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Boogaloo
by Arthur Kempton

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     From Publishers Weekly
     In 1965, the boogaloo, a dance akin to the jitterbug as well as the title of a record by a Chicago soul group, leapt out of the communities of black America and swept across America. Since then, insiders in the music industry have used the word boogaloo to describe rhythm and blues, or soul music. Musicologist Kempton traces the genealogy of boogaloo in this grand and sweeping survey of the history of soul music in America. He masterfully narrates the careers of several musicians who played key roles in establishing the legacy of boogaloo. Sam Cooke, for example, molded his sweet and seductive style in his early days with the traveling gospel group, the Soul Stirrers. When Cooke discovered that he could make soul music by simply changing the words of many of the gospel tunes he was crooning, his career took a new and lucrative turn. Kempton also focuses on the ways that boogaloo captured the hearts not only of black Americans but also of white teenagers, driving men like Berry Gordy and the founders of Stax Records to find singers who could capitalize on this crossover appeal. In addition to profiles of Cooke and Gordy, Kempton offers detailed portraits of two other men-gospel great Thomas Dorsey and Parliament Funkadelic's leader, George Clinton-instrumental in making boogaloo the soul of American music. In a brilliant sketch of the history of rap music, Kempton anoints Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre and other rappers as heirs to these R&B musicians, arguing elegantly that hip-hop is modern boogaloo.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
     Boogaloo—the synonym of choice among the cognoscenti for rhythm and blues—is a stylish and profound meditation on the art, influence, and commerce of black American popular music. At once deeply knowing and keenly observant, Arthur Kempton reveals the tensions between the sacred and the profane at the heart of “soul music,” and the complex centrality of “Aframericans” in the evolution of our mass musical culture. What that culture is all about, who owns it, and who gets paid—these are issues of moment in his epic narrative.

     Kempton brilliantly traces the interconnections among a century’s worth of signal personalities, events, and achievements: from Thomas A. Dorsey, the so-called Father of Gospel Music, whose career (“Got to Know How to Work Your Show”) sheds light on Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown, among
others, to the rise of that “handsome Negro lad,” Sam Cooke (perhaps the greatest of soul singers) and his definitive crossover dreams; from Berry Gordy Jr.’s infatuation with Doris Day and his sharp business plan to capture and exploit the sounds of young America through Motown (“It’s What’s in the Grooves That Counts”) to the founding of Stax Records and Memphis Soul by a white farm kid who grew up dreaming of being a country fiddler; from the visionary funk of George Clinton to the ascendancy of hip hop (“Sharecropping in Wonderland”), the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, and the story of Death Row Records.

     Boogaloo is a monumental work, informed by a rare fierceness of intellect, which debunks many a myth and canard about our popular music heritage even as it enlarges our understanding of its quintessence.

About the Author
     Arthur Kempton was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and received a B. A. in English from Harvard. He has been a radio disk jockey, deputy superintendent of Boston’s public school system, and an educational consultant. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.
 

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