Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul (Hardcover)

~ Craig Werner (Author) "LISTEN AT HER. AM EN." Reverend C.L. Franklin's words rose up above the swell of voices that greeted his fourteen-year-old daughter as she surrendered to..." (more)
Key Phrases: gospel vision, gospel highway, crossover strategy, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, African American (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 his 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.
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From The Washington Post

As the recent debates over President Bush's and his Democratic challengers' youthful responses to the Vietnam War and its military draft have shown, the cultural battles to own the 1960s haven't faded away, although we're now more than 30 years past that era. Most Americans who were young then have an incessant need to establish not just what happened but what those experiences mean, what they portend for the future of our society. Craig Werner comes from that classic boomer cohort; born in 1952, he was ideally placed to witness firsthand the various mind expansions of the '60s, a formative epoch that he has engaged with his work ever since, in teaching Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and in his extensive writings about pop music.

Werner's previous book, A Change Is Gonna Come (1999), is a kind of textbook both reflecting and expanding upon his courses. It's a comprehensive, many-sourced history of the soul movement in pop music that flourished so brightly in the '60s, and that contributed mightily to a momentous (if temporary) racial integration of American pop culture among young people. A Change Is Gonna Come owed its title to a prophetic Sam Cooke song, a nod to the defining influence of Cooke who, along with Ray Charles, brought the traditions of gospel music into rhythm-and-blues and pop songs in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These artists used gospel styles in a way that prophesied soul as a new kind of beloved community of popular music, analogous to the civil-rights movement of that same time.

Higher Ground, which takes its title from a Stevie Wonder composition, is essentially a triple biography of Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Curtis Mayfield, younger inheritors of the Cooke-Charles pop innovations who then became major soul-music stars of their generation. Werner attributes the vitality of these artists' best music to "the ongoing call and response between the gospel vision and what Ralph Ellison called the 'blues impulse,' " a dialogue that flourished during the cultural ferment of the '60s after two decades of Southern blacks' migration to the cities of the North for the jobs and promise the urban life seemed to hold. The blues aches of the past (and often the present) were now inextricably mixed with the hopeful gospel-soul flavor of the civil rights movement.

Werner relates the three artists' lives in an episodic fashion. He rotates segments from each performer's life, showing how a certain moment in history affected Wonder, Franklin and Mayfield's indiviudal evolution as artists. This structure fits the trio well, as both Franklin and Mayfield were born in 1942, while Wonder followed in 1950 -- thanks to his community's enterprising Motown Records, he was a pop star from the time he was 12 and thus experienced the highs of the '60s on a roughly comparable schedule. Werner is obviously a great fan of each of the three musicians, and provides celebratory if thoroughly considered criticism of their work in Higher Ground.

But Werner is also judicious in detailing these artists' long and sometimes unhappy slides down from those peaks. Aretha Franklin burst forth with the magnificent "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You" album in 1967, the triumphant result of then-incandescent Atlantic Records simply letting Franklin be her gospel-piano self after Columbia had tried to shape her great promise into jazz-pop standards. Stevie Wonder mushroomed from child prodigy into Motown's first artist to gain artistic control from dominant label head Berry Gordy Jr., and Wonder used that power to create mature masterpieces like "Innervisions." Curtis Mayfield survived Jerry Butler's departure from the Impressions to score his own hits with the group and then as a solo act, notably with the "Superfly" soundtrack. Yet, except for rare interludes like Franklin's smash mid-'80s comeback with the dance-grooved "Who's Zoomin' Who?" album, none of the three artists experienced significant conjunctions of popular and critical success -- at least at the levels they promised us early on -- after the 1980s began. Mayfield's later story is the most tragic: He was paralyzed by a freak stage accident in 1990, and died almost 10 years later. Both Franklin and Wonder, in different ways, found that gaining extensive popularity and artistic control can take away the edge that created that artistry in the first place.

Werner's skillful job in portraying the lives of Franklin, Mayfield and Wonder falters somewhat on this question of the declines they suffered later in their careers. Werner is a white man, confined to viewing these black lives from the outside, and a liberal who learned his politics and racial guilt in the sainted '60s. (Full disclosure: So is your reviewer.) Werner wants to blame the right wing for his heroes' travails, and does so in Higher Ground's ever-more-obsessive indictment of Reaganism as the destroyer of soul music's gospel-bred hope, among its other ravages of America. Werner's righteous indignation overlooks the possibility that both Reaganism and the decline of soul music's popularity might have been parallel expressions of the same demographic shift, a relentless retreat of white Americans away from urban life and its integration after the triumphs of 1967 became the horrors of 1968. In pop music, young whites embraced, in sequence, the San Francisco scene, country rock, actual country music, singer-songwriters, punk, new wave -- all movements without significant black presence, yet not necessarily bastions of conservatism either. Pop-music styles tend to obey their own (often brief) life cycles, no matter the operable politics of the time; the once-dominant genre of big-band swing jazz lost its popularity during a Democratic administration, after all.

Yet Craig Werner can't help believing in the gospel impulse that informed his subjects' best music, and in Higher Ground keeps trying to find it again in more contemporary pop icons, all the way from R. Kelly ("his musical identity was pure gospel soul") to Werner's designated deus ex machina, Bruce Springsteen, whose "spiritual politics grew directly out of gospel soul." Neither really exemplifies the particularly '60s soul that the musical careers of Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder are all about, an earlier ideal that nevertheless continues to glow brightly in the most hopeful moments at the heart of Higher Ground.

Reviewed by Richard Riegel

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1 edition (March 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609609939
• ISBN-13: 978-0609609934
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,267,009 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars this book sings like Aretha, March 13, 2004

By A Customer

Werner, whose masterpiece, A CHANGE IS GONNA COME: RACE, MUSIC AND THE SOUL OF AMERICA, is widely considered a classic, strikes again with an equally profound book that is an even better read. The narrative speedskates on three fascinating and nicely braided portraits of artists who reshaped American music in the image of the best black dreams of freedom. Not only do we get three great life stories; we also get a complex cultural history of how the black freedom movement transformed American culture, infusing the "gospel vision" into all manner of music. And on top of that, Werner has written a fine short history of the movement "up South" in Detroit and Chicago, two urban crucibles that reveal, in distinct ways, the tragedy of America's failure to respond to the African American call for R-e-s-p-e-c-t and to the call of its own best inner visions. This book sings like Aretha.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not a classic, but necessary exposure to the message, April 30, 2007

By	souldrummer (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul (Hardcover)

This book doesn't fit neatly into any genre boxes. It's not a dedicated biography. It's not a musical history. It's not really cultural theory. It's a fusion between a joint biography of Wonder, Franklin, and Mayfield with a connection to the cultural history that fuels their work. I learned some things along the way, but I found this book to fall short of other recent reads in popular music such as "I Never Loved a Man" focusing on Aretha Franklin's first album and "Shout: The Beatles and Their Generation".

This book is very ambitious. It covers the lives of three subjects and 40 years of social history in about 290 pages. Consequently, it's more a series of events that support the author's central ideal: black music is most vital when it speaks in a gospel voice to community themes.

The work on Mayfield is very helpful and was most beneficial to me. Mayfield has traditionally been underrated. This book skillfully connects Mayfield to Cabrini-Green and traditions of black entrepreneurship. Mayfield sacrificed some of the chart success of Motown to remain independent and this book provides some quality interview excerpts from Mayfield and gives key highlights from his career. Let's hope there's a Black Studies student out there who will read this and be led to give Mayfield the full scale critical biography he deserves.

It's hard to do justice to Stevie in the space allowed. Werner is a big believer that Songs in the Key of Life is the peak of Stevie's powers. I'd like more support for this viewpoint with closer reading of Stevie's lyrics. Werner's a big fan of Conversation Peace for recent Stevie and dismisses Jungle Fever. I gained some key episodes on Stevie's life, though, and having just read about the Beatles, I gained a great deal from Werner's discussion about how Stevie gained artistic strength from rock music and artists like Jeff Beck.

Aretha resists analysis because she has not been as an open an interview subject as Stevie and Mayfield. Still, this book does communicate how powerful a symbol of womanist advocacy Aretha has become and how she has struggled to be true to her gospel roots while succeeding in a pop environment that often opposes those roots.

This book is not as thorough a history as other things that I've read, but it does offer one man's interpretation of some key figures and, especially in the case of Curtis Mayfield, bring attention to some underrated work. I recommend this for those deeply interested in these artists and those exploring a range of options for revitalizing soul music.

4 stars

---SD

5.0 out of 5 stars Ken Burns, This Should Be Your Next Documentary, February 22, 2007

By	Tom O'Leary "Writer" (Los Angeles, California) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul (Hardcover)

I bought this book because LA Times writer Ann Powers referenced it in her article on Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin and the movie Dreamgirls. I can see why Ann thought so highly of this work. Craig Werner has written the most insightful and the deepest book we are ever likely to get concerning the simultaneous influence of soul greats Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Curtis Mayfield. This book is the bomb!

As a lifelong Aretha-file, I was astonished by the author's multi-dimensional portrait of Aretha and her musical journey. There is more information here about Aretha than I have ever found anywhere---including in Aretha's very disappointing autobiography.

The portraits of musical genuises Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield are as deep and as indelible as the one of Aretha. These three artists very simply changed the face of American music. Not just soul music, but American music.

We can see---sometimes in frightening ways---the influence of these great musical sensations on American Idol every year. Not that any singer/songwriters of the last 20 years can touch these geniuses.

God Bless Aretha, Steve and Curtis! And God speed Craig Werner on to his next great book!