SOUL

[ronprice]

There are several basic histories of soul music. Generally the late 1950s and early 1960s seem to be the common ground, the common time period, when soul music made its debut.  In A Brief History of Soul Music by Piero Scaruffi one sees dates for singers and songwriters who turned gospel music into a secular art form.1  Various singers like Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Arethra Franklin, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, among others--created sounds that came out of my little blue radio in these late 1950s and early 1960s as I finished high school and started university.  This was my experience of soul mixed as it usually was with rock-and-roll.   My value-system was finding its home in these early years and the Bahá'í Faith became an essential sifting mechanism for my system of meaning and interpretation of society.

Of course there are and were many influences that come/came to make up my set of values and beliefs.  Music was for me one of these influences.  Soul continued to occupy the edge of my musical space with its sensuality, lust, its primal qualities into the late 1960s and early 1970s as I moved from Canada to Australia until soul was replaced by funk and disco music and until I moved away from rock and roll.   By the early 1970s my life had turned many corners far away from soul music becoming dominated by folk-rock, marriage and earning a living. –Ron Price with thanks to Piero Scaruffi, History of Popular Music, 2005.

Those years, back then, when
life was so very simple and I
had no idea what was in store
for me down the long....stony
and tortuous—but fascinating
road ahead—I knew nothing
about soul music, but I began
to be interested in the nature
of soul as described in words
of a new religion that was in
Canada by then for about 60
years and had come out of a
country on the edge of western
civilization and even further on
the edge of my life, but it moved
to the centre by my adult years
remaining there all my life---Iran.

Ron Price
20 May 2009