A (deep) voice of optimism

WHEN I HEARD that Lou Rawls had died, I was first saddened, then alarmed. Sad to cross yet another name off the steadily dwindling list of artists who in the ‘60s and ‘70s helped define R&B;, the sound that gave birth to rock and followed bebop and jazz as black popular music’s Next Big Thing. And alarmed that some of the hopefulness that his songs reflected died with him.

The 72-year-old Rawls was a senior member of a movement that evolved over decades and included flower-child experimentalists like Sly Stone and George Clinton. By the time R&B; was an official musical genre, Rawls was already a veteran performer of gospel, blues and jazz. He was a bridge from one musical era to another but also a fount of all these styles -- styles that were not individual so much as part of a fluid historical collective, aesthetic variations on a running theme of black salvation and empowerment through music.

Unlike his contemporaries, James Brown and Little Richard, who were also steeped in other traditions but who quickly became synonymous with the rawer elements of R&B;, Rawls retained a multi-dimensionality that was good not only for black music but also for business. It’s tough to imagine such broad popularity in music these days, an insanely niche business obsessed with “crossover appeal” but almost incapable of providing it.

Rawls was hardly considered relevant among today’s most popular black singers, chiefly hip-hop and rap artists. These artists sample R&B; dating back to the ‘50s, but Rawls is rarely tapped because his sound was, well, old-fashioned.

The rich, crooning baritone that made him famous -- the even voice that evoked tuxedoes and Vegas stages and won praise from Frank Sinatra -- seems antithetical to bare-knuckled tales about life in the inner city. Rawls’ voice didn’t have the ragged edge of Brown or of another contemporary, Ray Charles, and so he suffered from perceptions of inauthenticity that have plagued black pop music artists since the ‘60s.

Black music has gone through its own generation wars, emerging with hip-hop on one side and nostalgia tours (of reconstituted Temptations) on the other. And never, it seems, the twain shall meet -- not just in terms of music but in terms of meaning. Hip-hop speaks black truth (literally) while R&B; papers it over. Hip-hop is the in-your-face Fox News of black music, while R&B; is its eternal commercial break: all love and triumphing over hard times, striving for a better way and waking up to a brighter day. Not bad impulses, certainly, but hopelessly out of date.

But this dichotomy is yet another myth manufactured by marketing. Rawls was actually a pioneer of modern rap. His trademark patter and storytelling within songs included detailed descriptions of heartbreakers, street hustlers and others -- not a new motif in black music but one he kept alive for a new age and that was incorporated by acts as disparate as the Supremes, Stevie Wonder and Bootsy Collins.

Rawls’ velvety voice was not a denial of black struggle. It was simply one response to it -- one also made by Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and other black performers who defied hardship by making it all look, and sound, so easy. The truth was implied instead of stated, but it was always present.

The real difference between Rawls and his successors is not sound or style but outlook: One generation preached the power of love, the other bitterly notes its absence; one generation declared that times were changing; the next observes (profanity and all) that things have stayed too much the same. What is really on the wane is an optimism that has persisted, often improbably, in African American culture throughout its history.

Until now, anyway. That hopefulness and sense of salvation may be running out, musically and otherwise. Balladeers like Rawls are still around, but their ranks are thin, and overall they feel like a sugary, perfunctory counterpoint to the urban reality that now limns mainstream black music.

It should go without saying that there’s more to black life than the city, and more to the city than crime and punishment. But we always need people to say it. And people like Lou Rawls to sing it.