Disc S Style Quotes

In matters of style, swim with the current. In matters of principle, stand like a rock. —Thomas Jefferson

Grace adored Amelia. The older woman was a close friend of her grandmother and mother, and a constant in Grace's life. She visited Amelia often. The inn was her second home. As a child she'd always raced up the stairs and raided Amelia's bedroom closet, and Amelia had encouraged her unconventional behavior. Grace had loved dressing up in vintage clothing. Attempting to walk up in a pair of high button shoes. Amelia was the first to recognize Grace's love of costume. Her enjoyment of tea parties. She'd supported Grace's dream of opening her business, Charade, when Grace sought a career. From birthdays to holidays, the costume shop was popular and successful. Grace couldn't have been happier. She admired Amelia now. Her long, braided hair was the same soft gray as her eyes. Years accumulated, but never seemed to touch her. She appeared youthful, ageless, in a sage-green tunic, belted over a paisley gauze skirt in shades of cranberry, green, and gold. Elaborate gold hoops hung at her ears, ones designed with silver beads and tiny gold bells. The thin metal chains on her three-tiered necklace sparkled with lavender rhinestones and reflective mirror discs. Bangles of charms looped her wrist. A thick, hammered-silver bracelet curved near her right elbow. A triple gold ring with three pearls arched from her index finger to her fourth. She sparkled.

Now Mrs. Retallack wondered how the effects of what she called "intellectual mathematically sophisticated music of both East and West" would appeal to plants. As program director for the American Guild of Organists, she chose choral preludes from Johann Sebastian Bach's Orgelbuchlein and the classical strains of the sitar, a less-com­ plicated Hindustani version of the south Indian veena, played by Ravi Shankar, the Bengali Brahmin. The plants gave positive evidence of liking Bach, since they leaned an unprecedented thirty-five degrees toward the preludes. But even this affirmation was far exceeded by their reaction to Shankar: in their straining to reach the source of the classical Indian music they bent more than halfway to the horizontal, at angles in excess of sixty degrees, the nearest one almost embracing the speaker. In order not to be swayed by her own special taste for the classical music of both hemispheres Mrs. Retallack, at the behest of hundreds of young people, followed Bach and Shankar with trials of folk and "country-western" music. Her plants seemed to produce no more reac­tion than those in the silent chamber. Perplexed, Mrs. Retallack could only ask: "Were the plants in complete harmony with this kind of earthy music or didn't they care one way or the other?" Jazz caused her a real surprise. When her plants heard recordings as varied as Duke Ellington's "Soul Call" and two discs by Louis Arm­ strong, 5 5 percent of the plants leaned fifteen to twenty degrees toward the speaker, and growth was more abundant than in the silent chamber. Mrs. Retallack also determined that these different musical styles markedly affected the evaporation rate of distilled water inside the chambers. From full beakers, fourteen to seventeen milliliters evapo­rated over a given time period in the silent chambers, twenty to twenty­ five milliliters vaporized under the influence of Bach, Shankar, and jazz; but, with rock, the disappearance was fifty-five to fifty-nine milliliters.

What it is, coming out of and entering into all of those people in a swirl of transubstantiation, is soul music, here taking a shape so stark that it makes the style, in the deepest sense of the word, turn around the record as if that seven-inch disc were the sun, with the first, struggling attempts in the 1950s to discover the music—Ray Charles’s “What Would I Do Without You,” the Chantels’ “If You Try,” the Five Keys’ “Dream On”—and the deep-soul records of the mid-’60s that can seem to take the style, now a form, as far as it could go—Irma Thomas’s “Wish Someone Would Care,” Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” and Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” Lonnie Mack’s “Why,” most of all Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna come”—the planets that circle it. And because soul music is the limitless affirmation of the individual despite his or her past sins and all obstacles in his or her way, an affirmation that remains even in the moment before suicide, as it can seem to be in “Wish Someone Would Care” and “Why,” each of these records can, in the moment in which you hear them, be the sun, and all the rest, “This Magic Moment” spinning with them, again mere planets, maybe even, someday, should they ever fade, and their lies speak more loudly than whatever truths they tell, written out of the book and taken down from the sky, like Pluto—except that once a song has gone into the ether, it never disappears.

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