Although much less broad in scope and goal and coming from a different perspective, the Country Got Soul compilation has an against-the-grain mission statement similar to that of 1998's three-disc From Where I Stand: The Black Experience In Country Music box set. Whereas From Where I Stand spotlighted the role of blacks in a genre commonly thought of as "white music," the fifteen-song Country Got Soul flips the equation and presents white artists -- southern whites, to be exact -- in the late '60s and the '70s cooking up a brand of soul, a style generally considered "black music."
If you're not entirely comfortable with such lines being drawn, you're not alone. "Blue-eyed soul," for instance, is a phrase that's been known to get stuck in my throat. However, race-based observations and delineations have always been part of the modern music world, with Sam Phillips' reported declaration -- "If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars" -- merely the most familiar. (It's a sentiment echoed in the liner notes by the late Eddie Hinton when he's quoted as saying "I believed a Caucasian singing Negro music could make a lot of money.")
OK, now that the philosophical table-setting has been done, let's talk about the tunes. It's appropriate that a version of "You Better Move On" by fuzz-guitar master Travis Wammack is in the middle of things, because that song, written and originally recorded by Arthur Alexander, is typically cited as the beginning of the Muscle Shoals sound, which blended country, soul and pop, and brought together black and white musicians. Hinton's track, "Running Back To You", isn't nearly as ferocious musically as some of his other stuff, but it's certainly a fine showcase for his incredible voice, while a 1967 Hi Records single finds Charlie Rich funking up "Hey Good Looking" to great effect.
"Redneck Soul Man extraordinaire" Dan Penn, as he's anointed in the liner notes, is represented by a cut from his hard-to-find 1973 release Nobody's Fool. Tony Joe White puts in a little overtime, thanks to his characteristically swampy "Did Somebody Make A Fool Out Of You?" and the killer lick he lends to Donnie Fritts' positively elastic "Short End Of The Stick". But the highlight for me is from Jim Ford, a guy known, if at all, for writing "36 Inches High", which Nick Lowe covered on Pure Pop For Now People. His "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me" is rural garage funk with an attitude, and it's crying out for resurrection. (Paging Scott Miller & the Commonwealth or the Drive-By Truckers.)
It's worth pointing out that the oft-covered "Funny How Time Slips Away" shows up on both Country Got Soul (by Reuben Howell, who made a couple of records for Motown in the early '70s) and From Where I Stand (a falsetto-capped effort from Joe Hinton). Other notable versions of the song have been recorded by its author Willie Nelson and by Dorothy Moore, the latter for venerable southern soul label Malaco. As singer-songwriter Jeb Loy Nichols, the compiler of Country Got Soul, says, "These guys sang something that skittered the boundaries between race." As the compilation shows, and as From Where I Stand did before it, that manner of skittering frequently resulted in the creation of memorable music.
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