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

Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul. By Craig Werner. NY: Crown Publishers, 2004. [xii, 337 p. ISBN 0-609-60993-9. $24.00.] Bibliography, discography, index.

Craig Werner's new book Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul is the latest offering from a familiar voice in the criticism of African American musical idioms. While his two previous books on the subject, A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (New York: Plume, 1998) and Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), deal with more wide-ranging issues of race and its relation to African American musical idioms, Higher Ground focuses exclusively on soul music as a means to disseminate what Werner terms a unified secular "gospel vision." Werner achieves this by weaving narrative and analysis of the lives and music of three of the most important practitioners of soul music. Higher Ground emphasizes the connections between the personal, political, and activist leanings of these three artists, the messages contained in their music, and the faith instilled in all of them in their most formidable years as children reared in the quietly segregated North.

Higher Ground simultaneously traces the careers of Franklin, Mayfield, and Wonder through an introduction and five chapters. Although the book proceeds in a linear manner through time, Werner conveniently combines common themes from the lives and music of the three performers despite their occasional historical incongruity. Chapter 2, "Keep on Pushing: The Soul of the Freedom Movement," focuses on Wonder, Franklin, and Mayfield becoming self-sufficient musicians who strove for the financial and creative independence that was necessary to promulgate a sometimes radical message, even though each of these artists experienced this particular struggle at slightly different times. Similarly, chapter 3, "'Spirit in the Dark': Music and the Powers of Blackness," chronicles the breakthrough of all three artists as musical auteurs: Franklin in 1967 with her move to Atlantic Records, Wonder in 1971 with his new Motown contract, and Mayfield in 1970 with the formation of his own Curtom record label.

One of the most compelling aspects of this book, and what perhaps allows these three artists to represent soul music so effectively as a whole, is the way in which their careers align in the mid-1970s. Chapter 4, "'Songs in the Key of Life': The Gospel Vision in Changing Times," concentrates on the years between 1973 and 1976, a time in which the careers of Mayfield and Franklin experienced a decline and Wonder released his last great album after a near fatal accident. Finally, chapter 5, "'Who's Zoomin' Who?': Megastars, Monuments, Elders," tracks the difficult experiences shared by Franklin, Mayfield, and Wonder during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, when their pointed messages seemed to be less relevant in a culture where rhythm and blues was morphing into the more placid quiet storm genre, and hip-hop emerged as the best platform to disseminate radical social commentary.

At the outset of the book Werner writes only briefly about the decision to pair these artists. In spite of the obvious connections between Franklin, Mayfield, and Wonder, the type of distinctive "gospel vision" that the book claims is common among these three, and what necessitates their stories being discussed in the same book, is at times debatable. Werner's greatest argument for dealing with these musicians in the same study is the unique window in time in which African Americans from the North had an opportunity to "preach" their gospel vision to an interested white audience. Similarly, the association between this music and the political energy of the African American freedom movement gives the messages of the three a similar character. Nevertheless, the implication throughout the book that these three artists crossed over from gospel to pop musical styles in an effort to spread their vision to a ...