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Soul Music as the Soundtrack to Love

“Baby, you have done what no one thought could be.

You brought me some joy inside my tears.”

-Stevie Wonder

Whenever I’m explaining my deep affinity for soul music, I always start with those memories from my fifteenth summer, when the charged heat and the teenage ennui sank me into a space of extreme angst. I needed escape, and music began to carve out that place of sanctuary for me. For the first time, it wasn’t just something my parents played throughout the house, or filler to drown out the awkwardness of social gatherings, or the soundscape echoing throughout the dog days of my neighborhood—it became my own, a familiar and yet foreign system of enchantment. Music-loving came over me in flights of a certain kind of rebellious freedom; I would often sneak into my father’s room in early afternoons just to play his vinyl records to myself, daydreaming and basking in those lush sounds, the sunlight romancing through the bedroom windows. I’d play whichever records I could get my hands on from his collection, which meant I found myself listening to a lot of classic soul music: Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Al Green, The Supremes, Jackie Wilson, and so forth until I began to play each record twice over, and over again. On a song-after-song basis, those records soundtracked my dramatic declaration of new life. Beginning at some point there, I found the sense of purpose that I yearned for, and have never lost since.

Even still, there is a certain sacredness about soul music that allows me to not only appreciate it but to constantly be spellbound in my listening. I think about the musical arrangements—the half-bluesy wailing of horns, the sparse drums and rhythm sections, the chantlike choruses of pure celebration or mourning coursing through the songs. Magical, perhaps. My relationship with the genre of soul music seems to be different from my relationship with other genres. It is almost like a private saving grace, a near-indescribable order that has moved me and kept me and won over my deepest allegiances. Here is the part I’ve had to teach myself: this is a shared intimacy across many people of many generations. Music is all about the relation of shared meanings, and the discipleship of soul extends into a whole history of meanings that all boils down to a single fold of our humanity: love.

Love may not begin with anything but itself, but soul music certainly begins with love. It is a lineage traceable by musical ancestors. In the beginning, there were the wild hearts of incantation. There was the work song that folks now refer to as the slave spiritual, a union of Christian hymns and African traditionals invented by enslaved people as a form of prayer, a way to cope with the unspeakable troubles of the slave existence. For those people, music was a kind of assurance that forged hope out of even the deepest sorrows one could hold. It was all about finding self-possession in the belief that God was with them, a divine grace in the darkness. Spiritual music had two offspring: gospel and the blues, which were always akin and yet remained at distance from one another. The blues embraced a kind of Black nihilism, an ethos of woe and disturbance, a search to draw even the slightest meaning out of a decidedly miserable reality in America. Blues music served the great god of freedom; that is, it was riddled with the righteous desire to be freed from misery. It carried in the tradition of spiritual song by staring into the glassy eye of existentialism and invoking the unmitigated aching of the soul. Gospel more closely follows the lyrical tradition passed down from spirituals in that it was the music accompanying Black Christianity in America. There is a deep-seated solemnity about the praise of gospel music that is supposed to make one want to call unto God, to beg for mercy, and to make oneself vulnerable enough to receive the blessing of new resurrection. So when soul combined the musical styles of these two genres, it was much more than just a matter of following a legacy. It was a matter of establishing the bridge between the two and taking that route over troubled water. To survive.

Love is one of those concepts that language can’t exactly define, and certainly can’t measure. Yet, there seems to be a silent understanding that we all feel it, oftentimes in similar ways. It is part of our necessary system of intimacy, yes, but it also constructs our arc towards redemption. The popular consensus that love is constantly at work in our world seems to provide meaning to the human experience; it leads us to our imperative sense of self-worth, of belonging and purpose. It can be the sword with which we slay our cynicism and the tool with which we sow hope into everyday life, again and again. For Black people, this struggle has been exceptionally difficult throughout the ages given our history of unthinkable persecution. And thus the significance of music has always been so much more elevated—it is a matter not only of pleasure but also of using that pleasure as a tool of survival. By necessity, music for Black people has been a soundtrack to love. With the miraculous ability to feel and receive love, there will always be the feeling of longing to drive us. I don’t mean longing in the superficial and self-seeking sense, or as a substitute for “lust.” I mean the longing that is relative to the human desire for love, to our natural drive towards spiritual connection as the extrapersonal self. It’s present all throughout Black music: in gospel, it’s the petition for holy salvation, the summoning of a higher power. Gospel sets forth a belief that humans are unfinished creatures, and that God is the final complementary piece that we need in order to feel whole, to feel at ease, to feel empowered against the constant strain and heartache of our lives. In blues, longing is the spiritual cry to be freed from a constant state of dejection and the mundanities of life unrewarded. It lurches and lilts constantly, but it steadily returns to the idea of a better future. In line with tradition, soul music expresses a kind of longing; it spotlights both the power and the price of human-to-human love. In a great many of the classic soul songs, there is a speaker coming to grips with those feelings that well up in the soul, reaching out, daring to utter the words of rapture to a lover for a brief few minutes as if it were a song unto the heavens. In return, they may receive a sense of renewal sweeping throughout their body. They may feel taken over with the unmistakable vigor that feels like a holy ghost finding home within. Whatever it may be, they choose to relate it to an audience as if proclaiming “I am in love, and I want you to know what I feel. I want you to know that I am, too, saved.”

I listen to soul music to remind myself why I should love anything, and how difficult an undertaking it is to do so. This seems to be the miracle of it to me, that we still arrive back at this emotion fraught with aching and heartbreak and nerves. There is a great deal of bravery needed to reach that resolution. Not only do we come back, we will even celebrate it, make songs dedicated to the faith in that human-led deliverance, in that force that is already pulsating within us even when we cannot feel it and do not know of its presence. That is why I’ve needed soul music this whole time—to remind myself of love, which in turn reminds me of this seemingly superhuman ability that we have: even in the midst of uncompromising darkness, we will reinvent anything as a form of light—and that, of course, is what I mean when I say survival.

Wes Matthews is a Detroit-born, Philadelphia-based poet and essayist. His work has been published in 68to05, Scoundrel Time, Muzzle, and elsewhere. Wes served as the 2018-19 Philadelphia Youth Poet Laureate and received the Congressional Award for “outstanding and invaluable service to the community.” He is the recipient of the 2020 College Alumni Society Prize for his poetry and the 2020 Lillian and Benjamin Levy Award for his music criticism.

Wes MatthewsAugust 21, 2021