wright Zora Neale Hurston
Afro-American Studies 672: Selected Topics in Afro-American Literature: Topic: “Contemporary Multicultural Literature” Topic: “Faulkner and Multicultural Fiction” Topic: “Ulysses and the Multicultural Novel” Topic: “Whitman and Multicultural Poetry”
Afro-American Studies 675: Selected Topics in Afro-American Culture: Topic: “Hip-Hop Culture” Topic: “The Gospel Vision in African American Culture” Topic: “Soul Music and the Civil Rights Movement” Topic: “Yusef Komunyakaa and Contemporary African American Poetry” Topic: “James Baldwin and Billie Holiday”
ILS 254: Science and Literature
ILS 275 and 400: Shakespeare and the Modern World The Vietnam Era Writing the Two Cultures: Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Powers The Book as World: Don Quixote, Moby-Dick and Gravitys Rainbow
Monday with Authors: Doug Bradley and Craig Werner
Tricia Vanderhoof, Correspondent 5:02 p.m. ET Jan. 24, 2016
-Doug-Bradley-in-Nam-71-Attrib.-Courtesy-of-Author-.jpg
(Photo: ~Courtesy Doug Bradley)
Story Highlights
We Gotta Get Out of This Place was named Rolling Stone's #1 Best Music Book of 2015
Craig Werner is a Nominating Committee member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Doug Bradley served in 'Nam in 1970 and 1971, and the Vietnam infantryman's average age was 18-19
Bruce Springsteen's The River concert on August 20, 1981, brought new attention to the challenges Vietnam veterans were facing
28 CONNECTTWEETLINKEDINCOMMENTEMAILMORE
It's been almost 41 years since the fall of Saigon and, for many, one of the most powerful associations with Vietnam is the music of the period.
So authors Doug Bradley and Craig Werner asked survivors a single, simple question: "What was your song?"
Floodgates opened. The testimony they received is visceral – the hope, the horror, the fear, anger, disillusion, sorrow – still as immediate as mortar fire.
Doug Bradley served in Vietnam as a combat correspondent in 1970 and 1971. He and Craig Werner, professor of Afro-American studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison, co-teach "The Vietnam Era: Music, Media, and Mayhem." They have written "We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War," just named Rolling Stone's number 1 Best Music Book of 2015.
We spent an hour together on the phone; Bradley in Madison, and Werner on vacation in Hawaii.
Mondays with Authors: Your book is meticulously researched; hundreds of interviews. The index alone is 17 pages. How did you tackle this wealth of material?
Bradley: As Jay Maloney says in the final Solo (individual narrative), there is no such thing as one Vietnam, there were more than two and a half million of them. Every soldier lived a different experience and what emerged was the music. Music was the conduit.
MwA: How did the book come about?
Werner: In 2003, members of the Deadly Writers Patrol writing group who met at the Madison Vet Center gravitated to a conversation we were having about our love of music, sharing stories about songs they associated with their tours. It became apparent this was something much larger.
MwA: In what way?
Bradley: There were so many complexities. The length of the war, different phases, so many causes of tension, race particularly, not just there but back home as well. And music at its heart.
MwA: Two phrases permeate the book: "In country" and "Back in the world." The gap between the two, the estrangement the boys felt, color every narrative. How did that translate?
Bradley: Their average age was 19, 20 and for most of these young guys, it was their first time away from home. They were completely unprepared for the conditions. Songs were how they kept their spirits going, their connection to those they left back in the world while they were in-country, whether in combat or not.
Doug Bradley is co-author of “We Gotta Get Out of This
(Photo: ~Courtesy Doug Bradley)
MwA: When radio was out, how did they cope?
Both laugh: However they could. Someone always had a guitar, or improvised an instrument, or they sang, hummed. Bootleg cassettes or tapes on cheap decks from the PX.
MwA: The cover is spot-on, white-on-red DYMO lettering over the photo. Who chose it?
Bradley: Jack Harrison, design and production manager at UMass Press. We talked about different images. It's a copyrighted picture but we paid for it. It's iconic, that rear shot of a marine waiting for a flight out of Khe Sanh in the worst early days (February 25, 1968), his guitar and M16 slung across his back.
MwA: It captures the ambivalence. What did you learn writing the book that you didn't know before?
Werner: Longing for home, the breadth of the soundtrack our vets connect with their experience. (Doug murmurs agreement) The war lasted such a long time, the sheer range of songs that overlap their tours, that's the thing that struck us both. And they came from every area of the U.S. so you had every type of music.
Craig Werner is co-author of “We Gotta Get Out of This
(Photo: ~Photo by Leslee Nelson)
MwA: Examples?
Both: "Davy Crockett," "Yellow Rose of Texas," Kingston Trio's "MTA" ("The Man Who Never Returned") Peter, Paul and Mary's "Leaving on a Jet Plane," Temptations' "My Girl;" church music; "On Top of Old Smokey." Plus so many songs relating to women not just girlfriends: moms and sisters, other females in their lives as well.
MwA: Why do you think the same tunes were mentioned again and again?
Bradley: Because each song had a different meaning for each person. And even the meaning of the same song often changed as the person’s experience changed.
Werner: Every tent was different, every hooch. What makes our book different – the real core – is that it acknowledges the differences, but with music as a source of connection.
MwA: The mood of the war reflected the changing mood of the country. Ebony magazine called 1967 the summer of 'Retha, Rap and Revolt. How did that affect the soldiers?
Bradley: There was so much racism between colors, class, and a predominantly high percentage of the casualties were lower-class minorities. Gerald McCarthy's Solo dealt with that. (McCarthy was 18 when he went overseas and barely 19 when he returned.)
MwA: (In "Bad Moon Rising") McCarthy writes, "Crackers burned a cross in front of Doc Brown's tent," but then also wonders, "Does music make us whole again? Looking back, I think now music brought us together." It sounds as if music helped heal some of the in-country hate?
Werner: It provided a connection, but also an escape.
An Army band gets its groove on during the Vietnam
(Photo: ~Courtesy Doug Bradley)
MwA: Is there anything you're surprised someone hasn't asked you?
Bradley: No one's asked whether I was pro- or anti-war, but it doesn't matter. With everyone we've interviewed, there's been both sides, and all ways in between. We just got out of the way and let them tell their stories. Music sustained these stories and it let them get them the hell home.
Werner: No one's gonna read the book and come away with the idea that Vietnam was a good idea. People who were there all pretty much agree with that.
MwA: Craig, I have a question for you. You're a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominating Committee. Bon Jovi's from New Jersey. He's eligible. Why hasn't he been voted in?
Werner: We have no idea. No one knows who does the voting.
MwA: Craig, the Garden State is counting on you.
(Craig laughs)
MwA: Moving on – another Garden State rocker. Your book talks about Springsteen's crucial The River concert on August 20, 1981 when he called Bobby Muller onto the stage, where he paid tribute to the vets and the problems they face, the burdens they carry.
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Both: There's no way to overemphasize the importance of what Springsteen did in L.A. He listened to people. He acknowledged that this is real and it's buried more deeply than anyone realizes
Listening is hard because we want to fix it. There's no way to fix it but the power of music is overwhelming. He provided that forum. He truly felt, 'There but for the grace of god go I, that's some other poor guy who just couldn't get out of it.' People got that.
MwA: Due to the advances in medicine and technology, we had just 58,307 fatalities in two decades. But there were 303,644 wounded. That has led to unprecedented ongoing veterans' issues. What support is there?
Bradley: What strikes us teaching our class, especially for the younger vets, men and women, is the tremendous strain and the distance between the rhetoric – the "Thank you for your service" clichés, appearances at airports or trotting out half-time at games – and what they're being forced to deal with. In the process of writing our book, we found that many who found it impossible to talk about their experiences could do it when we asked, "Do you have a song?" What was needed were places where people could tell their stories.
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of
(Photo: Courtesy Bettmann/CORBIS)
MwA: Are there any?
Bradley: We stay connected with new organizations that continue to raise awareness. We're inspired by Dryhooch (military jargon for a hut or safe place to sleep during combat), a non-profit that provides peer and family support and counseling, by veterans, for veterans of all eras, in a café-like environment.
MwA: Where did Dryhooch start?
Werner: It was founded in Milwaukee in 2010 by Bob Curry, and more have branched out. Their Coffee Shop provides a gathering place to reconnect; it's free of alcohol, always a major problem for vets, and dedicated to helping warriors who survived the war, now survive the peace.
MwA: What's most important?
Both: To know that others share the same issues. That there are ways to make those connections, share those burdens.
MwA: You mention the women. So many more serve now than ever before. The ones who served in Vietnam (almost 7500) were referred to as Donut Dollies. Those you interviewed didn't seem to object to the term, although today the term seems somewhat demeaning. Tell us about them.
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Both: There were rigorous qualifications and most (over 83 percent) were nurses, Red Cross volunteers there as morale boosters for the troops. They were mostly older than most of the guys they befriended because of the college requirement.
Bradley: Craig, have you never heard anyone complain about the term?
Werner: No, it was not a term they objected to, it was the way it was. They were very independent, there to do the job; they wanted to see for themselves. They were lifesavers. Many of them were anti-war. They had a connection with life back it he world and it was great to have them there.
Bradley: They were poised and smart and had enough camaraderie that they have their own reunions. Many had PTSD and trauma as well. Heather Stur wrote a great book, Beyond Combat, which very definitely makes that point.
Werner: Jay Maloney's Solo makes the point as well. He was a medic and his friend Sharon, a nurse, was killed during a rocket attack on their hospital. Women were not safe. If you're getting mortared, you're in combat. Gender isn't relevant. Men and women experience same trauma and share a lot of the same problems.
MwA: Young women also served as DJs and often found themselves walking a fine line between Division Command guidelines (censorship) and GI requests that might get the broadcasts pulled. Doug, you deal with that in your Solo "Chain of Fools." The brass hated what they called "subversive" music, especially a renegade DJ?
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Bradley: You mean Dave Rabbit (real name C. David DeLay Jr.). He was a pirate radio legend, played heavy metal, psychedelic tunes, drug anthems: "Peace out, brother."
MwA: Details!
Bradley: AFVN broadcast out of Saigon and he'd burst into their signal, "Change your radio to this frequency!" And we would! I was sure he'd get nailed. He fooled with the playlist and played the music we all wanted to hear.
The women listened to his music as well and he'd have them go into the women's latrines and read what was written in the stalls. He'd tell us, "So-and-so is pushing bad H at ___; I was just there!" And you felt he was there the whole time. I don't know how he got away with it.
MwA: He's a legend!
Bradley: Yes!
MwA: But he only broadcast for three weeks in January 1971!
Bradley: (Laughs) Yes! But it was the longest three weeks in radio history!
MwA: One final thing you discovered?
Both: That although there is no definitive Vietnam soundtrack, many of the favorites for younger vets in Afghanistan and Kuwait and the Mideast are the same: Creedence and Bruce and Hendrix.
"We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War" was published by the University of Massachusetts. For information on how to get a playlist, go to www.umass.edu/umpress/title/we-gotta-get-out-place.
Follow Tricia Vanderhoof on Twitter @triciavand
QUOTED: (Werner) "When we started out we thought we were going to organize it around a Vietnam vets’ Top 20—choose 20 songs and use those to tell the story. And then we started interviewing people and it became a Top 200 or a Top 2,000 or something like that very, very rapidly. Ten years later, we decided it was just time to finish writing the book, and part of that was way too many of the guys who we talked to were starting to die. We wanted to get it out while as many as possible were still with us."
(Bradley)"I think the legacy of the book is that—maybe 40 years too late — we found a way to have a dialogue with the men and women who fought in Vietnam, and that music was essential to enabling them to heal"
Authors explore the music and sound of the Vietnam era
Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, background, from left, with their book "We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War" at the Stars and Stripes central office, Washington, D.C., on Aug. 26, 2016. The book, which explores how U.S. troops used music to cope with the complexities of the Vietnam War in country and up on their return to the States, was named the Best Music Book of 2015 by Rolling Stone magazine.
Carlos Bongioanni/Stars and Stripes
Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, background, from left, with their book "We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War" at the Stars and Stripes central office, Washington, D.C., on Aug. 26, 2016. The book, which explores how U.S. troops used music to cope with the complexities of the Vietnam War in country and up on their return to the States, was named the Best Music Book of 2015 by Rolling Stone magazine.
Carlos Bongioanni/Stars and Stripes
View Photo Gallery »
By Sean Moores
Stars and Stripes
Published: November 8, 2016
Like many great conversations about music, it started at a party.
Doug Bradley, a Vietnam veteran, and Craig Werner, a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, met at a Christmas party at the Madison Vet Center in 2003. They struck up a conversation about ’60s music that soon took on a life of its own as several veterans joined in and shared their stories and experiences. As the Thunderclap Newman song says, there was something in the air.
“It was really amazing to watch. And then, even though we had just met, we sort of said, ‘There’s something going on here,’ ” said Bradley, 69. “And a couple of months later we grabbed a beer on the terrace there at the university and sat out on the lake and said, ‘Let’s write a book.’”
Their 2015 book, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War,” explores the music of the era, how troops used music to cope with life in a war zone and how veterans turned to music as a means of survival and reintegration upon coming home.
As they wrote, they found a niche.
“This is telling part of the story that we didn’t hear (in) other places,” said Werner, 64. “When we started out we thought we were going to organize it around a Vietnam vets’ Top 20 — choose 20 songs and use those to tell the story. And then we started interviewing people and it became a Top 200 or a Top 2,000 or something like that very, very rapidly. Ten years later, we decided it was just time to finish writing the book, and part of that was way too many of the guys who we talked to were starting to die. We wanted to get it out while as many as possible were still with us.”
Bradley and Werner also ended up co-teaching a class called “The Vietnam Era: Music, Media and Mayhem” at Wisconsin. They dug into the soundtrack of Vietnam for a decade, conducting hundreds of interviews that centered on a common question: What was your song?
“I think, frankly, it was a way for some of these people to get back home from the war.”
- Doug Bradley, Vietnam veteran
“We learned very early on to start our interviews with, ‘Did you have a song that you connect with Vietnam?’,” Werner said. “Because, this is no secret, if you go to a Vietnam vet and say, ‘Hey, man, what was it like?’ Good damn luck. You’re not getting anywhere. But the music opened that up.”
The authors had a good handle on the material. Bradley, a music lover from Philadelphia, was drafted into the Army in March 1970 and soaked up the soundtrack of Vietnam while serving as an information specialist at Long Binh from November ’70 to November ’71.
Werner played organ in a band named Armageddon, gigging in front of GIs and hippies alike around Fort Carson, Colo., during the war. He’s written other music books and is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s nominating committee. Despite their musical bona fides, Bradley and Werner still found themselves surprised at times.
“I sort of expected a little more edgy things, maybe a little politics,” Bradley said. “Not the black and white politics we had in America at the time, but what stunned me was there’s ‘My Girl’ and (Otis Redding’s) ‘(Sittin’ on the) Dock of the Bay’ and there’s (Peter, Paul and Mary’s) ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ and (The Beach Boys’) ‘Sloop John B’ — ‘Detroit City’ by Bobby Bare. So many songs about longing and wanting to be somewhere else and wanting to be home or missing the person you loved. And I didn’t expect that in those conversations.”
They also found that songs held different meanings for different people. The track from which their book takes its title is a prime example. “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” written by Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, was pitched to the Righteous Brothers as the follow-up to their 1965 No. 1 hit “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”
“Cynthia Weil sent us the demo copy and, man, it would have been a No. 1 hit, without any question, by the Righteous Brothers,” Werner said. Instead, the get-out-of-the-ghetto song was recorded by the Animals, who were making a move from working-class Newcastle upon Tyne, England, to London.
Released in July 1965 in the U.K. and September ’65 in the United States, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and its bubbling bass line rose to No. 2 and No. 13 on the charts in those countries, respectively. Meanwhile, the song took on a life of its own in Vietnam. It resonated more strongly as the war dragged on and fell out of public favor.
Bradley recalls hearing the song for the first time after arriving in country. Two soldiers from his new office at Long Binh were preparing to leave Vietnam, which was cause for celebration.
[Doug Bradley in Vietnam, 1971. Bradley, the co-author of 'We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War,' was an Army information specialist at Long Binh in 1970 and '71. Courtesy of Doug Bradley]
Doug Bradley in Vietnam, 1971. Bradley, the co-author of 'We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War,' was an Army information specialist at Long Binh in 1970 and '71. Courtesy of Doug Bradley
“We’re coming in, two guys are going out, so they had a DEROS (Date Eligible For Return From Overseas) party,” Bradley said. “And it was one of the best parties I’ve ever been to. I’m in country two weeks, and they played ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place.’ And we all joined arms and sang and we changed the words. When they go, ‘(girl there’s a) better life for you and me,’ we said, ‘in the U.S.A.’ That was our closing line.”
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War” presents a thorough history of how technology — transistor radios, access to inexpensive reel-to-reel and cassette decks and the establishment of Armed Forces Vietnam Network radio — and cultural factors turned Vietnam into the so-called Rock and Roll War. There are USO shows, Filipino cover bands and minstrels in the hooch. You can read about the four most popular acts among troops (James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix and Creedence Clearwater Revival).
Bradley and Warner delve into the patriotism that pushed Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets” to No. 1 in 1966 — and the parade of parodies that followed. They collected this chronology through conventional research, reporting and writing, but also by putting voices of the veterans front and center by letting them write about their experiences.
These “solos,” by a diverse group that includes white, black, Hispanic and Native American veterans, provide the beating heart in the book’s narrative. The passages, and many of the behind-the-scenes interviews, served another important purpose.
“I think, frankly, it was a way for some of these people to get back home from the war, Bradley said. “There were many, many moments, almost universal, when a person would start to tell us a story they’d never told before . . . Sometimes we’d go to sit down with them and they’d have their kids in the room and they’d talk — that was when they finally got home.”
VIETNAM VETERAN'S TOP TEN SONGS
1. “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” The Animals
2. “Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” Country Joe and the Fish
3. “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” Peter, Paul and Mary
4. “Fortunate Son,” Creedence Clearwater Revival
5. “Purple Haze,” The Jimi Hendrix Experience
6. “What’s Going On,” Marvin Gaye
7. “Detroit City,” Bobby Bare
8. “Chain of Fools,” Aretha Franklin
9. “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” Nancy Sinatra
10. “My Girl,” The Temptations
Submitted by Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, authors of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War,” who interviewed about 300 veterans while writing the book.
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War” was well received critically, earning praise from Rolling Stone as Best Music Book of 2015. Bradley and Werner hope that getting troops home, a return so many were denied, can be part of their book’s legacy.
“I think the legacy of the book is that — maybe 40 years too late — we found a way to have a dialogue with the men and women who fought in Vietnam, and that music was essential to enabling them to heal,” said Bradley, who named “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” when asked for “his song” from Vietnam. “I think the book’s about healing. I want the legacy to be that two or three hundred people that we talked to were able to get back home and to heal.”
Added Werner, who cited CCR’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain” as the song he associates with Vietnam: “We usually close our class with it, and usually — the last few times I’ve listened to it, it really hit me. . . . I’m looking at our TAs (teaching assistants), these younger (Iraq and Afghanistan) vets, (and) I’m just thinking … let’s not do this again … can we please learn something?”
moores.sean@stripes.com
< 'Next Stop Is Vietnam': A War In Song November 11, 20102:30 PM ET 8:20 Download Facebook Twitter Google+ Email ROBERT SIEGEL, host: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel. MELISSA BLOCK, host: And I'm Melissa Block. On this Veteran's Day, we're going to look back, listen back, really, to the war in Vietnam. Its history has been told countless times in books, movies and plays. Now a new CD collection explores the conflict and its impact through the music it inspired. From member station WCPN, David C. Barnett reports. DAVID C. BARNETT: In 1969, Gary Hall was an orthopedic technician in the 17th Field Hospital in An Khe, in Vietnam's Central Highlands.�He saw what seemed to be an endless stream of wounded and dead, and Hall says music took him away, at least temporarily. (Soundbite of music) Mr. GARY HALL (Former Orthopedic Technician): In An Khe, I think the popular song was "Love One Another," The Youngbloods. (Soundbite of song, "Love One Another") THE YOUNGBLOODS (Band): (Singing) Love is but a song we sing. And fear's the way we die. Mr. HALL: Come on people now, smile on each other, everybody get together, gonna love one another right now. (Soundbite of song, "Love One Another") THE YOUNGBLOODS: (Singing) Come on people now, smile on each other, everybody get together, try love one another right now. Mr. HALL: That's the one I remember really strongly. BARNETT: But if you ask a lot of veterans, the song that captures their feelings about Vietnam is a 1960s pop hit by The Animals, which was really about young people trapped in a British urban slum. (Soundbite of song, "We Gotta Get Out of This Place") THE ANIMALS (BAND): (Singing) We gotta get out of this place, if it's the last thing we ever do. We got to get out of this place. Girl, there's a better life for me and you. BARNETT: There are over 300 songs on the new 13 CD box set titled "Next Stop is Vietnam." They range from a folk ballad released just before U.S. troops landed, to a 2008 song about the aftereffects that veterans still suffer. Hugo Keesing put the collection together.�It's a project he's worked on since the early 1970s, when he taught psychology courses to U.S. troops a few hundred miles up the coast from Saigon. Mr. HUGO KEESING (Curator, "Next Stop is Vietnam") By, I want to say, about the mid-1980s, I had collected about 500 45s that dealt with the Vietnam War. BARNETT: The first Vietnam War protest song to become a commercial hit was a three-and-a half-minute rant. (Soundbite of song, "Eve of Destruction") Mr. BARRY MCGUIRE (Musician): (Singing) The eastern world, it is explodin', violence flarin', bullets loadin'. You're old enough to kill, but not for votin'. You don't believe in war, but what's the gun you're totin'? BARNETT: Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" was banned by many radio stations and the entire Armed Forces Network. Mr. KEESING: The perceived or assumed impact was such that within several weeks, there was already the first answer record, the "Dawn of Correction," where a very clean-cut group of young men, who included members of Danny and the Juniors, decided that it was important to refute, point-by-point, some of the concerns and claims made in "Eve of Destruction." (Soundbite of song, "Dawn of Correction") THE SPOKESMEN (Band): (Singing) The Western world has a common dedication to keep free people from Red domination. Maybe you can't vote, boy, but man your battle stations or there'll be no need for votin' in future generations. BARNETT: Perhaps the first song to explicitly�support the growing military effort in Vietnam was co-written by an Army soldier who recorded this demo version in a Saigon safe house in the mid-1960s. (Soundbite of song, "Ballad of the Green Berets") Staff Sergeant BARRY SADLER (U.S. Army, Special Forces Unit): (Singing) Silver wings upon their chest. These are men, America's best. BARNETT: Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler was a member of the Army's elite Special Forces unit, identified by their green berets, when his commercial recording of the song went to the top of the charts. (Soundbite of song, "Ballad of the Green Berets") Staff Sgt. SADLER: (Singing) Trained to live off nature's land. Trained in combat, hand to hand. Mr. ART MCKOY: We always admired those guys, because they went way up in the hills and in the valleys and did some hell of stuff. And, in our hearts, even though we weren't that courageous to be Green Berets, when we hear that song, we all want to be like Green Berets, you know. BARNETT: Art McKoy says the members of his platoon were impressed when they first heard the song. But when McKoy got back home to Cleveland, another Vietnam song caught his ear. It was by a local singer named Charles Hatcher, better known as Edwin Starr. (Soundbite of song, "War") Mr. EDWIN STARR (Musician): (Singing) War, huh, yeah, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Uh-huh. War, huh, yeah, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Say it again, y'all. Mr. MCKOY: The fact of the matter is that we went with nothing, we lost our lives, and we came back, we really had nothing. If you ask me, that was one of the great battle cries. I think it's relevant right today. BARNETT: A number of soldiers recorded their own songs while serving in-country, and an entire disc on the new set is devoted to them, including this take on the daily news briefings conducted by the U.S. government press office in Saigon, recorded by - perhaps for good reason - an unidentified military staffer. (Soundbite of song, "Battle Hymn of the Republic of Vietnam") Unidentified Man: (Singing) Mine eyes have seen the story of the winning of the war. It is published every afternoon a little after 4. They put it in the briefing sheets and then they tell us more and the truth goes sliding by. BARNETT: One of the best known songs of the era is another darkly humorous ditty by Country Joe and the Fish about soldiers marching off to war. (Soundbite of song, "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag") COUNTRY JOE AND THE FISH (Band): (Singing) And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam. Mr. KEESING: By the early '70s, as troops were arriving in Vietnam,�they�were singing the "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag." BARNETT: Hugo Keesing. Mr. KEESING: It was an indication of how divided not only the nation was, but there was almost a gallows humor in singing, whoopee, I'm going to die, as American troops are coming to Vietnam for the first time. (Soundbite of song, "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag") COUNTRY JOE AND THE FISH: (Singing) Well, there ain't no time to wonder why, whoopee, we're all gonna die. All right. BARNETT: Country Joe McDonald's performance at the�1969 Woodstock festival�made him famous, but in a 1996 talk at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Navy veteran expressed conflicted feelings about the legacy of his signature song. Mr. COUNTRY JOE MCDONALD (Musician): When I sing�"Fixin'-to-Die Rag" for Vietnam veterans, I know what they're feeling and they're thinking. But when I sing it to a regular audience, I don't know what the hell they're thinking. Mr. JOHN BEGALA (Former Ohio Legislator): Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, the next stop is Vietnam. (Soundbite of laughter) Mr. BEGALA: Great song. BARNETT: Former Ohio legislator John Begala was a sophomore at Kent State University in 1970, when four students were killed by National Guard troops called in to quell an anti-war protest.�One week later, a new song by�Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, came on the radio. (Soundbite of song, "Ohio") CROSBY, STILLS, NASH AND YOUNG (Band): (Singing) Tin soldiers and Nixon comin'. We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drummin'. Four dead in Ohio. Mr. BEGALA: To this day, I listen to that song and I get pissed off. It tugs on your emotions and it tugs on your anger, tugs on your disappointment, and the rage.�My god, it takes you right back. BARNETT: For NPR News, I'm David C. Barnett in Cleveland. (Soundbite of song, "Ohio") CROSBY, STILLS, NASH AND YOUNG: (Singing) Gotta get down to it. Soldiers are gunning us down. Should have been done long ago.
QUOTED: "We Gotta GetoutofThis Place is a fine introduction to the role of music during the Vietnam War."
Bradley, Doug. We gotta get out of this place: the soundtrack of the Vietnam War
R.D. Cohen
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1176.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Bradley, Doug. We gotta get out of this place: the soundtrack of the Vietnam War, by Doug Bradley and Craig Werner. Massachusetts, 2015. 256p Index afp ISBN 9781625341976 cloth, $90.00; ISBN 9781625341624 pbk, $26.95; ISBN 9781613763698 ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-3440
ML3918
2015-24892 CIP
Bradley (a Vietnam veteran) and Werner--who co-teach a course on war at the University of Wisconsin--have compiled a fascinating history of music connected with the Vietnam War. Drawing on a wide range of personal interviews and published autobiographies, the authors provide five roughly chronological chapters, each focusing on a particular song, plus detailed notes and a number of extensive quotations they label "SOLOs." "With the crucial exception of combat situations," the authors begin, "music was just about everywhere in Vietnam, reaching soldiers via albums, cassettes, and tapes of radio shows sent from home; on the Armed Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN); and on the legendary underground broadcasts of Radio First Termer." The Animals's recording of "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" served as a sort of unofficial anthem, but it was joined by numerous other songs, patriotic as well as antiwar. By the late 1960s there was increasing disenchantment among the soldiers and growing racial strife. Country Joe McDonald's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" became increasingly popular. Joining Michael Kramer's The Republic of Rock (CH, Nov'13, 51-1390), We Gotta GetoutofThis Place is a fine introduction to the role of music during the Vietnam War. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All readers.--R. D. Cohen, Indiana University Northwest
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cohen, R.D. "Bradley, Doug. We gotta get out of this place: the soundtrack of the Vietnam War." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1176. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661571&it=r&asid=ee7c7b6b8a06e364d691adbf3f1a3903. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661571
Werner, Craig. Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul
Bill Piekarski
129.3 (Feb. 15, 2004): p129.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Crown. Mar. 2004. c.352p. photogs. index. discog. ISBN 0-609-60993-9. $24. MUSIC
Werner (African American studies, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison; A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, & the Soul of America) cogently traces the confluence of soul music, African American spirituality, and the Civil Rights Movement as they progressed, evolved, and reinforced one another through the Sixties and Seventies. As a microcosm, he focuses on the lives, careers, and art of three stylistically disparate giants of soul music: Aretha Franklin, whose background in the black church shone through her secular music; Stevie Wonder, who rose from a novelty act to prove himself a genius composer and amazing multi-instrumentalist; and the lesser-recognized but still-influential Curtis Mayfield, a composer, band leader, guitarist, vocalist, and poignant social commentator. One caveat: readers unfamiliar with the music of these artists will not grasp the message or meaning here. In attempting to describe representative songs, Werner's prose is surely evocative, but it is no substitute for the music itself--a drawback that could have easily been remedied by the inclusion of an audio CD. As Elvis Costello so veridically stated, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Nonetheless, this will make a worthy addition to both public and academic libraries.--Bill Piekarski, Lackawanna, NY
Piekarski, Bill
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Piekarski, Bill. "Werner, Craig. Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul." Library Journal, 15 Feb. 2004, p. 129. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA113896903&it=r&asid=7773c58dc09c7806b835835e1eacb3f9. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "Werner's exquisite prose and his richly informed music history offer a deeply felt love letter to three of soul music's greatest."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A113896903
Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield and the Rise and Fall of American Soul
251.5 (Feb. 2, 2004): p68.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
CRAIG WERNER. Crown, $24 (352p) ISBN 0609-60993-9
In this eloquent cultural history, critically acclaimed music writer Werner (A Change Is Gonna Come) conducts a journey through the lives of three leading musical artists and the ways they used their gospel music training and the vision it provided to transform American popular music. What makes the music of these three singer-songwriters so significant is that each had a vision of helping African-Americans to strengthen their racial identity while at the same time moving to a higher ground the dawning hope for interracial equality that was emerging in the late 1960s. As Werner points out, Wonder, Franklin and Mayfield grew up in impoverished homes while at the same time singing in their parents' or grandparents' churches about visions of a better world. As each singer took that musical vision to the streets, he or she applied it in various ways to the struggle for civil rights and equality. Franklin's music, as Werner observes, incorporated the hopes of Martin Luther King's interracialist dream and themes of the Black Power movement in songs like "Respect" and "Think." By the early '70s, Mayfield, whose early collaborations with Jerry Butler in the Impressions produced some of soul music's most moving moments and one anthem of the Civil Rights movement ("People Get Ready"), produced music that reflected the concerns of the Black Power movement. Mayfield's focus on black identity, pride and power later made itself felt in Iris powerful protests against drug abuse in "Freddie's Dead" and "Beautiful Brother of Mine." Werner adeptly examines the beauty and power of each singer's music as well as gracefully tracing the ways that their music and their culture influenced each other. Werner's exquisite prose and his richly informed music history offer a deeply felt love letter to three of soul music's greatest. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield and the Rise and Fall of American Soul." Publishers Weekly, 2 Feb. 2004, p. 68. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA113096813&it=r&asid=52526a2f60bf7b52420a3ef75083f0c5. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "a trip down the "gospel road" that's long, meandering, and generally unrewarding."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A113096813
Werner, Craig. Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul
71.24 (Dec. 15, 2003): p1443.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Crown (352 pp.) $24.00 Mar. 2004 ISBN: 0-609-60993-9
The biographies of three important figures in soul music are uncomfortably interwoven.
Werner (A Change Is Gonna Come, not reviewed; African-American Studies/Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) displays a reach well beyond his grasp in this ambitious yet muddled work. He sees Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and Curtis Mayfield--all hit-making performers during the '60s and '70s heyday of soul--as musical exemplars of the secularized "gospel vision" that lit a path for the civil-fights movement that burgeoned as these performers rose. Werner would have been better served by focusing just on Mayfield, for he makes a compelling case for the gospel-bred Chicagoan as a master synthesist of church feeling, pointed political songwriting, and artistic self-determination. He is less adept at delineating the import of Franklin (daughter of the powerful Detroit preacher C.L. Franklin) and Wonder (a child of the Detroit projects, and the lone artist unschooled in gospel music). Leaping around in time and from one musician to the other, Werner presents a farrago of obvious social and political observation, boilerplate biography, and tepid criticism. He relies almost entirely on dog-eared secondary sources: Among the subjects, only Mayfield sat for an interview. The writing about music is either flat-footed or hyperbolic, and Werner's attempts to mingle career details with the parallel story of the rights smuggle are ham-handed. The narrative utterly loses steam as it moves into the late '70s and '80s, when disco and rap supplanted R&B as the music of choice among many young African-Americans. The "fall of American soul" of the subtitle was little more than a reflection of changes in societal currents and popular tastes, and the declining excellence and relevance of the three artists Werner focuses on. Compared to Peter Guralnick's classic Sweet Soul Music (1986), this is wanting in nearly all categories.
A trip down the "gospel road" that's long, meandering, and generally unrewarding. (Agent: Dan Greenberg)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Werner, Craig. Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2003, p. 1443. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA112021104&it=r&asid=25fa119d2181bd7abc446ad35896e09b. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "An ambitious and comprehensive look at the deep connection between race and music in America, Werner's book is filled with provocative insights."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A112021104
A CHANGE IS GONNA COME: Music, Race and the Soul of America
246.10 (Mar. 8, 1999): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Craig Werner. Plume, $19.95 paper (4l7p) ISBN 0-452-28065-6
An ambitious and comprehensive look at the deep connection between race and music in America, Werner's book is filled with provocative insights. Why, for instance, did "funkateers and feminists, progressives and puritans, rockers and reactionaries" band together in an "unholy alliance" against disco, destroying "the last remaining musical scene that was in any sense racially mixed"--a scene that made crossover stars of women, African-Americans and gay men? Werner (Up Around the Bend), a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is enlightening without being overwhelming. Tracing the gospel, blues and jazz "impulses" through American, English and Jamaican music, he shows how the threads of music spun under the oppression of slavery and inequality have been woven into all types of popular and innovative music. One of the high notes of the book is his vivid description of how, as disco petered out, hip-hop and rap emerged in the burnt-out, battle-scarred terrain of the South Bro nx. Cut off from the increasingly "upwardly mobile" Studio 54 scene, the locals developed their own dance music, drawing on snippets from the history of popular music and particularly on the techniques of Jamaican street-party DJs. Werner's breadth of knowledge is impressive. He writes with equal clarity about--and respect for--gospel icon Mahalia Jackson (who "placed black women and their voices at the center of the freedom struggle") and Public Enemy (who expressed a "combination of political intelligence and street realism"). In America, where most people live in spaces rigidly defined by race and ethnicity, Werner shows how music still has the power to bring people together. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A CHANGE IS GONNA COME: Music, Race and the Soul of America." Publishers Weekly, 8 Mar. 1999, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA54082538&it=r&asid=34c6d42d2c58e50725520efa627cc384. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "His observations and semiotic connections prove insightful."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A54082538
A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, & the Soul of America
Mike Tribby
95.12 (Feb. 15, 1999): p1024.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Werner, Craig. A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, & the Soul of America. Mar. 1999. 432p. index. Plume, $19.95 (0-4522-8065-6). DDC: 782.42164.
Werner's essays are wide-ranging but not scattered, at worst blurring details, such as the precise meaning of the Rastafarian phrase "I and I," in the interests of conciseness and flow. His observations and semiotic connections prove insightful. He maintains that "black music provides a clear vision of how we might begin to come to terms with the burdens of our shared history" and "the best way to get a sense of what black music offers is to follow its story through the decades that have shaped the world we live in today." So he examines various musicians and styles in topical chapters: "Motown: Money, Magic, and the Mask," "Sly in the Smoke," "P-Funkentelechy," "Disco Sucks" (of course), etc. Occasionally esoteric, the book is still an excellent aid in placing figures as different as Mahalia Jackson, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and Tupac Shakur in social and historical context. Werner's exceptional "playlist" of recommended songs continues the main text's focus by considering even the Righteous Brothers in terms of black music and social change.
YA/C: Although specialized, this thoughtful account may be useful for curricular (reports, discussion, etc.) purposes. SEB.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tribby, Mike. "A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, & the Soul of America." Booklist, 15 Feb. 1999, p. 1024. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA54018237&it=r&asid=3ce217292ba8fecf1be1341708862a9f. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "a provocative, passionate glimpse at the core meaning and effects of postwar American popular music."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A54018237
A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, & the Soul of America
David P. Szatmary
124.1 (Jan. 1999): p102.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Werner, Craig. A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, & the Soul of America. Plume: NAL. Mar. 1999. c.432p, permanent paper, index. ISBN 0-45228065-6. pap. $19.95. MUSIC
Werner (Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse, Univ. of Illinois, 1994) charts the integrative influence of African American-based music on race relations in the United States from the 1950s to the present. Generally following a chronological approach, he divides the book into 65 brief chapters that loosely relate to three major musical themes: a redemptive gospel strain, jazz innovation, and blues realism. Werner most clearly explores the link between music and race in chapters on soul, disco, funk, house, and rap, explaining the connections between Motown and the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., Public Enemy's rap against a Reaganized America, and Aretha Franklin's place in the late 1960s black power movement. At his worst, Werner drifts into academic overintellectualizations of straightforward artists and their songs and overambitiously tries to deal with the scope of African American music while ignoring most of postwar jazz. Although it sometimes resembles an uneven, disjointed series of lectures revolving around opinion rather than research, this book still offers academics and lay readers a provocative, passionate glimpse at the core meaning and effects of postwar American popular music.--David P Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Szatmary, David P. "A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, & the Soul of America." Library Journal, Jan. 1999, p. 102. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA53631166&it=r&asid=ef41c8268e3ea862864fd1401a0e2386. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A53631166
UP AROUND THE BEND: The Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival
246.6 (Feb. 8, 1999): p204.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Craig Werner. Avon/Spike, $13.50 paper (245p) ISBN 0-380-80153-1
"From the beginning," Werner asserts, "there was something deeply mythic about Creedence Clearwater Revival." But the story of the four California suburbanites who transformed the American pop music landscape by tapping into Southern roots rock is a legend that has been hard to pin down, interpreted differently by rock critics, by the music industry and particularly by various members of the band. CCR's acrimonious breakup in 1971, fueled by escalating battles between frontman John Fogerty and his bandmates, revealed that each member of the band had different ideas about everything from musical philosophy to career ambitions to songcraft. Given that the truth about the band's rise and demise has been hotly contested, the kind of oral history that Werner weaves together here is particularly useful: each bandmember gets the opportunity to air his own perspective fully. While the antipathy between Fogerty and his bandmates has not abated over time, all four confront both their collective successes and crises art iculately and with unflinching-and sometimes brutal-honesty. They still share a passion for music, focusing on their own songs and on the artists that influenced them. Fogerty in particular waxes lyrical about the profound role music has played in his life. Despite their animosities, the members of CCR celebrate the dynamic spirit of rock and roll: as drummer Doug Clifford puts it: "It was a wonderful thing. It was a dream of schoolboys growing up, the American dream.... It doesn't get any better than that." Photos. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"UP AROUND THE BEND: The Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival." Publishers Weekly, 8 Feb. 1999, p. 204. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA53872207&it=r&asid=1c5909f51956c86dcac865199ca2c339. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A53872207
A change is gonna come; music, race & the soul of America, 2d ed
21.3 (Aug. 2006):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
0472031473
A change is gonna come; music, race & the soul of America, 2d ed.
Werner, Craig Hansen.
U. of Michigan Press
2006
468 pages
$22.95
Paperback
ML3479
Werner (Afro-American studies, U. of Wisconsin) considers black music since the 1950s--notably gospel, blues, jazz--and people and styles influenced by it, all within a social context that pays close attention to race. He examines styles such as Motown, folk music, Southern soul, funk, disco, punk, and hip-hop. He discusses a wide range of artists including Mahalia Jackson, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, James Brown, John Fogerty, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, George Clinton, Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Mary J. Blige, OutKast, Ozomatli, and Lauryn Hill. This edition replaces the last five chapters of the previous (1998) edition with four new and updated ones. The book contains an index of songs listed in the text.
([c]20062005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A change is gonna come; music, race & the soul of America, 2d ed." Reference & Research Book News, Aug. 2006. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA148972179&it=r&asid=4b1f7e17cef4e5f5f49733a7918e9475. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "Higher Ground is a welcome addition to the literature of works on rhythm and blues that exhibit a true critical stance."
"Werner has a deep grasp of the issues that surround the music of this time and place, and any student of African American music will find this book unique and thought provoking."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A148972179
Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul
Andrew Flory
61.3 (Mar. 2005): p752.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Music Library Association, Inc.
http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org
Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul. By Craig Werner. NY: Crown Publishers, 2004. [xii, 337 p. ISBN 0-609-60993-9. $24.00.] Bibliography, discography, index.
Craig Werner's new book Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul is the latest offering from a familiar voice in the criticism of African American musical idioms. While his two previous books on the subject, A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (New York: Plume, 1998) and Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), deal with more wide-ranging issues of race and its relation to African American musical idioms, Higher Ground focuses exclusively on soul music as a means to disseminate what Werner terms a unified secular "gospel vision." Werner achieves this by weaving narrative and analysis of the lives and music of three of the most important practitioners of soul music. Higher Ground emphasizes the connections between the personal, political, and activist leanings of these three artists, the messages contained in their music, and the faith instilled in all of them in their most formidable years as children reared in the quietly segregated North.
Higher Ground simultaneously traces the careers of Franklin, Mayfield, and Wonder through an introduction and five chapters. Although the book proceeds in a linear manner through time, Werner conveniently combines common themes from the lives and music of the three performers despite their occasional historical incongruity. Chapter 2, "Keep on Pushing: The Soul of the Freedom Movement," focuses on Wonder, Franklin, and Mayfield becoming self-sufficient musicians who strove for the financial and creative independence that was necessary to promulgate a sometimes radical message, even though each of these artists experienced this particular struggle at slightly different times. Similarly, chapter 3, "'Spirit in the Dark': Music and the Powers of Blackness," chronicles the breakthrough of all three artists as musical auteurs: Franklin in 1967 with her move to Atlantic Records, Wonder in 1971 with his new Motown contract, and Mayfield in 1970 with the formation of his own Curtom record label.
One of the most compelling aspects of this book, and what perhaps allows these three artists to represent soul music so effectively as a whole, is the way in which their careers align in the mid-1970s. Chapter 4, "'Songs in the Key of Life': The Gospel Vision in Changing Times," concentrates on the years between 1973 and 1976, a time in which the careers of Mayfield and Franklin experienced a decline and Wonder released his last great album after a near fatal accident. Finally, chapter 5, "'Who's Zoomin' Who?': Megastars, Monuments, Elders," tracks the difficult experiences shared by Franklin, Mayfield, and Wonder during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, when their pointed messages seemed to be less relevant in a culture where rhythm and blues was morphing into the more placid quiet storm genre, and hip-hop emerged as the best platform to disseminate radical social commentary.
At the outset of the book Werner writes only briefly about the decision to pair these artists. In spite of the obvious connections between Franklin, Mayfield, and Wonder, the type of distinctive "gospel vision" that the book claims is common among these three, and what necessitates their stories being discussed in the same book, is at times debatable. Werner's greatest argument for dealing with these musicians in the same study is the unique window in time in which African Americans from the North had an opportunity to "preach" their gospel vision to an interested white audience. Similarly, the association between this music and the political energy of the African American freedom movement gives the messages of the three a similar character. Nevertheless, the implication throughout the book that these three artists crossed over from gospel to pop musical styles in an effort to spread their vision to a wider audience is not substantiated.
The most pressing issue addressed in the book is the nature of Werner's "gospel vision" itself. Mayfield, Wonder, and Franklin were three artists whose music was deeply political in nature, and whose message reflected many of the pressing issues that faced the African American community during a roughly fifteen-year period between 1961 and 1976. Only by realizing that Werner is describing a fascinating process of secular spirituality--a type of worldly "gospel"--can one reconcile the distance between these artists promoting positive virtues, such as peace or compassion, and the idea that Franklin, Wonder, and Mayfield were, in fact, delivering the word of God as a divine force. Throughout the book Werner contrasts this "gospel vision" with what he calls a "blues impulse" in African American popular music. The distinction between these two modes of presentation is crucial for Werner; a blues-based outpouring reflects the need for survival while a gospel message preaches redemption.
The music of Aretha Franklin, especially the commercial gospel recordings of her early years on the Atlantic label, offers the strongest, most compelling faith-oriented music that is discussed in the book. Franklin's undeniably strong connection to the African American church due to the mission of her father C. L. Franklin, perhaps the most famous African American preacher of his day, imbues her music with undeniable gospel music authority. Yet, the overwhelming majority of Franklin's music is secular, and in spite of her strong connection to Christianity her repertoire offers little social commentary in comparison to the work of Mayfield and Wonder. Werner is most concerned with the portion of Franklin's music that has an outwardly womanist stance. Yet, it seems that the deeply personal nature of a large portion of Franklin's most famous music, although it sounds like gospel, eschews the "gospel vision" exhibiting instead a more passionate "blues impulse."
It is perhaps ironic that Wonder and Mayfield, not the daughter-of-the-church Franklin, offer the greatest examples of Werner's secular "gospel vision." Werner successfully traces the political and activist causes of both of these musicians and shows how these strong beliefs pervade the majority of Mayfield's output and the music of Wonder after he was given free reign by Motown in 1971. Wonder's often buoyant lyrics, and his uncanny ability to turn any public statement into a metaphysical sermon, are very successfully interpreted through the lens of the "gospel vision," giving order to what may otherwise be seen as an unfocused general message. But Werner's model works best in interpreting Mayfield's work, along with his low-key public persona. The activist messages that underlie so much of Mayfield's work throughout his thirty-year career clearly extol a strong sense of secular spirituality based on an ideology that is strongly informed by the African American freedom movement.
Higher Ground is a welcome addition to the literature of works on rhythm and blues that exhibit a true critical stance. He has explored one of the most complex issues surrounding this repertoire: the nature of the spirituality that provides much of the social and contextual underpinnings of African American popular idioms in postwar America. This study considers northern rhythm and blues as a central force in black life in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, contrary to the stereotype of this music as substantively inferior to its southern counterpart. Readers who are familiar with the central arguments of such diverse books as Samuel Floyd's The Power of Black Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) and Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), books that view northern rhythm and blues in this manner, will find Werner's stance refreshing. Werner has a deep grasp of the issues that surround the music of this time and place, and any student of African American music will find this book unique and thought provoking.
ANDREW FLORY
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Flory, Andrew
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Flory, Andrew. "Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul." Notes, vol. 61, no. 3, 2005, p. 752+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA130470111&it=r&asid=ef145eaccdb96d58e8f7764489e788bf. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "A Change Is Gonna Come is on balance a very impressive study. For its scale, for its detail, for its close attention to musics all too often attacked (rap) or dismissed (disco, funk), for the coherent passion of its argument–for all these virtues Werner's book deserves its prominence and its praise."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A130470111
A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America
Robert Cochran
34.4 (Winter 2000): p713.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 African American Review
http://aar.slu.edu/
Craig Werner. A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America. New York: Plume, 1999. 430 pp. $19.95.
Craig Werner sets himself a compelling and daunting task in A Change Is Gonna Come: What's attempted is nothing less than a history of the complex interactions between popular music and racial politics in the United States in the final four decades of the twentieth century. It's a huge enterprise, loaded with pitfalls, and no ground for the timid.
Werner opens with Mahalia Jackson in 1963 and closes with Wu-Tang Clan in the 1990s, with literally hundreds of stops on the way. It's a great ride for the most part, despite occasional stumbles. The cover blurbs record high praise from high places, and few readers, one guesses, will grudge the accolades.
Mahalia Jackson's singing of "I've Been 'Buked and I've Been Scorned" and "How I Made It Over" at the epochal 1963 March on Washington offers in fact a perfect introduction to A Change Is Gonna Come. The first number, with its stress upon lived experience, upon unflinching confrontation of reality, complements the second's insistence upon the eventual victory of dogged spirit over mean circumstance. Werner calls the first perspective "the blues impulse" and the second "the gospel impulse." For a fuller definition of the former he cites Ralph Ellison: Blues opts first to "finger the jagged grain" of "brutal experience," and second to "transcend" such experience by "a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism." It is "personal catastrophe expressed lyrically." For the latter he turns to James Baldwin and Mavis Staples, among others. Gospel songs insist upon hope; they affirm "a vision of spiritual community."
The larger narrative curve, divided into five sections and built in turn of sixty-five short segments--too short to be called chapters--describes songs and singers and political events and politicians that mix these fundamental "impulses" in dramatically different proportions. The story begins in exuberant hope, in the musical accompaniment to Dr. Martin Luther King's magnificent "Dream" of a beloved national community in which individuals are judged, if at all, not by their ethnicity, their gender, their region, or their religion but by "the content of their character." The first eighteen segments describe various musical affirmers of this dream--Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, Woody Guthrie, Motown, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding at Monterey, Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, Muscle Shoals, Memphis Soul. The stress throughout is on the often explicit interaction between musical and political currents; there are whole segments where music is much subordinated to political developments.
This upward curve is soon interrupted. The second, third, and fourth sections chronicle a sharp downturn from sixties hope to seventies troubles and eighties despair, addressing Vietnam, disco, "Jimmy Carter and the Great Quota Disaster of 1978," and (rock bottom, darkest hour) "the Reagan Rules." The second section opens ominously, with "Black Power, Vietnam, and the Death of the Dream," and ends plaintively, with Donny Hathaway's "Where Is the Love?" When the fourth section opens it's time for Chuck D's "Welcome to the Terrordome." The "Reagan Rules" are for Werner the worst enemy of both the reality of the blues impulse and the community of the gospel impulse. There are four of them, in Werner's summary: "reality is determined by image and anecdote"; "the purpose of life is to make a lot of money"; "violence is the core of American, that is to say male, identity"; and "the world is divided into 'us' and 'them.' "It is at least an interesting argument that finds in the triumph of these "rules" a fertile so urce ground for the most anti-social excesses of the 'eighties gangstas.
Only with the fifth section does dawn break again, in "the Nineties Remix." Werner closes his work with segments titled "Flashes of the Spirit" and "Redemption Songs," where the claim for a resurgent beloved community is put forward: "The best music of the eighties grew out of the blues impulse, insisting on the reality of brutal experience over and against nostalgic fantasies and self-righteous lies. In the nineties, the gospel impulse moved back to the center." Kirk Franklin and the Family, Wu-Tang Clan--even the names assert community. Werner is tough on mostly obvious targets--Ronald Reagan above all, of course, but also Tipper Gore, Diana Ross, Wynton Marsalis, and Newt Gingrich. There are far more heroines and heroes. Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, Bob Marley, Dorothy Love Coates, Sly Stone, John Fogerty, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Al Green, Ann Peebles, George Clinton, Gil Scott-Heron, Tupac Shakur, Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Kirk Franklin--all these and scores m ore get good ink. But A Change Is Gonna Come is for all its data a very readable book. Werner writes with verve, with a fine sense of telling anecdote, and with occasional unintrusive first-person observations. Sometimes the rhetoric seems forced and artificial--a segment ends with, "I second that emotion"; a citation of Lauryn Hill is capped with, "The ball's in your court, gangstas." There is also a regrettable tendency to first-name certain esteemed figures--Mahalia, Brother Ray, Miles, Donny [Hathaway], Ronnie [Spector], Dot [Dorothy Love Coates]--suggesting an intimacy that doesn't ring true.
Such missteps, however, are surprisingly rare. A Change Is Gonna Come is on balance a very impressive study. For its scale, for its detail, for its close attention to musics all too often attacked (rap) or dismissed (disco, funk), for the coherent passion of its argument--for all these virtues Werner's book deserves its prominence and its praise.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cochran, Robert. "A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America." African American Review, vol. 34, no. 4, 2000, p. 713. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA70434341&it=r&asid=09a5dadff77d34812c944592fc00e96d. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "an intellectual and emotional depth often missing in contemporary discussions of what American music is as art, science, and social/spiritual force. As both readers and lovers of music in all of its dimensions, we owe Craig Werner a great debt for writing about its mysteries and realities with the passion, clarity, and knowledge that the music so richly deserves."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A70434341
A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America
Kofi Natambu
34.4 (Winter 2000): p715.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 African American Review
http://aar.slu.edu/
Craig Werner. A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America. New York: Plume, 1999. 430 pp. $19.95.
A narrow fixation on the examination of the individual musical celebrity as cultural icon and economic commodity has dominated most writing on American music for the past two decades. Rarely (and this is especially true since 1980) has the critical or analytical focus been on the social and historical context of the music itself as it reflected or was influenced by the events and cultural circumstances that it emerged from. In fact it is characteristic of a great number of texts to separate and isolate form from content to such a degree that all too often we lose sight of exactly why a specific musical style or expression became significant in the first place.
As a result very few books by music historians and critics wind up saying anything particularly insightful or even interesting about why music matters beyond the academic or strictly commercial concerns of musicologists and music industry executives (and their advertising partners in mass media). This is why it was such a profoundly satisfying pleasure to read a new book by Craig Werner entitled A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America. Werner, a professor of African-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he teaches music and cultural history, has mastered the extremely difficult art of writing about music as both an aesthetic and social force that conveys, implies, symbolizes, and represents ideas as well as emotions, but without reducing its complexities and ambiguities to merely didactic categories.
This precise attention to historical nuance as well as cross-cultural dynamics and traditions permeates Werner's lucid analysis of the exceedingly rich and hybrid reality of American music in all of its dimensions from Gospel, Jazz, and the Blues to Rock and Roll and Hip Hop. This has allowed Werner's text to enter the elite pantheon of truly great books in the genre. Such seminal texts as Blues People (1963) and Black Music (1968) by the legendary poet, playwright, critic, and activist Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), as well as such major and provocative books as Mystery Train (1975) by music critic and cultural historian Greil Marcus, Peter Gurainick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (1986), Nelson George's acclaimed works Where Did Our Love Go?: The Rise & Fall of the Motown Sound (1985) and The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1989), and Shadow & Act (1964) by the late novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison have given us new insights into what makes music such a central f orce in our lives.
As in these texts, Werner keeps his laser-like eye focused on what the music means to the people who both play and listen to it. What he discovers is nothing less than the fundamental hopes, desires, fears, dreams, fantasies, and aspirations of Americans during the twentieth century acting themselves out in great sonic dramas of melodic lyricism, rhythmic intensity, and harmonic dynamism, as well as atonality and pure noise elements. And what a grand panorama of musical styles and pageantry it is! Werner reminds us that the twentieth century would be completely unintelligible without the monumental contributions of such inspiring artists as Mahalia Jackson, Robert Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, B. B. King, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Sam Cooke, Howlin' Wolf, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone, Eric Dolphy, Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie, George Clinton, Bob Marley, Al Green, Stevie Wonder , Chuck Berry, (the Artist formerly known as) Prince, Gil Scott-Heron, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Curtis Mayfield, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Donny Hathaway, Cassandra Wilson, Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, Ice Cube, Run-DMC, KRS-one, etc. Theyre all here, plus a multitude of others in a dense yet highly accessible tome of some 400 pages that feverishly examines the endless links among music, politics, history, literature, visual art, philosophy, religion, and social/cultural reality over the past five decades.
What Werner brings to this ever fascinating narrative is a great knowledge and appreciation of precisely how such major historical events as the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, as well as the Vietnam War, the rise of the Feminist and Gay/Lesbian movements, and the multiple political assassinations of the 1960s were pivotal to understanding how music played such a significant role in our consciousness of the meaning of these events. He also makes this particular legacy of music-making history more intelligible, and thus useful; for analysis and cultural/political activism continue down to this very moment, in which the various musical movements of the past twenty-five years (e.g., Disco, Punk, Reggae, New Wave, Funk, and Hip Hop) are strictly predicated on, and draw their fundamental strength and energy from, the social/political context of their various cultural origins.
Thus a profound understanding of how the pervasive force and influence/impact of Reaganism played a major role in our collective perceptions of what the stakes were (and are) in late twentieth-century American culture becomes an essential element in identifying what a widely diverse group of musicians, composers, and singers were directly and indirectly responding to in the musical stances and expressions of our time.
This intimate awareness of how and why music informs and shapes our consciousness of history and society in terms of the ongoing battles over the meaning of the categories of race, class, and gender gives Werner's work an intellectual and emotional depth often missing in contemporary discussions of what American music is as art, science, and social/spiritual force. As both readers and lovers of music in all of its dimensions, we owe Craig Werner a great debt for writing about its mysteries and realities with the passion, clarity, and knowledge that the music so richly deserves.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Natambu, Kofi. "A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America." African American Review, vol. 34, no. 4, 2000, p. 715. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA70451861&it=r&asid=b8a7010b94673cab2add45988d5f9180. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "Readers should approach with caution any book that champions itself as the definitive view of black popular music. Yet A Change Is Gonna Come, though not a comprehensive account, is extraordinarily far-reaching. It is also highly accessible and would be suitable for an introductory course in African American music and culture."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A70451861
A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America
MARK ANTHONY NEAL
56.4 (June 2000): p958.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 Music Library Association, Inc.
http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org
A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America. By Craig Werner. New York: Plume, 1998. [xviii, 430 P. ISBN 0-452-28065-6. $19.95 (pbk.).]
Nearly forty years have passed since the publication of Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), Imamu Amiri Baraka's groundbreaking and provocative study of black music. A blueprint for the polemics that surrounded the emergence of black studies in the late sixties and early seventies, Baraka's book was also the first significant scholarly study of black music that was informed by the realities of the African American experience. Since then, with the mainstream acceptance of both African American and cultural studies, there have been numerous studies of black popular music, including notable publications by Rob Bowman (Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records [New York: Schirmer Books, 19971) and Brian Ward (Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Block Consciousness, and Race [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998]). Craig Werner's A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America is a welcome a nd accessible new study of a cultural form that has dominated popular expression in the United States since the end of World War II.
Many of the earlier explorations of black popular music have failed to consider the broader contexts needed to represent fully the dynamics of black music in the United States. The classic examples are those studies that have rendered the progenitors of black music as "primitive" geniuses whose connections with the "natural" world provided the conduit for Western culture to explore its physical and sexual inhibitions. Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro" (in Mailer, Advertisements for Myself [New York: Putnam, 1959], 337-58) comes to mind as an example of this approach. In addition, there has been a proclivity among mainstream music critics to examine black popular music, particularly individual artists and groups, solely within the context of mainstream popular music, without considering the obvious influence of the black music tradition itself. The mainstream critical establishment's genuflection toward Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, and George Clinton, for example, rarely includes mention of the formidab le impact of blues or honky-tonk on African American life and culture as it informs the music of these artists.
Werner, a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, is a serious student of popular music and its broad influences; his other recent books are Playing the Changes: From Afro-modernism to the Jazz Impulse (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994) and Up around the Bend: The Oral History of Credence Clearwater Revival (New York: Spike, 1997). What he is interested in even more than the music itself is its capacity to change society. His title, of course, is borrowed from the late Sam Cooke, whose song "A Change Is Gonna Come" was released posthumously after his murder in December 1964 (Shake, RCA LPM 3367, 1965). The title pays homage not only to the artist who perhaps best embodied America's integrationist project, but also to the tragedies, joys, and hopes associated with that project and to the role of black popular music in articulating those emotions. This is not to suggest that Werner reduces black folks to the emotional guidepost for an America bent on racial guilt, but that African Americans, via their music, were best positioned to articulate the shortcomings and failures of American democracy.
Werner chronicles the past forty years of black popular music in loose chronological order. The text is organized around five major sections containing sixty-five small chapters. Though the latter may at first strike the reader as "drive-by" critiques that rarely bring breadth or depth to their subject matter, they allow Werner passionately to examine many of the integral parts that form the whole without having to make the de rigueur theoretical interconnections between themes and ideas that have come to represent cultural studies.
Werner suggests that black popular music is governed by three essential "impulses" that inform the African American world-view. The first is the gospel impulse--the belief that "life's burdens can be transformed into hope, salvation, and the promise of redemption" (p. [27]). The second is the blues impulse, a "process [that] consists of (1) fingering the jagged grain of your brutal experience; (2) finding a near-tragic, near-comic voice to express that experience; and (3) reaffirming your existence" (p. [69]). The third is the jazz impulse, a "redefinition" that continually reworks the concept of identity as an individual, a member of a community, and a part of a larger tradition. As useful as these concepts may be, some may find them rather kitschy, though they quite adequately reflect the black community of the late fifties and sixties. It is perhaps telling that Werner includes his description of these themes in the chapters that focus on the sixties and the civil-rights movement. Later chapters document the challenges that eroded them, though Werner identifies music well into the nineties--by both black and white artists--that fits firmly into his framework.
At times, Werner himself appears to be a member of the mainstream audiences he portrays throughout the book. Such is the case in his touching chapter on Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and the Monterey Festival in 1967; Redding, Werner suggests, may have been a better agent for racial understanding than the much more popular Hendrix: "Every time I look out my front window, I see Lake Monona, where Otis died. Whenever I play his great songs ... I wonder whether Otis might have been able to bring the hippies, my people, into a deeper understanding of the gospel impulse" (p. 94). Elsewhere, Werner is very much the progressive cultural historian, as in his informative chapter "God Love Sex: Disco and the Gospel Impulse," which documents the emergence of disco and the Stonewall riots of 1969. He is perhaps at his best when he allows his wide-ranging taste in popular music to frame his critique of black music.
Readers should approach with caution any book that champions itself as the definitive view of black popular music. Yet A Change Is Gonna Come, though not a comprehensive account, is extraordinarily far-reaching. It is also highly accessible and would be suitable for an introductory course in African American music and culture.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
NEAL, MARK ANTHONY. "A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America." Notes, vol. 56, no. 4, 2000, p. 958. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA63859306&it=r&asid=21bdcc3e88f879ff5e47a9765c6b7af0. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "Werner ... is a meticulous expositor of the relationship between African American culture and its canonical modernist literature, from Charles Chesnutt and the revised plantation tradition to August Wilson and neoclassicism."
"Werner's musicological aesthetic of African American literature brilliantly participates in--plays a change on, if you will--the ensemble of critical voices initiated by Du Bois about the importance of black musical aesthetics for "engag[ing] basic (post)modernist concerns" of life and literature."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A63859306
Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse
Maurice Wallace
38.1 (Spring 1997): p198.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1997 University of Wisconsin Press
Craig Hansen Werner, Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994. xxvi + 341 pp. $39.95.
In 1969 writer-critic Albert Murray wrote in his crucial book The Omni-Americans, "There are white Americans so to speak and black Americans. But . . . the white people are not really white, and . . . black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another."(1) Sandra Adell's Double-Consciousness/ Double Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature and Craig Hansen Werner's Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse probe deeply and constructively into the dialogic relations between black and white, Afrocentric and Eurocentric articulations of the literary in modern and postmodern periods of thought. Where Adell is concerned to test the limits of critical "double-consciousness" (the double bind) in black literature and literary theory, on the one hand, Werner, on the other, is a meticulous expositor of the relationship between African American culture and its canonical modernist literature, from Charles Chesnutt and the revised plantation tradition to August Wilson and neoclassicism.
Double-Consciousness/Double Bind takes its cue from the white (Western) and black double-voicedness of modern black critical practice implicit, for example, in the "intersection. . . constructed by virtue of [the] name" (3) of Black Aesthetic criticism of the 1960s. This dual inheritance in black literary criticism emerges most conspicuously, according to Adell, with W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903, although in 1892, not many years prior to Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Anna Julia Cooper published "what is arguably the first critical essay on literature published by a black American, 'One Phase of American Literature'" (4), which owed itself to a similar discursive hybridity. Adell demonstrates that Du Bois's enduring metaphysics of "double-consciousness," the governing hermeneutic of Double-Consciousness/Double Bind, emerges crucially from his intellectual engagement with the idealist traditions of German philosophy, namely Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. "The Souls of Black Folk: Reading Across the Color Line," the first chapter in Adell's study, may, however, prove to be less memorable as "the first time anyone has shown in detail how [Du Bois's] notion of 'double-consciousness' emerges from the philosophy of Hegel as . . . articulated in the Phenomenology of Spirit" (8) than as an example of self-reflexive criticism that demonstrates, in its exposition of Du Bois's Hegelianism, the deeply complex, even tricky work of (re)constructing the omnicritical genealogy which is Adell's own double bind. Like the dilemma faced by poststructuralists committed to theorizing African American literature (among whom Adell takes Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, and Robert Stepto to be most representative), "The Souls of Black Folk: Reading Across the Color Line" is most instructive when, paradoxically, it shows itself mired in the textual system that she observes Du Bois, by necessity, writing through. Interestingly, Adell is, in this connection, less severe on Du Bois than she is on Gates and Baker, whom she faults for their efforts to isolate an "`authentic' Afro-American literary tradition grounded in the black vernacular" tradition which yet relies on "the forms of language inherited from the master's class" rather than the black vernacular culture itself (120, 121). But chapter 5, "The Crisis in Black American Literary Criticism and the Postmodern Cures of Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.," would seem to reveal a theory and methodology in the critical practices of Gates's The Signifying Monkey and Baker's Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature that may be far less removed from Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk than their temporal distance suggests. (Adell's use of both men's full and familial names in her chapter title is brilliantly, if brutally, signifyin(g) in that definitively black sense of the word laid out by Gates. It announces, sardonically, a cousinly familiarity which sees beneath professional pretenses. Don't you get too biggity, boys. I know your Mamas!)
Though, in my judgment, Adell is unduly critical of Gates and Stepto, her challenges to Baker are among this book's most erudite moments. Her rereading of the musical epigraphs which preface each chapter in Souls corrects Baker's assertion that the epigraphic juxtaposition of the Sorrow Songs alongside those poetic or musical fragments that represent the high European arts "displace[s] or deconstruct[s] what he calls Western expressive culture" (26). Convincingly, Adell instead argues that the Sorrow Songs make "no such intervention" into the primacy of Western expressive culture in Du Bois's cultural critique; Du Bois "merely foregrounds the very complex system of interrelationships that makes up his (con)textual field" (27). Here Adell's reading of Du Bois is, in the context of the book's greater point, unmatched. On Baker, as later chapters reveal, Adell is unrelenting. And she avoids the fatal lapses of argumentation in Joyce Anne Joyce's infamous vilification of Baker and Gates in 1987, "The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism."(2) "Writing across Lacanian discourse" (60) here and a vaguely Marxist feminism there, Adell understands, where Joyce did not, that she is "necessarily . . . traversed--crisscrossed--by [the] discourses" (130) that jeopardize the "authenticity" of Baker's work ("Theoretically . . . my 'stand' makes me vulnerable to--or . . . obliterates me from--the same kinds of criticisms I've made against [Baker and Gates], for hasn't the pot once again called the kettle black?" [130]).
While discussions of the problems of African American literary criticism under poststructuralism frame Adell's book at the introduction and final chapter, the three intervening chapters on Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire, Richard Wright and Maya Angelou, and black feminist literary theory merit mention here. Unlike the archaeology of philosophical influence that Adell's Du Bois chapter represents, the metaphysical roots of Negritude a la Senghor and Cesaire have been discussed extensively (by Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Abiola Irele, Janet Vaillant, Sunday Anozie, and Christopher Miller, for example). "Reading/Writing Negritude: Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire," therefore, would seem, for Adell, a rather academic recontextualization of the problems and paradoxes of philosophical dialogism between white Western traditions and African ones (which may reflect, in the case of Negritude, a more minimal distance between Senghor and Heidegger, say, or Cesaire and Husserl, than that which obtained between Du Bois and Hegel and Heidegger). Nevertheless, Adell is wise to raise the stakes somewhat by problematizing, however briefly, the critical relation between black traditions, the African and the African American specifically, between Senghor and Richard Wright, with the figure of Du Bois--true to this book's design--mediating.
Perhaps Adell's most expert reading of the black literary text is that of Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It is a nuanced, familiarly Freudian reading which reminds we who teach twentieth-century African American literature and poetry that Angelou's book contains some of the most evocative, brutal, and poignant scenes in contemporary American literature, scenes which lend themselves easily, as Adell shows, to the critical tugging of race, gender, and psychoanalysis. However satisfying Adell's treatment of Angelou, I concede a certain oddness about its place in a book that is otherwise about criticism, not of it. For those of us who have grown weary of the inordinate, knee-jerk attention to Toni Morrison by liberal white critics especially, however, this peculiarity is of no matter.
Chapter 4, "Seeking the Other Women of (Black) Feminist Literary Critical and Theoretical Discourses," answers, happily, what has been, for this reader, one of the most vexing questions about (post)modern black feminist thought: why has "womanism," as a lexical and ideological corrective to the culturally exclusive significations of "feminism," lost currency (or maybe only its lexical appeal) in black feminist discourse? This chapter's belabored conference accounts notwithstanding, Adell suggests that the favored term "black feminism" bespeaks the problem of "ideological thinking" (103) insidiously, almost imperceptibly, inherited by women of color in the West, which "risk[s] practicing its own forms of [cultural, non-Western] exclusion" (92). Lest the reader be misled, Adell is not antifeminist, as some might misconstrue (at one point she quotes Angelou saying, "I'd be stupid not to be on my own side"). Her challenges to (black) feminism are fair and, given the double-consciousness/double bind thesis of this work, unavoidable. What's more, Adell shows that one does not have to be a polemicist to issue challenges.
If, as Keneth Kinnamon describes it on the book jacket, Double-Consciousness/Double Bind strikes one as irreverently "fearless" at times, part 1 of Craig Werner's Playing the Changes suffers from a distracting defensiveness about its relationship to its "high" theoretical debts. These words frustrate Werner's study before it fully begins: "[B]efore I begin . . . an anecdote explaining a certain hostility toward the theoretical enterprise that may emerge throughout this study . . . . Aesthetic isolation mocks my populist soul" (3-4). Nevertheless, Werner is stronger, more poised and in his element in parts 2 and 3, so as to make Playing the Changes an admirable, indeed indispensable work.
I don't want to exaggerate the effect of Playing the Changes. But it is readily apparent that Werner would rather not admit (in the text proper) how deeply indebted he is to Robert Stepto's seminal work From Behind the Veil in light of Stepto's reputation as, variously, "black poststructuralist," "(new) black formalist," and "reconstructionist"--all designations intended to call into question, though to varying degrees, an "authentic" commitment to the study of black literature. Werner's formulation of the "narrative of endurance," however--the name he gives to that type of Faulknerian narrative that focuses on a fairly static black protagonist, "the `enduring saint,' who is physically enslaved but spiritually free" (30)--is derived (Werner cannot avoid admitting) directly from Stepto's so-called poststructuralist, new formalist, reconstructionist enterprise in From Behind the Veil, the epistemological underpinnings of which Werner claims, in theory, to hold "a certain hostility toward." On the one hand, Werner speaks of "the theoretical dimensions of Playing the Changes" (xviii), while positing his project, in the next breath, "as a series of responses to (as opposed to theoretical interrogations of) a variety of [critical calls]," black and white (xix). This is the tension, the self-conflicted resistance to "theory," absent from Adell's criticism, that vexes part 1, "Afro-Modernist Dialogues." Although Werner's discussion "The Brier Patch as (Post)modernist Myth: Morrison, Barthes, and Tar Baby As-Is" seems little affected by the dilemma (Roland Barthes and Stephen Henderson are managed equally well and with even profit), how much more revelatory could The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka be to understanding the Afromodernist sensibility if Werner pursued the logic behind those points in Baraka's autobiography where "Baraka loses his grounding and relies on theoretical ideological terms that recall the solipsistic abstraction of his Village period" (100), rather than dismissing them as Barakan lapses in what "should be" the voice of one "firmly grounded in, and . . . in advance of, the political and expressive realities of its time" (100)?
However unflattering Werner's critical self-consciousness in part 1, I hasten now to say that virtually all of my early, hopeful expectations of Werner were realized in part 2, "Studies in African-American Poetics," and part 3, "Playing the Changes: Gospel, Blues, Jazz." Werner not only recovers some of the most crucial, if lesser known, writers of Afro-modernism, including Melvin Tolson, Ed Bullins, Etheridge Knight, and Henry Dumas, but his close readings of Knight's poetry, the Black Arts aesthetic of Dumas, and the prosody of Tolson's Harlem Gallery are nothing if not soundly and expertly rendered. Black women writers (Gwendolyn Brooks and Audre Lorde in part 2, Morrison in parts 1 and 3), more commonly known than Tolson, Bullins, Knight, and Dumas, are no less crucial to Werner as representatives of the Afromodernist impulse and receive such space in his book as Stepto's critics say should have been constructed in his.
As this book's purpose is, in part, to apprehend the "complexities of innovative Afro-American texts" (xvii) of the (post)modernist period, "Playing the Changes: Gospel, Blues, Jazz" is, to my mind, Werner's most important section. Werner's musicological aesthetic of African American literature brilliantly participates in--plays a change on, if you will--the ensemble of critical voices initiated by Du Bois about the importance of black musical aesthetics for "engag[ing] basic (post)modernist concerns" of life and literature, "including the difficulty of defining, or even experiencing, the self; the fragmentation of public discourse; and the problematic meaning of tradition" (xvii). Situating a "gospel impulse" inventively between that of the blues and jazz on the cultural continuum of modern black expressive sensibilities, Werner's is only the most recent "(re)phrasing" of this musicological study of African American culture.
It is precisely "the problematic meaning of tradition" for black writers (and white writers alike, if Werner's Faulkner is any indication) that makes Double-Consciousness/Double Bind and Playing the Changes seem like two cuts from the same critical cloth. Both bring "two superficially disparate traditions: European-American (post)modernism and African-American culture in both vernacular and 'high art' forms" into such close proximity that the "racialized dichotomy" implied by their erstwhile estrangement is, as Werner writes, "subvert[ed]" (xv). One only hopes that future studies of omnicriticism will recognize the double bind in truly dual terms and tell us in sustained fashion, and at long last, just how much "white" literature owes to "black" thought, anyway.
(1.) Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans. New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture (New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1969) 3.
(2.) Joyce Anne Joyce, "The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism." New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 18 (1987): 335-44.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wallace, Maurice. "Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse." Contemporary Literature, vol. 38, no. 1, 1997, p. 198+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA19369766&it=r&asid=083b64c972c2301b693e6541663a6b29. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A19369766
Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse
John Lowe
30.4 (Winter 1996): p678.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 African American Review
http://aar.slu.edu/
In 1922 James Weldon Johnson warned in his Book of American Negro Poetry that "the final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior. The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions."
Johnson's prescient pronouncement was both an assertion and a challenge. Cognizant, as few were at the time, of the amplitude and excellence of African American culture, he was troubled that it would constantly remain a light hid under a bushel basket.
Subsequently, other writers and intellectuals took it upon themselves to pick up the challenge - to add to the heritage, yes, but also to bring it to the attention of the rest of the nation. No one did more in this regard, perhaps, than the late Ralph Ellison, whose remarkable achievements in fiction, as well as literary and cultural criticism, were based both in a thorough knowledge of classic monuments of Western and, especially, modernist literature as well as in a comprehensive and loving appreciation of the Afrocentric tradition in American social and cultural life. His chief avenue of approach to this lode was the rich vein of African American music, particularly jazz, which contributed many metaphors and coinages to Ellison's critical lexicon.
Ellison's lead has found many echoes in critical discourse, and one of the most impressive has now appeared in the form of Craig Werner's learned, witty, and altogether refreshing analysis of the complex relationship between Eurocentric postmodernism and African American cultural formations, Playing the Changes. Without sounding a note of condemnation, Werner helps correct the recurring error of many postmodernist scholars who have ignored the important contributions African American culture has made to modernism and, now, postmodernism. Rediscovering these connections, Werner argues, helps recoup a "moral center," one that resituates scholarly discourse around values that support individual development and democracy. Conversely, however, he lingers over the intriguing differences as well, while delving deeper than virtually any preceding critic into the overlapping dialogues of jazz and letters. In this way, the book in some ways extends an argument developing recently in books such as Eric Lott's Love and Theft and Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations, which interrogate the contributions of African Americans to the construction of "whiteness" and "white" culture.
One problem does emerge early on, however. Werner quite rightly praises Robert Stepto's paradigm of ascent/immersion in African American letters (articulated in the landmark book From Behind the Veil) and selects it as a corollary to his own pairing of terms, linking ascent with modernism and immersion with Afrocentrism. While this formula, used throughout Playing the Changes, serves Werner well in many cases, it simplifies the cultural production done within each realm. Zora Neale Hurston would certainly have objected to this divorce of modernism from folk culture, as even a cursory reading of her "Characteristics of Negro Expression" and "Art and Such" reveals.
Werner groups the essays in the book around some intriguing concepts. The first, "Afro-Modernist Dialogues," moves us through the case for linking the two crucial paradigms of the title via four essays on, respectively, Charles Chesnutt, African American responses to Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Melvin Tolson. Each set of ruminations usefully employs a postmodern set of critical instruments in tandem with Afrocentric modes of reading. In the second part, "Studies in African-American Poetics," Werner moves to a consideration of the tensions between Eurocentric written and Afrocentric oral forms, the Black Arts Movement, and African American drama. The final section, "Playing the Changes: Gospel, Blues, Jazz," presents four concluding essays exploring the relation that exists between African American musical and literary aesthetics, especially as both fields generate/interact with a modernist mode. Major writers find new interpretations here, alongside readings of more recent artists and extended readings of unjustly ignored writers; Werner provides a fine take, for instance, on Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro, reminding us of her dazzling avant-garde daring.
The book begins, however, with a look at the "ancestors" of Afrocentric modernism. Like Sundquist (whose book apparently appeared after the completion of Werner's manuscript), Werner finds Charles Chesnutt to be a key figure in ur-formations of modernism, particularly in his complex literary use of masking strategies, which Werner rightly connects to devices in "Uncle Remus" tales that Joel Chandler Harris may not have fully understood. Werner's musings on Chesnutt are altogether too brief, however, and this proves true of many of the other writers Werner must necessarily scant in carrying out his encyclopedic agenda.
For Werner, the cultural production and criticism of writers and musicians who had "synthetic multicultural sensibilities" - such as Hughes, Hurston, Ellington, Brooks, Armstrong, and Ellison - have led, directly or indirectly, to many contemporary art forms such as rap and contemporary jazz, African American women's thought, Afrocentrism in its many guises, and the overriding question, which also preoccupies postmodernists, of how to "communicate visions of new possibilities - psychological, aesthetic, or political - to an increasing resistant audience." Werner concentrates his analysis on three varying strands of the musical tradition, which he calls the gospel, blues, and jazz impulses. All of these, Werner argues, are profoundly based in the overriding and African-inspired tradition of call and response, which he maps in some detail. Utilizing this self-fashioned "instrument," Werner is able to "play" a considerable number of changes himself, because he has read so widely, not just in African American "texts" of all sorts, but also in American and continental literatures that have profoundly influenced African American writing. His thoughtful and provocative chapter "Afro-American Responses to Faulkner," for example, displays an encyclopedic knowledge of the Mississippian's work, but also of the complex uses Faulkner makes of Afro-American culture, which in turn had their effect on subsequent writers within that tradition. Although some of Werner's arguments seem presentist, in the main they prove persuasive, especially as they culminate in a tribute to Ernest Gaines's acceptance and transcendence of Faulknerian concepts of race.
Werner's mastery of both African American literary traditions and postmodern theory pays a handsome dividend in his chapter on transitions and innovations in autobiography. His analysis of the life stories of Brooks, Delany, and Baraka skillfully shuttles between African and European modes and practices, offering convincing evidence not only of Werner's findings about autobiography, but of the efficacy of the book's broad purposes.
Similarly, Werner's extended exploration of Brooks's achievements in poetry profits from a rigorous application of metrics that is nonetheless coupled with a display of her Afrocentric manipulation of both prosody and subject. The method, as one might expect, works even better when applied to Melvin Tolson, perhaps the clearest example of African American postmodernism.
The book concludes with four impressive chapters on the acknowledged masters Wright and Baldwin, juxtaposing them with treatments of two contemporary writers, August Wilson and Leon Forrest. Dealing primarily with Native Son, a masterpiece but nevertheless a vexed text within the canon, Werner usefully rehearses the African American engagement with modernism, carefully situating Bigger Thomas at the crossroads of modernist alienation and blues-based consciousness; the metaphysics of this position receives precise delineation, especially in terms of Bigger's impasse with Max. Werner also considers the limitations of Wright's attitude toward the blues and folk culture, and clears away several of the myths that have attended this problematic aspect of the writer's stance toward African American culture as a whole. Baldwin, by contrast, finds placement in a gospel impulse; for Werner, this writer's fate was determined by a fixation on salvation, a stance inculcated in him while still a child in his father's storefront church. In the long run, however, this aspect of Baldwin has, in combination with various social changes, led to a decline in Baldwin's reputation, which Werner's readings could help reverse, particularly in his astute analysis of the little-read Just Above My Head. Playing the Changes will also inform many readers for the first time, and remind others forcefully, of the power and originality of the Chicago Renaissance, which receives a cogent presentation as part of Werner's foregrounding of his discussion of Leon Forrest.
Many of the book's chapters appeared earlier as articles or sections of books; although they have clearly been reworked to eliminate tell-tale seams, one does find various threads reappearing without need, such as the many references to the same points in Ellison and Baraka. Still, Playing the Changes represents much more than a hasty assemblage of a distinguished critic's various takes on any number of subjects; to his credit, Werner has for many years repeatedly grappled with the key questions announced in his introduction, and so the essays interrelate and cumulatively develop a unified point of view. The early chapters, for instance, prepare one for a more intense reading of Werner's superb essay on Roland Barthes and Toni Morrison's Tar Baby than one would have reading it separately, as was the case when it first appeared.
In the course of this study, Craig Werner takes us back to many of the key moments in African American literary discourse, when both converging events and individual gambles by writers resulted in the "changing same." The Black Arts Movement, the African American stage, and the upheavals and battles among theorists and supposed "non-theorists" all find reflection (of both kinds) here. Throughout his discussions, Werner seems constantly to look for common denominators, bridges, and healing gestures, particularly when addressing ongoing controversies. God knows we can use such work, and other critics seem to be moving in this direction too. Still, at times it seems Werner doth strain too much. Putting Ron Karenga and Ralph Ellison on the same frequency, for instance, takes things rather far.
There are a few irritating aspects to the book. There are no footnotes, so everything gets loaded into the text proper, and occasionally a key quote, such as a long one from Alan Nadel on p. xix, has no reference in the bibliography. At times Werner introduces important matters, briefly comments, and then rushes on to another example without doing justice to the topic he has raised (for instance, in his provocative but frustratingly truncated treatment of Leon Forrest's work). Similarly, Werner's scatter-shot "Epilogue" reaches out to gather up the myriad strands of postmodern Diasporan culture, particularly its musical manifestations, which will inevitably be transformed, Werner tells us, into literature. The payoff to this approach, of course, is the amazing sweep and panorama of the book, which provides the kind of "big-picture" approach to this complex culture that we always need but don't always get. If Werner therefore sometimes seems to be teasing us with fragmentary analysis, he is also pointing the way. Of course another way to put it is that we would anticipate that this amazingly ambitious book would end in a powerful "call" of its own. Now it's up to us to respond.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lowe, John. "Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse." African American Review, vol. 30, no. 4, 1996, p. 678+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA19420319&it=r&asid=ecef0b8d763114e45284d5fba43c6336. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "an informative and 'reader friendly' survey."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A19420319
A Change Is Gonna Come
(Apr. 2006):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
A Change Is Gonna Come
Craig Werner
University of Michigan Press
839 Greene St, Ann Arbor, MI 48104
0472031473 $22.95 press.umich.com
A newly revised, expanded, and updated edition, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, And The Soul Of America by Craig Werner (Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin) is an informative and "reader friendly" survey of forty years worth of music and events in African-American history which played such an influential role in shaping the path of the American popular culture. Professor Werner manages to present an engaging and knowledgeable perspective of Afro-American music's intimate connection with its composers, performers, and audiences, while carving a vivid picture of the political credit it deserves. Very strongly recommended for Black Studies, Music History, and American Popular Culture library collections, A Change Is Gonna Come is both the perfect scholarly reference and an ideal nostalgic documentation of the history of African-American influence upon their own ethnic musical traditions.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Change Is Gonna Come." Internet Bookwatch, Apr. 2006. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA146062168&it=r&asid=2d0df7c7cbb5408393701b4de79fb785. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "Werner's book suffers only from its lack of firsthand interviews, only Mayfield talked to Werner, in 1997. But he draws from a variety of sources to portray not only three great talents but an era and its lingering effects on the nation."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A146062168
Riding The Soul Train
(Apr. 18, 2004): Opinion and Editorial: p4.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 The Tampa Tribune. The Tampa Tribune
http://www.tampatrib.com
Sunday April 18, 2004
Section COMMENTARY
Page 4
Riding The Soul Train
HIGHER GROUND: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield And The Rise And Fall Of American Soul. By Craig Werner. Crown. 352 pages. $24.
By CURTIS ROSS
cross@tampatrib.com
Craig Werner does an admirable and entertaining job of weaving together cultural and social analysis in "Higher Ground," which surveys the careers of three R&B giants as well as charting the successes and setbacks of the U.S. Civil Rights movement.
Werner chose these particular soul music icons because all three grew up in the northern United States, away from the Jim Crow laws of the South. But, as Werner points out, racism in the North, though less institutionalized, was just as ingrained.
Werner explores the links of Wonder, Franklin and Mayfield with the church , traditionally a source of not only spiritual but social and political power for black America , and with the Civil Rights movement. Those ties are very individual and reflect the artists' backgrounds to foreshadow the direction of their later music.
Franklin has the strongest church ties. Her father was a prominent Detroit minister. Visitors to his home included civil rights leaders and gospel music greats. It is Mayfield's music, though, that exhibits the strongest gospel influence and whose songs, such as "People Get Ready" and "We're a Winner," became anthems for the civil rights movement.
Wonder is the spiritual wild card here. Although he too grew up singing in the church choir, his spiritual leanings, as expressed in his music, tended toward post-hippie, new age-type sentiments.
Paths To Greatness
The careers of each took divergent paths as well. Mayfield proved the most independent-minded early on, penning hits for his group, The Impressions, and later his own well-received solo albums. He also proved prescient business-wise, retaining control of his publishing and forming his own record label, Curtom.
Franklin's early music was at the mercy of Columbia Records, which attempted to groom her as a jazz and pop standards singer. It was only when she signed with R&B-orientated Atlantic Records that her inner musical voice came forth.
Wonder was Motown's blind boy genius, scoring a hit at 12 years old with "Fingertips, Part 2." But as he grew, he chafed at the label's assembly-line approach to music-making. When he reached 21, Wonder voided his contract, re-signing only when he was guaranteed artistic freedom.
Werner traces the three career arcs from peaks to later, frustrating valleys. He also offers pointed commentary about black music's loss of contact with its spiritual and social elements, as evidenced through the rise of pleasure-seeking disco and materialistic gangsta rap.
He's equally adamant about the way the promises of the civil rights movement were subverted, pointing the finger not only at obvious targets (Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley, the conservative-led backlash of the early 1980s) but at blacks who gained political power by buying into racist systems, and who were unwilling to surrender it for the greater good.
As the movement faded, so did the musical greatness of all three. By the mid-1980s, Wonder was churning out pap such as "I Just Called to Say I Love You" and Franklin was foundering artistically through a series of mismatched producers and duet partners.
Mayfield's story is the most heroic and heartbreaking. After a 1990 accident left him a quadriplegic, he managed to create one final album, 1996's "New World Order," before his death in 1999.
Werner's book suffers only from its lack of firsthand interviews , only Mayfield talked to Werner, in 1997. But he draws from a variety of sources to portray not only three great talents but an era and its lingering effects on the nation.
Curtis Ross writes about pop music for the Tribune.
Copyright 2004, The Tampa Tribune and may not be republished without permission. E-mail library@tampatrib.com
CAPTION(S): No Art
CURTIS ROSS
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Riding The Soul Train." Tampa Tribune [Tampa, FL], 18 Apr. 2004, p. 4. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA115549287&it=r&asid=d1351409b1069b912200146378f679eb. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A115549287
QUOTED: "No single book could capture that many Vietnams, or the multitude of voices needed to describe them, any more than you could squeeze that many singers onto a single 45 RPM record or write a song to evoke all of their experiences. But the remarkable achievement of Bradley and Werner’s We Gotta Get Out of This Place is how close they’ve come to making that many voices of Vietnam veterans heard."
We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War by Doug Bradley and Craig Werner
By Steve Nathans-Kelly | November 9, 2015 | 2:59pm
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We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War by Doug Bradley and Craig Werner
The cultural impact of influential Vietnam-themed films like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July and Good Morning Vietnam is so pervasive that the soundtracks of those movies—all of which made ample use of music from the Vietnam era—have arguably entrenched themselves as the de facto soundtrack of the war.
GetOutofThisPlaceProper.jpgWhen Francis Ford Coppola laid The Doors’ stark and spooky “The End” over rotor-whirring helicopters and Vietnamese jungles ablaze, he not only set the tone for his impressionistic film; he made the song and the war virtually inseparable in the minds of moviegoers whose strongest impressions of the war were formed as they absorbed Coppola’s film. Likewise, when Barry Levinson paired Louis Armstrong’s dreamy “What a Wonderful World” with a montage of police brutality and villages being bombed in Good Morning Vietnam, his choice was so effective that in addition to creating a perhaps permanent imagined connection between the song and the war, he virtually ensured that “What a Wonderful World” would be used just as contrapuntally in TV commercials for years to come.
The Vietnam War looms so large in the collective imaginations of Americans of several generations that most of us tend to think of the music of the war as the music that evokes it for us. In their thoroughly researched, powerfully written and insightful new book, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner frame the question of which songs defined the Vietnam era in much less voyeuristic terms. Weaving together the testimony and reminiscences of a broad range of veterans—drawing on both the authors’ extensive and probing interviews and a host of poignant memoirs—Bradley and Werner explore the music that made Vietnam “the rock ’n’ roll war” through the recollections of those who fought the war and survived it.
Fascinatingly, Bradley and Werner investigate the mechanics of how music featured so prominently in the soldiers’ experience in Vietnam, and how music sometimes united and often exposed deep and contentious divisions between soldiers of different racial and regional backgrounds. Perhaps most fascinatingly of all, We Gotta Get Out of This Place demonstrates how the music that found its way into the lives of the men and women who fought the war changed as the war dragged on, reflecting the dramatic changes “back in the world.”
Several years back, when Bradley and Werner took up the oral history project that became We Gotta Get Out of This Place, the authors envisioned that its centerpiece would be a “Vietnam Vets’ Top 20.” As they interviewed more and more veterans, it quickly became clear that no static set of 20 songs would accurately represent the story that was emerging—and that 200 or 2,000 songs might not, either. It wasn’t just the range of songs that were popping up in the vets’ recollections as the breadth of experience associated with those songs. And if a broad swath of vets couldn’t agree on a song such as the Animals’ defiant working-class anthem “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” Nancy Sinatra’s ever-popular “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s redoubtable “Fortunate Son,” Peter, Paul & Mary’s wrenching “Leaving on a Jet Plane” or even Country Joe & the Fish’s anti-authoritarian, pro-soldier “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” (with its unforgettable “It’s one-two-three, what are we fighting for?” chorus), those records couldn’t begin to represent the range of songs that mattered to soldiers fighting the war or the reasons they did.
If Bradley and Werner had attempted to build their book around a 20-song list, they would have had a much harder time trying to capture how profoundly the music that made its way to Vietnam changed between the early years of America’s involvement in the war from the 1961-1964 to the fall of Saigon in 1975. It’s staggering to consider the cultural sea changes that separated the military advisors and volunteers of the early 1960s, whose musical tastes might have run from Pat Boone to Tony Bennett to Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets,” to the disillusioned draftees of the early 1970s, who arrived steeped in a youth culture defined by the escalating war at home and joined an increasingly aimless war in Vietnam.
As Bradley and Werner point out, the military’s eventual surrender to the influence of popular music changed dramatically in that period, as reflected by the increasing rock-and-soul-friendliness of Armed Forces Radio Vietnam (which for years had restricted its programming to classical music and pop of the blandest sort, as depicted in Good Morning Vietnam). During the later years of the war, dissension in the ranks drove the military to initiate a policy of “hip militarism” to make army life more recreational and palatable as a way of warding off mutiny without addressing its root causes. A key part of “hip militarism” was opening the doors to rock and soul music, antiwar and Black Power sentiments and all.
“Maybe the soldiers were benefitting from the new hip militarism,” Bradley and Werner write, “but they were still in Vietnam and there was still a war going on. Just as there were riots back home, there was racism in Vietnam; just as there were drugs back in the world, there were drugs in-country too. Amid all this mayhem, music could be a balm, an inspiration, and an ironic commentary, sometimes all three at once.”
Naturally, the music that soldiers gravitated to in Vietnam didn’t simply reflect the war or their attitudes toward it, but who they were and where they came from. The sharply divergent musical tastes of soldiers of different racial and ethnic backgrounds is a key part of the story Bradley and Werner tell in We Gotta Get Out of This Place, and one way that using music to gain a deeper and richer understanding of the soldiers’ experience proves most effective. While it’s something of an oversimplification to say that the white guys favored country and western, the black guys preferred soul and pot-smoking Hendrix fans of both races met in the middle, much of the story involves such basic and unshakable differences in the black and white working-class cultures that clashed in Vietnam. But to suggest that the musical differences and resulting (often violent) conflicts were just a black-and-white thing ignores the voices of Latino and Native American soldiers who fought in the war—and who chime in with some of this oral history’s most compelling narrative “Solos.”
Perhaps the most surprising musical connection in the book comes from Chicagoan marine Rick Berg. Mostly, Berg recalls getting stoned and listening to psychedelic albums like the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request. But he also describes listening to a record by “soft hippie” folksinger Judy Collins, which included her rendition of “Poor People of Paris” from the 1963 Peter Weiss play Marat Sade. “A while later I recognized the irony to that,” Berg recalls. “I’m listening to French revolutionary songs. The Viet Cong gave me my first lesson in Marxism, and I had the soundtrack… I figured it out in a hole one day. The VC are fighting for poor people; the Vietnamese are poor; I’m poor; I’m on the wrong side.”
Perhaps what’s most striking about Bradley and Werner’s book is its balance, and the feeling for nuance that comes through in their writing and the vets’ testimony they share. We Gotta Get Out of This Place is by no means an exclusively hawk or dove’s book. Ambivalence abounds in nearly every “Solo,” in individual soldiers’ experiences and the stranger-than-fiction adventures of Vietnam pirate radio legend Dave Rabbit, and the fascinating recollections of Filipino guitarist Edgar Acosta, whose career in music began with gigs on U.S. bases in Vietnam.
We Gotta Get Out of This Place concludes, appropriately enough, with a revealing and often painful discussion of the travails of Vietnam vets in the 40 years since the war’s end. The last chapter’s testimony captures how difficult the journey back to the world proved for so many, as they returned to find the country they served distancing itself from them in the shamed and humiliated aftermath of the war. Naturally, the book homes on the role music has played in that uniquely brutal phase of the Vietnam experience, both for those who found that particular songs had become a lifeline of sorts, as well as those who transmuted that experience into original music of their own.
In the concluding “Solo” of the book, Vietnam vet Jay Maloney begins, “There is no such thing as one Vietnam. There were more than two and a half million of them.” No single book could capture that many Vietnams, or the multitude of voices needed to describe them, any more than you could squeeze that many singers onto a single 45 RPM record or write a song to evoke all of their experiences. But the remarkable achievement of Bradley and Werner’s We Gotta Get Out of This Place is how close they’ve come to making that many voices of Vietnam veterans heard.
QUOTED: "nuanced and frequently moving."
1. 'We Gotta Get Outta This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War' by Doug Bradley and Craig Werner
Doug Bradley and Craig Werner's account of music's connection to the Vietnam War is intimate and deeply informative, with a scope that encompasses both the war itself and the way that music has helped raise awareness of veterans' issues long after its end. We Gotta Get Out of This Place gives the reader a good sense of how the popularity of different songs and styles waxed and waned over the years, as the mood of the war changed. It also gives plenty of space for extended first-person narratives (dubbed "Solos") offering a diverse array of viewpoints, including many from veterans who found themselves in anti-war camps, those who felt more conflicted about the anti-war movement, and musicians like Country Joe McDonald and James Brown. Nuanced and frequently moving. T.C.