Entertainment
Bullz-Eye Home
Entertainment
Music
Movies
Television
Movie DVDs
Music DVDs
Games
Celebrity Babes
Entertainers
Interviews
Channels
The Opposite Sex
Sports
Entertainment
Fitness
Gadgets
Vices
Wagering
Humor
Recreation
Travel
Stuff to Buy
News
Premium Members

Join  Enter



Cool Links

All Pro Models
Premium Hollywood
EatSleepDrink Music
Sports Blog
Cleveland Sports
Political Humor
Toksick

CD Reviews: Review of The Soul Truth by Shemekia Copeland
 
Flucke Home / CD Reviews Home / Entertainment Channel / Bullz-Eye Home


Click here to buy yourself a copy from Amazon.com Shemekia Copeland: The Soul Truth (Alligator  2005)

Buy your copy now from
What on earth is soul, anyway? It's like Justice Brennan said when trying to define pornography: I know it when I see it.

It's the indescribable link between gospel and pop. It's B-3 organs screaming through spinning Leslies. It's powerful vocals that can, in two measures, move from a gentle rain to Hurricane Katrina. It's love and guilt and anger and preaching rolled up into blue notes that somehow sound 50 times more sincere and danceable than the best thing Britney ever has and ever will throw at us.

Shemekia Copeland, daughter of the late gritty-funky Texas blues guitarist Johnny "Clyde," has soul.

Blues fans have watched Ms. Copeland mature over the last 10 years, from 14-year-old onstage foil of her father to a full-fledged blues shouter. Indeed, I saw her open for Koko Taylor in the late 1990s, and even then they seemed like daughter and granddaughter – with Shemekia outshining a still-great but clearly declining Koko that particular night in Harvard Square's House of Blues.

The Soul Truth picks up where her first two records left off, but with a twist: Booker T & The MG's guitarist Steve Cropper produced the CD, and performs on several tracks.

On one hand, it's a slam-dunk. There's a great mix of rockers ("Who Stole My Radio?") and ballads ("Poor Excuse," "Strong Enough"), served with a big helping of Shemekia's trademark girl-power lyrics – also part of the tradition of Big Mama Thornton and Koko themselves followed from older generations – laced with fat horn arrangements, Memphis rhythm guitar, and of course, screaming organ lines that add the gospel "greaze" of Aretha, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and their pals.

It's a bluesy record all the way through, and indeed this is what modern blues sounds like – polished rock and soul – but as is the case with many Alligator discs, there's a straight traditional blues with just acoustic guitar and vocal, tossed out as a prop to the traditionalists who want to hear it down and dirty. Her rendition of Eddie Hinton's "Something Heavy" does that job here, and Shemekia – with the ultimate blues pedigree, growing up on the road with a legend – doesn’t disappoint. Stripped bare of the full soul band, her voice sounds even richer.

And there's funk. Maximum blues funk, the kind Chicagoans expect from Alligator, runs strong in "Breakin' Out" and "Better Not Touch." Delicious stuff, when Shemekia takes the mic and just dominates the band – which lays back by design, just like Cropper and the MG’s did for Otis and other powerful Stax vocalists back in the day.

The only thing this album lacks? The low-tech hiss and occasional feedback from those original 1960s soul cuts, which despite their being sonic defects, they somehow made Otis sound more desperate, Aretha more convincing in her sermon-songs, and Sam & Dave more slick than they actually were. Thanks to digital sound quality and reproduction, Shemekia's tracks sound as clean as those original guys would have loved their records to sound, and in the process, a little something is lost. But that's just a quibble. It's a small complaint – unlike large complaints I have about contemporary would-be soul singers such as TLC, who couldn't sing in tune to save their lives.

Shemekia Copeland, some days, probably wakes up and sees the latest, most popular MTV videos and wonders if she was born 20 years too late. She'd have fit in perfectly in the music world of he father's generation, when more music fans would've appreciated her work. But you and I, we know we're privileged to be blessed with one of the greatest young female blues voices of a generation – in our time. She's got the milieu nearly to herself now, with the old legends passing on one by one. We can only hope Shemekia finds enough love out there on the touring circuit to keep her one-woman show going.


~Mojo Flucke, Ph.D.
 mojo@bullz-eye.com




 

 

 

Bullz-Eye.com : Feedback - Link to Us  - About B-E - FAQ - Advertise with Us


© 2000-2005 Bullz-Eye.com®, All Rights Reserved. Contact the webmaster with questions or comments. Privacy Policy and Site Map