Tastykakes, Soul Songs & Shining Stars

Fifty years of soul, rhythm and blues, and the record business from Joe McEwen—the Philadelphia critic who profiled the Staple Singers, George Clinton and Michael Jackson in the 1970s, then spent four decades as an A&R man signing Elvis Costello, Wilco, Nick Lowe and Queen Latifah. Joe McEwen grew up in Philadelphia and the near suburbs with two escape valves, a basketball and a radio, and a household he writes about here in a series of childhood vignettes—family dramas, teenage disquietude, and the soul, R&B, blues and jazz coming out of the speaker. He started writing about the music in and around his college years in Boston, for the Boston Phoenix and the Real Paper, and graduated to the Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He was still in his twenties when he contributed five chapters to the original Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll, wrote for Greil Marcus’s Stranded, and published Sam Cooke: The Man Who Invented Soul. Then, in 1978, he was hired at Columbia Records as an A&R rep—his first full-time job in the business that would be his home for the next four decades, through Sire/Warner Bros., Verve and Concord Music Group, working with Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, k.d. lang, Wilco, Nick Lowe, Shawn Colvin, Dinosaur Jr, Built to Spill, Tanya Tucker, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, Queen Latifah and the Frank Sinatra catalogue. Tastykakes, Soul Songs & Shining Stars gathers half a century of that double life into one collection. The profiles run from the 1970s to the present: the Staple Singers, Allen Toussaint, Michael Jackson, Joe Tex, George Clinton, Sam Cooke, Don Covay, Cissy Houston, Eddie Kendricks, Swamp Dogg, Betty Wright and Henry Stone in Miami, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff and Thom Bell in Philadelphia. Around them are shorter reveries on single records and the people who made them—Dennis Coffey’s “Scorpio,” the Four Tops’ “Baby, I Need Your Loving,” Laura Nyro, Pharoah Sanders, Lamont Dozier, Bunny Sigler, the Delfonics—and a section called Ball, on Moses Malone, Darryl Dawkins, Irv Cross and Caldwell Jones, because basketball and soul music are the same argument about rhythm, improvisation and grace conducted in two rooms. The book closes with “Baseball, Basketball and the Blues,” an extended 2024 conversation with Peter Guralnick, McEwen’s longtime friend and the great chronicler of this music, on where it came from and what it costs to bear witness to it.

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