I am certainly not qualified to talk about music. I simply listen to what I like and in general couldn’t tell you who is singing or what the song is about. But being 75 years old I heard this song when it came out and never thought it was “soul” or that they sounded “black”. Is this some kind of revisionist music history or something? I don’t listen to music because of the singers race and to do so seems odd if not racist.
OldFertJanuary 6, 2019, 10:36 AM
Wait until the young fellow runs into Charlie Pride. Or Darius Rucker’s post-Hootie stuff if you don’t want to go back that far. Don’t forget Isaac Hayes singing “by the time I get to Phoenix.”
IIRC, the Righteous Brothers got their name from a guy in one of the clubs in which they were playing. ‘Twas a black guy (maybe from a black group) who heard them and commented “you guys sound righteous.”
OldFertJanuary 6, 2019, 10:39 AM
Should’ve read Neo’s post first…
…According to Medley [the bass-baritone of the duo], they then adopted the name “The Righteous Brothers” for the duo because black Marines from the El Toro Marine base started calling them “righteous brothers”. At the end of a performance, a black U.S. Marine in the audience would shout, “That was righteous, brothers!”, and would greet them with “Hey righteous brothers, how you doin’?” on meeting them.
When I was a kid my mom would go jitterbugging all over the house dustin’, moppin’, wipin’, stirrin’, with the radio turned up and singin’ right along with whatever was playing, and us kids would follow and mimic her and laugh.
The radio dood (gasp, yes, dood, they were all doods back then) never said whether anybody was black, white, whatever, and nobody really cared. If it sounded good just listen to it, if you didn’t like it, well that’s what that 2nd biggest knob on the front of the AM radio was for.
Jake was hereJanuary 6, 2019, 8:58 PM
If anything, it’s a sad comment (as someone at Neo’s said) on the way popular music in America has been balkanized and crippled. Now we expect whites to sing one way and blacks another, when we had no such ideas in our heads sixty years ago… The same guy did a video where he watched Living Colour’s “Cult of Personality” and had his mind blown when he realized the band was black; an African American heavy-metal band seemed far less weird back in 1988 than it does in 2018, and that seems to me to be a step back.
SLMJanuary 6, 2019, 9:06 PM
Coincidence – I ran across this same clip two nights ago and shared it with my wife. We watched his reaction to Chuck Berry, too, and he says he always thought Berry was white.
Yes. The first song I heard Eva sing was Bridge Over Troubled Waters. I thought she was black. It was absolutely the best version I’ve ever heard. But this: https://youtu.be/KzEL-pVqs3g
ghostsniperJanuary 7, 2019, 12:11 PM
I never thought of the Righteous Brothers as anything but what they are. They sound “black”? Really? They don’t to me.
Couple weeks ago I turned the tube on late at night to PBS3 and that Amanpour woman was on there interviewing a negro couple, man and wife. I had neither seen nor heard of that couple before. There was nothing remarkable about either, both were dressed casually and nice. As the interview went on I found that the husband was a retired pro baseball player and the wife was an R&B singer, both very successful. They spoke of their children, one was 16 and the other 11, and trials and errors of raising them in today’s world, the various things both are involved with in their day to day lives, and how their marriage has endured for almost 20 years. Nothing seemingly “unusual” at all. Quite normal. In a white world.
They both spoke and looked white, except for their skin color. I listened close. They did not sound black. Not even in the nuances. Not in the ending of words. Nothing in their speech indicated they were black.
I believe it would require an unbalanced person to have hateful thoughts about this couple based on my brief study of them, simply because they are of a different race than them. Further, I don’t believe most balanced white would have no problem with this couple living next door to them, even having them over for cook outs and other things friendly neighbors engage in.
When there is discussion about racial issues in the US I don’t believe the issues are about people like those I seen in that interview. Basically, that couple blends in nicely with the fabric of what it means to be an American. They can go into any restaurant, and business, any anything and they will be treated as a human being should. It is how they present themselves, which is an exterior view of how they think of themselves. As far as the majority of the american people this couple was just one more piece of the pie.
ghostsniperJanuary 7, 2019, 12:14 PM
Jeez, I need to put Miss Olive on the payroll as proof reader.
“Further, I don’t believe most balanced white would have a problem with this couple living next door to them…”
Blondi UtronkiJanuary 7, 2019, 12:18 PM
Jewell, Me too!
JackJanuary 8, 2019, 12:31 PM
His comparison to the Temps is great and I agree but I never thought, even for a second, that the Righteous Brothers sounded black.
What I don’t agree with is that so many potentially great black singers….since we’ve always got to distinguish between black and white….slipped out of the singing and slud over to “rap”. Rap is nothing more than black anger expressed in bad rhythm and rhyme.
RickJanuary 8, 2019, 1:36 PM
I’ve run across a lot of this type of video and admit to being baffled by them. I don’t need a play by play announcer to listen to music. Another one I run across is unknown vocal coaches reviewing music by famous artists. Why should any of us care about this guys reaction? I sure don’t.
Heard an interview (WFUV, NYC) with John Mellencamp explaining why he releases so few CDs now: The money’s in concerts, not record sales. The concentration of ownership of city radio results in using prepackaged soundtracks: city radio stations mostly play “urban music”, ie rap. He’s too white for airtime.
I guess my take on these videos is (mostly) I am pleased to see and hear young people discover classic old music, without regard to race.
The race thing is mildly interesting too, I guess, if we have to go there; but it does suggest we have gone backwards. I don’t recall thinking too much about such things – Duke Ellington’s quote that there’s only two kinds of music, good music and the other kind, works for me.
CallmelennieJanuary 11, 2019, 5:53 PM
I didn’t for a moment think the Righteous Bros were white. I always thought they were just another great Motown act. I was shocked the first time I saw pictures of them\
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
— WH Auden
TWAIN IN TESLA’S LABORATORY
from “Chimes of Freedom”
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
The painter stood Before her work She looked around every where She saw the pictures and she painted them She picked the colors from the air Green to green Red to red Yellow to yellow In the light Black to black When the evening comes Blue to blue In the night
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Search American Digest’s Back Pages
Contemplation of the Sword
Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
formerly used to kill men, but here
In the sense of a symbol. The sword: that is: the storms
and counter-storms of general destruction; killing
of men,
Destruction of all goods and materials; massacre, more or
less intentional, of children and women;
Destruction poured down from wings, the air made accomplice,
the innocent air
Perverted into assassin and poisoner.
The sword: that is: treachery and cowardice, incredible
baseness, incredible courage, loyalties, insanities.
The sword: weeping and despair, mass-enslavement,
mass-torture, frustration of all hopes
That starred man’s forehead. Tyranny for freedom, horror for
happiness, famine for bread, carrion for children.
Reason will not decide at last, the sword will decide.
from Preludes
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
from Canto CXV BY EZRA POUND
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Ferreya
ARTIST: GIBSON
Edwin Deakin, American
Hillegas
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “Chimes of Freedom”
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
Gerard Van der Leun
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
The scientists are in terror
Comments on this entry are closed.
I am certainly not qualified to talk about music. I simply listen to what I like and in general couldn’t tell you who is singing or what the song is about. But being 75 years old I heard this song when it came out and never thought it was “soul” or that they sounded “black”. Is this some kind of revisionist music history or something? I don’t listen to music because of the singers race and to do so seems odd if not racist.
Wait until the young fellow runs into Charlie Pride. Or Darius Rucker’s post-Hootie stuff if you don’t want to go back that far. Don’t forget Isaac Hayes singing “by the time I get to Phoenix.”
IIRC, the Righteous Brothers got their name from a guy in one of the clubs in which they were playing. ‘Twas a black guy (maybe from a black group) who heard them and commented “you guys sound righteous.”
Should’ve read Neo’s post first…
…According to Medley [the bass-baritone of the duo], they then adopted the name “The Righteous Brothers” for the duo because black Marines from the El Toro Marine base started calling them “righteous brothers”. At the end of a performance, a black U.S. Marine in the audience would shout, “That was righteous, brothers!”, and would greet them with “Hey righteous brothers, how you doin’?” on meeting them.
May I say it?? It’s okay to be white.
Is everything about race now?
When I was a kid my mom would go jitterbugging all over the house dustin’, moppin’, wipin’, stirrin’, with the radio turned up and singin’ right along with whatever was playing, and us kids would follow and mimic her and laugh.
The radio dood (gasp, yes, dood, they were all doods back then) never said whether anybody was black, white, whatever, and nobody really cared. If it sounded good just listen to it, if you didn’t like it, well that’s what that 2nd biggest knob on the front of the AM radio was for.
If anything, it’s a sad comment (as someone at Neo’s said) on the way popular music in America has been balkanized and crippled. Now we expect whites to sing one way and blacks another, when we had no such ideas in our heads sixty years ago… The same guy did a video where he watched Living Colour’s “Cult of Personality” and had his mind blown when he realized the band was black; an African American heavy-metal band seemed far less weird back in 1988 than it does in 2018, and that seems to me to be a step back.
Coincidence – I ran across this same clip two nights ago and shared it with my wife. We watched his reaction to Chuck Berry, too, and he says he always thought Berry was white.
He should hear Eva Cassidy.
Yes. The first song I heard Eva sing was Bridge Over Troubled Waters. I thought she was black. It was absolutely the best version I’ve ever heard. But this:
https://youtu.be/KzEL-pVqs3g
I never thought of the Righteous Brothers as anything but what they are. They sound “black”? Really? They don’t to me.
Couple weeks ago I turned the tube on late at night to PBS3 and that Amanpour woman was on there interviewing a negro couple, man and wife. I had neither seen nor heard of that couple before. There was nothing remarkable about either, both were dressed casually and nice. As the interview went on I found that the husband was a retired pro baseball player and the wife was an R&B singer, both very successful. They spoke of their children, one was 16 and the other 11, and trials and errors of raising them in today’s world, the various things both are involved with in their day to day lives, and how their marriage has endured for almost 20 years. Nothing seemingly “unusual” at all. Quite normal. In a white world.
They both spoke and looked white, except for their skin color. I listened close. They did not sound black. Not even in the nuances. Not in the ending of words. Nothing in their speech indicated they were black.
I believe it would require an unbalanced person to have hateful thoughts about this couple based on my brief study of them, simply because they are of a different race than them. Further, I don’t believe most balanced white would have no problem with this couple living next door to them, even having them over for cook outs and other things friendly neighbors engage in.
When there is discussion about racial issues in the US I don’t believe the issues are about people like those I seen in that interview. Basically, that couple blends in nicely with the fabric of what it means to be an American. They can go into any restaurant, and business, any anything and they will be treated as a human being should. It is how they present themselves, which is an exterior view of how they think of themselves. As far as the majority of the american people this couple was just one more piece of the pie.
Jeez, I need to put Miss Olive on the payroll as proof reader.
“Further, I don’t believe most balanced white would have a problem with this couple living next door to them…”
Jewell, Me too!
His comparison to the Temps is great and I agree but I never thought, even for a second, that the Righteous Brothers sounded black.
What I don’t agree with is that so many potentially great black singers….since we’ve always got to distinguish between black and white….slipped out of the singing and slud over to “rap”. Rap is nothing more than black anger expressed in bad rhythm and rhyme.
I’ve run across a lot of this type of video and admit to being baffled by them. I don’t need a play by play announcer to listen to music. Another one I run across is unknown vocal coaches reviewing music by famous artists. Why should any of us care about this guys reaction? I sure don’t.
Heard an interview (WFUV, NYC) with John Mellencamp explaining why he releases so few CDs now: The money’s in concerts, not record sales. The concentration of ownership of city radio results in using prepackaged soundtracks: city radio stations mostly play “urban music”, ie rap. He’s too white for airtime.
I guess my take on these videos is (mostly) I am pleased to see and hear young people discover classic old music, without regard to race.
The race thing is mildly interesting too, I guess, if we have to go there; but it does suggest we have gone backwards. I don’t recall thinking too much about such things – Duke Ellington’s quote that there’s only two kinds of music, good music and the other kind, works for me.
I didn’t for a moment think the Righteous Bros were white. I always thought they were just another great Motown act. I was shocked the first time I saw pictures of them\