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Solomon Burke is the minister of the blues
01:00 AM EST on Thursday, March 1, 2007
Grammy winner Solomon Burke, billed as the king of rock and soul, plays Saturday at New Bedford’s Zeiterion Theatre.
Solomon Burke’s voice? Take your pick. It’s a bulldozer; it’s single-malt Scotch; it’s — I dunno, something strong and heavy.
It was never polished enough to have a Top 20 pop hit, but it’s been strong enough to keep going since 1954. Ask The Rolling Stones: They heard him do the original versions of “Cry to Me” and “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” and they knew. They had hits with their own versions of those songs.
Burke dropped off the pop map in the late ’60s and didn’t re-emerge until 2002’s spare, haunting Don’t Give Up on Me, a collection of his takes on songs by heavyweights such as Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan, all contributing new material to Burke’s rehabilitation. Because they knew, too.
Burke followed that up with 2005’s Make Do With What You Got, produced by Don Was, and continued with last year’s Nashville, which brought the soul man to that town for the first time, with Buddy Miller as producer and a list of duet partners including Dolly Patron, Gillian Welch, Jim Lauderdale and Miller. The opener, Tom T. Hall’s “That’s How I Got to Memphis,” is a heartbreaker for the ages.
Burke is a minister — has been since before he was a teenager — and his religious background suffuses everything he says, whether he’s asking after the family of an interviewer he’s never met or talking about his 21st-century comeback.
“The word is blessed — constantly. Just speaking with you today is a double blessing. Just knowing that we’re going to come back and thank as many people as possible for what they’ve done with my music and for my music, that’s sustained me for another week, another month and another year. There’s not that many of us around. . . .
“Thank God I’m still running.”
That sums up Burke’s attitude: He doesn’t seem to get too high over the high points or low over the low points. As long as you keep going, he says, something will happen. And good or bad, it was meant to be.
“Once you’re in the race, you’re in the race. You may not always come in first, second or third, but the idea is to be in the race. Because the race is not given to the swift, but to those who endure to the end. So I’m showing up — that’s the secret.”
The years — decades, really — when weak material and the passing of musical styles led to comparative anonymity never got him down, he says.
“You only feel bad when you can’t pay your bills, and the bill collectors say to you, ‘I can’t wait,’ and you say, ‘OK, what’s the next solution. Would you like to buy some of these records I’ve got here?’
“You learn to live with life and make it work, because this is what life is about: experiences. And once we learn to deal with the experiences of life, it becomes a little easier.
“My secret has been having faith — believing that God will make a way somehow, as long as I keep the effort going and keep putting a foot forward. And family.”
Burke continued to perform in church and in Europe, but at one point, he says, he hadn’t performed in his native Philadelphia in more than 10 years. “We’ve had a standard. And once you’ve created a standard in Europe, for a certain prestige and certain shows, it’s hard to come back.”
That’s why, Burke says, this string of shows is called the Thank You Americana Tour.
“We’re actually losing money by doing these performances. What I’m doing is coming back and saying, ‘Thank you.’ And taking the pulse of the people, and wanting to hear what the people want to hear from me, so I’ll know where the people want me to go with the next album.” (He’s talking about his next secular album — a new gospel album, he says, is already in the works.)
It’s not rare for an American performer to find success in Europe that eluded him in America, particularly soul and blues acts. “It’s the idea that the people in Europe study the music, because it’s something that they can’t get,” Burke says.
“That’s changing, because the European young people today are listening to what their moms and dads were listening to, and they’re learning to sing the music and believe in the music and love the music, and this is why we’re getting so many fantastic, talented, young, powerful artists singing soul and rock and blues and gospel.”
The release of Don’t Give Up on Me was “not what you’d call a comeback; that’s what you’d call a step up,” Burke says. “Just a triple blessing from out of the heavens, for someone to be spiritually in tune, to say, ‘I want to do something with Solomon Burke’ . . .
“All of those things worked so well, and they worked so diligently to make that record happen. And my first Grammy! [I’ve been going] since 1954. That’s over five decades of music.”
The record opened up doors, Burke says. Actually, “it opened up doors, windows, closets, bookshelves” — he hesitates — “tax accountants. But very blessedly. We take all these things in stride and to the best of our ability and stay positive.”
Speaking the day after the Grammy awards, which included a Christina Aguilera tribute to James Brown and a “young faces” segment including John Legend, Corinne Bailey Rae and John Mayer, Burke sounded hopeful about the future: “It makes you feel so good to know that the music is going on, and with a greater power and a stronger movement, yet with the same good spirit of what it was and what it should be.”
Burke describes his reaction to Aguilera’s version of “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” as “tears. I’m 67 years old — I literally cried and wished from the bottom of my heart that James could have been here to hear that.”
Burke’s flirtation with country music started in 1960, when he recorded songs such as “Just Out of Reach of My Tempting Arms” and “He’ll Have to Go.” He says Atlantic, his label at the time, gave him the songs “because they had no idea where to take me, and my manager said to them, ‘He can’t just be a rhythm and blues artist, because he’s still an active minister.’ ”
Rhythm and blues, Burke says, was still not considered proper work for someone of his calling.
“A lot of the older ministers and elders just didn’t understand me being a part of it. I was in a meeting with some of the elders and … I said, ‘Well, I don’t understand what’s wrong with this. I’m filled with the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost allows me to go anywhere and do anything within reason. And they said, ‘Well, you know, they got Big Joe Turner over there, and Ivy Joe Hunter, and Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker,’ and I’m saying ‘Wow. I didn’t know that you all knew all those people.’ So it goes to show you that somebody else was listening. …
“So we came up with the idea of me being a soul singer, and that worked well for the church. And it was a joke to [Atlantic Records partner and producer] Jerry Wexler, because he had no idea how that was going to work.
“So they gave us some country music to sing. And that was supposed to be the beginning of the end, but the Lord saw fit for it to be the beginning of the beginning.”
After his early country singles, Atlantic insisted he record some R&B, and brought in songwriters such as Don Covay and Bert Berns, “and the rest is history.”
Today, Burke’s goal is to keep putting one foot on front of the other. Doing what you do, Burke says, is the key to — well, pretty much everything. And as long as people enjoy the show, he says, there’s no sense in stopping.
“The most important thing is the people. Without the people you have nothing. . . . It’s the only way I can tell to keep going. . . .
“It’s about being in the race, and keeping your face in the place.”
Solomon Burke sings at the Zeiterion Theatre, 684 Purchase St., New Bedford, Saturday night at 8. Tickets are $35; call (508) 994-2900.
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