Shawn Smith
The Diamond Hand
Gator/Sound Vs Silence; 2009
The musical term “blue-eyed soul” is one rife with conflict, as it typically is employed to refer to white folks with passionate vocals reminiscent of black singers belting out old-school R&B. On a good day, the expression can be used with affection to denote those white singers who manage to call upon traditionally black vocal forms artfully and reverentially. In other instances, for a critic to describe someone’s songs as “blue-eyed soul,” this is a death knell signaling the arrival of cheap, copycat music from someone whose voice and style is more than sub-par. Do we need to replace this often-misused idiom with something more generic, something that’s less racially divisive or should singers (and their record labels and PR people) simply embrace the term and belt their tunes out even more heartily?
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