I got back from Portland yesterday, my final destination and the place I was looking forward to the most. The theme of this trip: soul. 

The first night I got there, my beautiful friend Jude, a badass bartender around town, sent me this text: "One of my bars is looking for a new night to do...I'm thinking 70's soul...Would you be interested?" My response: "YES." And then I realized, I don't really know anything about 70's soul, or any soul for that matter, besides the bits and pieces I've heard on mix tapes. 

That next day, I spent a couple hours getting lost on the Internet, looking up key words, basically on safari through the vast terrain that is Wikipedia. 

"According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, soul is 'music that arose out of the black experience in America through the transmutation of gospel and rhythm & blues into a form of funky, secular testifying.' Catchy rhythms, stressed by handclaps and extemporaneous body moves, are an important feature of soul music. Other characters are a call and response between the soloist and the chorus, and an especially tense vocal sound. The style also occasionally uses improvisational additions, twirls and auxiliary sounds." 

Handclaps and "call and response," in my brain, equals Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Bobby Womack, Etta James, Little Richard, Ray Charles, James Brown, Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, The Staple Singers, Percy Sledge, James Carr, Al Green, Marvin Gaye. The list is endless. But what about the more obscure soul spectrum? Usually things considered "obscure" are tricky to discover online, and require a more investigative approach.

That same night, I discovered that my friend Nick Waterhouse was DJing a soul night in Portland. Super random, but eerily on point with what was going on in my head. Nick and his band, the Tarots, are a flashback to the good days of rhythm and blues and jazz and soul, when music sounded real, simple yet robust, complete with backup singers (the Naturelles). And they wear suits when they perform. Very classy shit. His record collection is out of fucking control. We met up that night, before his set, and talked about soul. I told him about my potential DJ night, and showed him my list that I started compiling of artists, and he turned me on to Jasper Woods. 

Jasper Woods - "Hully Gully Papa"

Just listen to that song. Nick has excellent taste.

The next day, I went to my favorite record store in the world, Mississippi Records. Although the shop itself is really small, it's impeccably curated, especially their soul and blues sections. I bought six records: Bo Diddley's Have Guitar Will Travel, Chrissy Zebby Tembo's My Ancestors, Muddy Waters' After the Rain, At Home With Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Lightning Hopkins' Dirty Blues, and Long John Hunter's Ooh Wee Pretty Baby!, whose song "I Don't Care" is my favorite of all the songs off all the LPs that I bought. 

Long John Hunter - "I Don't Care"

And then, of course, I bought a mix tape, the thing Mississippi is infamous for. The tape is a compilation of "early soul," titled I Learned It All The Hard Way. I'll do a full write-up of the tape tomorrow when I have more time. 

The end.