美国国家公共电台 NPR One Wonders / Second Best Songs: Marlena Shaw And 'California（在线收听）

NOEL KING, HOST:

Sometimes a musician comes out of the gate with a really big hit but not Marlena Shaw. She recorded this song in 1969 and then waited for decades.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CALIFORNIA SOUL")

MARLENA SHAW: (Singing) Like a sound you hear that lingers in your ear, but you can't forget from sunrise to sunset.

KING: This is "California Soul." And today, it's a hit. Hip-hop producers have sampled it. It's been used in TV commercials. But Emily Lordi thinks there is a lot more to love about Marlena Shaw. Lordi has been researching soul music for a new book, and Marlena Shaw is her pick for our series One-Hit Wonders/Second-Best Songs.

EMILY LORDI: Marlena Shaw is a really extraordinary soul jazz singer. She was never quite as well known as she might have been, however, in part because she was hard to categorize.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CALIFORNIA SOUL")

SHAW: (Singing) California soul.

LORDI: "California Soul" is a cool song, but, like, its lyrics are kind of ridiculous. They don't really say anything except for, like, California's cool. People are in love, you know. It's almost insistently and buoyantly banal, particularly when we compare them to the lyrics of "Woman Of The Ghetto," which are really complex and layered and profoundly provocative.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WOMAN OF THE GHETTO")

SHAW: (Singing) I was born and raised in the ghetto. I was born and raised in the ghetto. I'm a woman of the ghetto. Listen to me, legislator.

LORDI: On the one hand, the song "Woman Of The Ghetto" offers a really powerful challenge to these reports that were coming out in the 1960s, often created by white urban sociologists who were talking about the conditions of the ghetto and kind of what was wrong with black America, often blaming black people themselves. And Marlena Shaw's song is remarkable in part because she speaks from the first-person perspective, and she's also speaking significantly from a woman's perspective, right? I am a woman of the ghetto. That matters, right? She's able to express concerns about domestic issues. How does somebody feed their children?

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WOMAN OF THE GHETTO")

SHAW: (Singing) How do you raise your kids in the ghetto? How do you raise your kids in the ghetto? Feed one child and starve another. Tell me, tell me, legislator. Chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain (ph).

LORDI: She's chanting. It's kind of chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain (ph). There's something really interesting about her decision to use those sounds. They're kind of suspended between the two words chain and change. In that way, the song, I think as a whole, is doing something really interesting, talking about conditions into which black people in the so-called inner city seem to be chained and then this potential for change and for movement and even transcendence beyond these conditions.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WOMAN OF THE GHETTO")

SHAW: (Singing) Strong, true, my eyes ain't blue. I am the woman of the ghetto.

LORDI: If we don't listen to that song, we're really going to miss a lot about what made her such an extraordinary vocalist and activist in her time.

KING: That was Emily Lordi. She's an English professor at Vanderbilt, and she's got a book coming out this summer called "The Meaning Of Soul." Marlena Shaw's "Woman Of The Ghetto" is her pick for our series One-Hit Wonders/Second-Best Songs.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WOMAN OF THE GHETTO")

SHAW: (Singing) Now, how do you...