If you don’t know how good Solomon Burke is, he’ll tell you.
Burke, one of the ever-dwindling living legends of R&B, has always been a master of self-promotion–he doesn’t wear the robe and crown for nothing. All this grandstanding would be totally embarrassing if Burke didn’t have the talent to back it up.
Luckily, Burke is a master of his craft–part preacher, part back-door man and part voodoo alchemist; always in touch with the spiritual while never far from the utterly physical. As a main practitioner of the mixture of church and juke joint that was 1960s soul, Burke purred, cried, hollered and prayed; his hits, most notably “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love” and “Cry To
Me,” still remain well-deserved classics.
And now, after a truly distinguished 40 years in music, Solomon Burke has made the best record of his career. Don’t Give Up On Me, released by Fat Possum Records, a Mississippi label most notable for its near-revolutionary collections of raw electric blues, is a masterpiece by nearly any estimation.
The idea, while not new, is ingenious nonetheless–it combine Burke’s many talents as a vocalist with the songs of some of the best songwriters on the planet (Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Van Morrison, Tom Waits, Brian Wilson, etc.), and then puts it all together in a down-home and spare musical package that allows Burke’s voice to shine through a subtly gritty mix of few instruments.
Every nuance, well-crafted by Burke after all those records and all those performances, comes through clearly and with the impact that only the best vocalists (regardless of style) can infuse.
Joe Henry, an indie darling whose song “Flesh and Blood” appears here, surrounds Burke with a quiet but never weak ensemble that provides fitting back-up for the sermons therein.
And what sermons they are. As great as Burke is, as great as the band sounds, the songwriting is the main reason that Don’t Give Up On Me is the triumph it is. This shouldn’t come as any surprise, given the fact that every song on the album, save one, was written specifically for this record by a heavyweight songwriter with scores of previous success. (Interestingly enough, that one exception, Rick Purnell’s album-closing “Sit This One Out,” is as successful as any song by the more “legendary” writers.)
The album opens quietly, with the title track a haunting and quietly insistent plea for forgiveness. The song’s writer, Dan Penn, is one of the very best R&B songwriters in history. An Arkansas white boy, he wrote or co-wrote innumerable soul classics, from “It Tears Me Up” to “Do Right Woman,” and this is another in a long line of masterpieces.
From there, we go to Van Morrison (who contributes two beautiful ballads, “Fast Train” and “Only A Dream,” both of which he has also recently released), Tom Waits (the benedictory “Diamond In Your Mind”), Brian Wilson (who’s never sounded as soulful as Burke makes his “Soul Searchin'”), Bob Dylan (Burke sings the blues on “Stepchild”), Nick Lowe (my choice for the best current white soul songwriter, with “Other Side of the Coin”) and ’60s pop mavens Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (“None of Us Are Free,” a blistering polemic on which Burke is joined by the equally righteous Blind Boys of Alabama).
In the middle of all this is Elvis Costello’s “The Judgment,” an operatic epic on which the church and the physical literally join together.
There are few music moments this year, or any year, for that matter, to compete with Burke’s delivery of lyrics like “If I done wrong and loved you too long, stand up and just testify!!”
These are the kind of words that Burke was born to say, and we can thank Costello (and his co-writer Cait O’Riordan) for placing them on his lips with such melody and grace.
As we move on into an ever-more-uncertain future, let us bask in the comforting glow of Solomon Burke, in all his somewhat-egotistical glory. Mr. Burke, the self-proclaimed “king of rock and soul,” may actually hold some claim to the title, and Don’t Give Up On Me certainly cements it.
Preach on, sir.
