Since 2010, Tom Ashburn has been playing “Down-home Southern Soul from the heyday of Memphis, Nashville, and Muscle Shoals” on his Dark End of the Street show. We spoke on October 29.
Michael A. Brown: How did you choose the “Southern Soul” genre for your show?
Tom Ashburn: I’ve liked it all my life and nobody else plays it, certainly not as a format. With the exception of Respect, Dock of the Bay, and Soul Man, most of this music would be lost to history. It comes from an era where soul music was regional. I grew up in the Washington, DC area but also heard music from places like Philly, plus some southern stuff. My mother was from Yazoo City, MS, so in the summer in the ‘60s, we used to drive down there to see all our cousins. My father was from Dallas, so we’d continue from Mississippi to Dallas, and I noticed a big contrast between what we heard in the deep south and what we heard in Texas. And I liked it all.
MAB: What are the differences between the music you play and the “strictly urban format” you mention in your show description?
TA: There is a period in the music I play with a distinct country element to it … blues, gospel, and country. It’s no accident that the main producers in the south, Jim Stewart at Stax, Rick Hall at Muscle Shoals, and Chips Moman at American Sound Studios all played in country bands. So there was always a little “twang” in their music, whereas motown was much more “pop”-oriented.
Another difference is that motown was always on the beat … The Four Tops’ “sugar pie honey bunch” for example. But the southern soul is a little behind the beat, where the horns come in … or where Otis Redding would do his “oohs and ahhs.” It was more laid back than motown. And local musical styles had their differences, too. In Chicago, I think they just took a blues band and put a horn section behind it and called it “soul.”
I like to feature house bands on the show, because a lot of the soon-to-be big names … genuine talents … started in them or with them. And the southern recording studios welcomed them. So if a singer showed up on the right day, their backup band could be the same as Aretha Franklin or Wilson Pickett got … musicians like The Swampers and Booker T and the MGs. Hey, American Studios produced 120 top releases by those performers, and I play their music.
MAB: What was R&B radio like in the ‘60s and early ’70s?
TA: In the ’60s, a lot of soul music made its way from strictly R&B stations into the Top 40. If it was a hit, it got played. And there were a couple radio stations in particular that featured soul. In the south, WLAC in Nashville was a 50,000 watt clear channel AM station that in the evening and at night blanketed about 2/3 of the country. They had DJs like Gene Nobles, Hoss Allen, and John Richbourg, who all transitioned from playing blues to playing soul. And as John R said, he didn’t play the hits, he made the hits, as he did with Otis Redding’s These Arms of Mine.
MAB: What sort of exposure did Black entertainers have and not have on mainstream radio in those days?
TA: Again, it was very regional. Memphis had stations that would play them all. In Pensacola, FL, Papa Don Schroeder on WBSR would play them all. But a lot of places, especially in the rural south, had only a gospel station and a country station that played no soul music. In DC, we got a smattering of all of it because of the large African-American population and the radio stations that served them.
Significantly, the exposure also depended on where the performers came from and where they wound up. For example, when Washington DJ Al Bell was brought in to run Stax Records in Memphis, he brought lots of DC talent with him … people like Eddie Floyd and Ruby Johnson. But record producers in New York and LA still thought of Memphis and the south as backwater areas that they didn’t need to cater to. But the so-called Second Migration was changing that. Rural southern Blacks were moving to the industrial centers of the north and to the mid-Atlantic states. Alabama folks were going to Cleveland and Mississippi folks to Chicago. All the Temptations were from Alabama and Mississippi, not Detroit. Wilson Pickett was from Alabama. Interestingly, Louisiana and Texas Blacks headed for LA and Oakland, often for defense industry jobs. When all those people got to their new locations, that created ready markets for the kinds of southern music they played and listeners enjoyed. But in the late ‘60s, things changed again, especially after Dr. King was killed. After that, many northern DJs wouldn’t play southern music … they said they wanted music that was more “sophisticated.”
MAB: How did the increasing numbers of FM stations affect the kind of music you play now?
TA: It didn’t exist on FM radio. At that time, radio was a single-recording format, not an album format. There were no “concept” albums with long cuts on FM, merely collections of singles.
MAB: What was TV’s effect on soul and motown popularity – especially that of American Bandstand?
TA: Bandstand was big and important! Dick Clark made sure we got to see and hear James Brown, Solomon Burke, Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Joe Simon, the Staple Singers, Johnny Taylor, Rufus Thomas, and more. Lots of soul music exposure.
MAB: Are there Austin venues where listeners can hear live southern soul music?
TA: The best-known is C-Boy’s Heart and Soul on South Congress. Not specifically what I play, but definitely soul music.
MAB: What’s coming up on your next couple Dark End of the Street episodes?
TA: Well, I know the song I’ll play to start the shows, but after that I’m not really sure. (We laugh.)
You can enjoy Dark End of the Street with Tom Ashburn every Tuesday at 11am.
Interview by Michael A. Brown