Strollin' with Good Ol' Lou Rawls

Taking a close look at his 1966 LP Soulin'

Welcome music lovers to a new edition of ‘Listening Sessions’!

One of things I most enjoy doing with my Substack is highlighting albums that have not received much critical treatment. These are albums that are not necessarily obscure and certainly not recorded by obscure artists but have slipped through the cracks nonetheless. One such recording is Soulin’, a 1966 album by Lou Rawls. It’s a snapshot of Rawls’ gift of traversing the genres of pop, jazz, the blues, soul and gospel, and creating a unified musical vision. The gems on the album are a remarkable sequence on the album’s second side as well as his first big hit, the elegant ‘Love is Hurtin’ Thing.’ I hope you enjoy the essay and will let me know what you think as well.

My piece on the Eagles from February which wrestled with why I’m not a big fan of their music generated a whole bunch of conversation. Out of that debate,

Tim Riley

, music critic and writer, including two books on the Beatles as well as the

riley rock report

here on Substack just to start, got in touch with an idea to have a back-and-forth on the Eagles and the themes explored in my essay. I’m always up for mixing things up here on ‘Listening Sessions’ and so my next dispatch, coming on May 20, will be a razor-sharp essay by Tim focusing on Hotel California. I’m excited to be able to share it with you soon.

My response will run on Tim’s Substack. If you haven’t subscribed yet to the riley rock report, a fount of commentary on everything from Beyoncé's new country-music album to the recent passing of Seiji Ozawa and one of over 40 Substacks I am pleased to recommend, click right below.

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“Boy, hand me down my walking cane
Boy, hand
me down my walking cane
hand me down my
walking cane
I’m gonna take me a stroll down memory lane.”
- from ‘Memory Lane,’ written by J.W. Alexander and Sam Cooke

As Lou Rawls sings the opening verse of ‘Memory Lane,’ a song written by J.W. Alexander and Sam Cooke which leads off the second side of his 1966 LP Soulin’, his approach exists in two worlds. One is the orbit of gospel and soul as his voice often hovers around a note, bending it slightly either above or below where it would rest on the musical staff. The other is the orbit of pop as on the second repeat of the opening line. He lightens his tone and glides along the melody line, stretching the notes horizontally before returning to where he started, firmly in the choir loft.

If there is a lineage of great male gospel-pop-soul singers, it may start this way: Ray Charles begetting Sam Cooke begetting Lou Rawls. Charles and Rawls may have had an advantage over Cooke in their more natural affinity for singing jazz (Charles, of course, could play it too) but each could take the various strands of Black music, personalizing and packaging them so that it would be indisputable to conclude that Black music was American music and vice versa.

Rawls today may be more immortalized as a vestige of the lounge-lizard side of the disco-inspired soul of the seventies, exemplified by his major hit, ‘You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine,’ but in the sixties, he cut a less parodic figure.

He was sharp yet street tough, telling of a “stormy Monday” and that it “’taint nobody’s business if I do,” while also plumbing the contours of “the shadow of your smile.” Here is where Rawls inspires even more comparisons: Jimmy Witherspoon (although Rawls didn’t venture as far in the extremities of blues and ballads as Witherspoon did), Joe Williams and Nancy Wilson, and Dion DiMucci and Elvis Presley. Another measure of his reach was his appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival on the opening night, appearing between the Paupers and Beverley Martyn; his presence another part of the argument why Monterey remains, to my mind, a more intriguing festival than Woodstock.

Part of Rawls’ set has been released—a revelatory 15 minutes of music. There is a performance of ‘Love is a Hurtin’ Thing,’ his first big single and two of his showstoppers: ‘Tobacco Road’ and ‘Dead End Street,’ both preceded by what had become one of his trademarks, the monologue. Both speak to Rawls’ move from Chicago and “the Hawk” to California, to “the West, where it’s the best.”

His extended version of John D. Loudermilk’s ‘Tobacco Road’ debuted on 1966’s Live!, an album recorded with an audience in the studio that expanded the concept of the Lou Rawls LP. From the time he had signed with Capitol in 1962 until Live!, his recordings were elegant and earthy collections of songs that existed at the intersection of soul, blues and jazz. Collectively they formed a survey of the repertoire that crossed these genre lines, a kind of fake book that a sixties song interpreter would be expected to know: ‘St. Louis Blues,’ ‘Rocking Chair,’ ‘St. James Infirmary,’ ‘Black and Blue,’ ‘I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water’ and so on. They remain testaments to Rawls’ affable versatility. The aforementioned Live! added a hip showmanship. ‘Love is a Hurtin’ Thing’ proved that Rawls could be a hitmaker and also got him on The Ed Sullivan Show.

The arrangement, shaded with the minor tonality of Northern soul, was written by H.B. Barnum and the record was produced by David Axelrod. They were Rawls’ key collaborators in the sixties; Axelrod at the helm since 1965 and Barnum a year later.

The album included ‘Love is a Hurtin’ Thing,’ a kind of sonic template for much of Soulin’. Barnum’s charts are full of declarative, unison (brass and reeds) lines as well as propulsive motion. Rawls is a man on the move, happy to relay, depending on the song, the virtues of his lady, as on the opening ‘A Whole Lotta Woman’ or the virtues of the one he aspires to soon make his lady, as on ‘You’re the One.’ Even on the downcast numbers—and there are quite a few on Soulin’—Rawls’ assured delivery never really wavers. Despair is treated as a romantic posture; adversity as something that will assuredly be surmounted.

Take ‘So Hard to Laugh, So Easy to Cry.’ It’s a conceit upon which many a song has been written and here, it takes on a strutting swagger. That is a pose that often distances a performer from the material he or she is singing (a reason why I have never particularly warmed up to the Frank Sinatra of ‘My Way’ or ‘That’s Life’) but it works for Rawls. On the B section, the tension between the stiff-upper-lip ambience and the devastation of the lyrics becomes heightened leading into a return to the A section in which Rawls circles around the melody of the phrase “my smiling days are over.”

There’s a glide to Rawls’ voice on most of the album. It prevents ‘What Now, My Love’ (a song du jour at time for the pop vocalist) from being too syrupy or bombastic. There’s a wry wink to the performance and a Barnum arrangement that swaps a bolero for a Basie beat. More on the square is Rawls’ version of Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane’s ‘On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever),’ (a far more endurable song du jour at the time). He soars over the melody, caressing it with debonair care and Barnum injects a hip quote of the Sinatra staple ‘Witchcraft.’ The other standards on Soulin’, ‘Don’t Explain’ and ‘Autumn Leaves,’ are taken at a faster clip than their lyrics suggest and again, if Rawls’ doesn’t dig too deep into them, the pleasure of hearing him tackle them is good enough consolation.

But all these moments on the album are, in a sense, window dressing for the great statement on Soulin’’s second side. It starts with ‘Memory Lane.’ Far more intimate than the six sides that precede it, it’s just Rawls with the orchestra’s rhythm section. There’s a subtle build through the three verses but Rawls never relinquishes the tight, dynamic control of his vocal. The performance ends with a repeat of the first verse and a return to the singer with just two percussionists and a bassist. But does it really end?

The walking bass line that is the heart of ‘Memory Lane’ morphs into a syncopated chordal pattern, very similar to the riff that charged flautist Herbie Mann’s famous recording of ‘Comin’ Home Baby.’ Then the rest of the band enters with a kind of cocktail-hour reverie. And then Rawls unveils the big twist. He begins a short monologue, revealing that he was singing ‘Memory Lane’ in the guise of an older man of Chicago—his name to be revealed as Ol’ Charlie—taking a stroll in the city’s Washington Park. He notices some kids playing and sees a child sitting by himself on a park bench. Ol’ Charlie ambles by and strikes up a conversation with the young boy about why he is not playing with the other children. The boy reveals how he looks up to his older brother, a man about town with silk suits, a white car, flush with cash and a coterie of lady friends. He wants to grow up rather than indulge in child’s play. Ol’ Charlie then takes a seat and tells the young boy to seize the opportunity that life will hopefully afford him. The groove then picks up momentum and Rawls as Ol’ Charlie begins singing, “when I was seventeen…”

‘It Was a Very Good Year’ was initially written as a feature for the Kingston Trio but became identified with Sinatra when he recorded it for his autumnal masterpiece, September Of My Years, in 1965. Whereas Sinatra’s version is full of reflection, Rawls positions the memories as a recounting of nocturnal good times. When each stage of life is noted as “a very good year,” Rawls treats them as moments of release—satisfaction with a life that has been and continues to be well lived.

At the completion of ‘It Was a Very Good Year,’ the rhythmic sway that punctuated Rawls’ first monologue returns for a second, much shorter one. The perspective shifts from Ol’ Charlie to two of his friends, marveling how he is “growing old gracefully” and “really taking care of business.” And then another first—silence—as Rawls begins to sing ‘Old Folks,’ the kind of superb standard that almost always results in a good performance. Rawls’ is no exception. He gives the song a sensitive reading, pulling back for most of it and then rising his voice as he sings, “every Friday he would go fishing / down by the lake / but he would only catch a perch or two / a great big whale got away / well, I guess I’ll warm up his steak.” He then draws back again to sing the final line as a cadenza, “the day that they take old folks / they’re gonna take old folks away.” He stretches out the word old to conclude a remarkable ten-minute performance.

Soulin’ does not include anything specific to indicate that the three songs and two monologues form a suite—the kind of medley that three years later would take over much of the second side of the Beatles’ Abbey Road. Indeed, it is its very unobtrusiveness, the fact that not much of big deal is made of it, that makes it that much more thrilling upon the realization what Rawls, Barnum and Axelrod had up their collective sleeve. It turns what is a better-than-average collection into something remarkable.

The conclusion of the album is also something memorable. ‘Breaking My Back (Instead of Working My Mind)’, cowritten by Rawls, has a straight-soul vibe with a bottom-heavy saxophone line. Rawls is a striver here, committing himself to leave the blue-collar world behind for a more intellectual life, a paean to urban mobility similar to what The Jeffersons would symbolize in the mid seventies. The song also, as does ‘Love is a Hurtin’ Thing.’ preview the kind of supper-club soul that would epitomize the music of the 5th Dimension, for example.

Rawls’ music in the sixties forms the tale of a singer who existed in many places at once. In effect, offering proof that one can be all things to all people without diluting one’s artistry. Soulin’ is bold chapter in that story and one that is not available for streaming. Grab a copy if you can and take a stroll with good ol’ Lou Rawls.

If you’re not yet a subscriber of ‘Listening Sessions,’ I hope you'll click the button below to subscribe and get each edition delivered straight to your inbox. I publish a long-form essay on music three times a month, every 10 days or so.