"More Meaningful Than a Three-Hour Lecture": Music On Soul!, 1968-73

Unlike the better remembered Soul Train, Soul! was a public broadcasting program that explicitly envisioned black music as a tool of consciousness raising for black and brown viewers who were infrequently, if ever, the subject of television's address. The show hosted the national TV debuts of such luminaries as Roberta Flack and Earth, Wind and Fire, and it gave musicians like Curtis Mayfield opportunities to host, and thus to display their depth as artist-intellectuals of Black Power. Professor Wald explores how the program represented music through the examples of remarkable performances by jazz legend Rahsaan Roland Kirk and neo-girl group Labelle.

Gayle Wald is Professor of English and American Studies at George Washington University and the author of Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in 20th-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Duke UP, 2000), Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Beacon Press, 2007), and, most recently, It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television (Duke UP, 2015). A recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, Wald has published widely in both scholarly and popular media. She is, with Oliver Wang, co-editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies.