Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power

The print size (font) is tiny. Excellent eye sight, or quality corrective lenses, will be a must to read this book. This buyer was shocked to see a $20.00 paperback with type nearly unreadable for some (many?) readers.

Aaron Cohen has done the impossible: he has written an exhaustive, scholarly work that is easy to read and which one doesn't want to put down. I finished it in a few days.Not only a book on music appreciation, Move On Up covers the underlying socio-cultural-political environment in which the music was being produced. Hence, it will appeal to a variety of readers.On the surface, Chicago may appear to be a diverse City. (i.e. It has had as many Polish people as Warsaw). Yet, not only were people of most ethnic backgrounds separate, there were (and are) institutional efforts, decisions, etc that directly led/lead to some of this separateness.The book is also a trip down memory lane for many of us. For example, the brief but descriptive reference to Old Town, a song about Lake Shore Drive, and the radio stations (yes, millenials, radio stations) we may have exclusively listened to or abhorred.

Chicago always gets short shrift when the history of Soul music is considered, inevitably being overlooked in favour of Detroit and Memphis. Given the quality of the city's music - and the fact Jerry Butler and the Impressions' 1958 classic "Your Precious Love" has a strong claim to being considered the first Soul record - this is something of an injustice, and one which Aaron Cohen's superb history of Chicago Soul from the fifties to the eighties sets out to redress.Cohen's hypothesis is that Chicago Soul owes its character to its ongoing dialectic with the communities from which the musicians emerged, and that it's much more closely linked to the community and its activities than Soul from other cities. As it's certainly more urbane than the sounds of Memphis, and less isolated from reality by showbiz glitz than Motown, this makes intuitive sense, and Cohen goes into considerable detail to provide the evidence for it. Consequently, his story (and his formidable primary and secondary research) takes account not just of singers, musicians and music biz types, but of politicians, community activists, entrepreneurs, business people and media figures. It's a rich, complex and fascinating portrayal of a dynamic and changing community between the 1950s and the 1980s, in which the impact of economic and social factors on artistic expression is clearly portrayed. Jerry Butler emerges as the emblematic figure, because he straddled many of the roles noted two sentences back.In his introduction, Cohen states that he wants to combine the strengths of academic and journalistic writing. He succeeds in this with considerable aplomb. From the former, he takes extensive (seven years in the making!) research and cautious, considered evaluation of the evidence, and from the latter, he takes focus and narrative drive. It's a very satisfying combination which grips and informs the reader in roughly equal measure.That said, readers who don't already know a little about the topic might find this very detailed book a little dry and hard to follow. I had to refer to the index a few times to remind me of who some of the less familiar non-musical names were, and it seems likely other readers may have to do the same. Cohen isn't particularly strong on vivid pen portraits of the individuals involved (his approach requires a certain distance from his subjects) and on the few occasions he tries he doesn't really bring the music to life. But these are minor criticisms, and serve more to highlight the areas that any successors to this excellent history need to move into as they build on this considerable legacy. This is a formidable book in every way and an essential read for anyone with an interest in the topic.

Amazing book, this really is a must read.