Better Get A Move On. Louise McCord. 1972. Gospel Truth Records.

 A few years ago I used to love watching a friend of mine working at her job as a karaoke hostess at a dive bar on the east side of Fort Worth. When singing, she’d sometimes lower her head slightly and, eyes closed, turn her face to the right, as if the note she was summoning was somewhere off in that direction. She’d then use her body to subtly mime a forward rocking motion and boom! Like a detonated projectile, the note was delivered. Written by Bettye Crutcher, the first female songwriter on staff at Stax Records, Better Get A Move On is the lead track off Louise McCord’s 1972 record, A Tribute To Mahalia Jackson, released on the Stax imprint Gospel Truth Records. It’s a deliciously tense R&B number about the perils of ignoring self-awareness, and McCord’s cautionary performance is haughty, authoritative, and sexy. You feel the fullness of her body behind every word of the lyric. The rich sensuality of her performance, and its shared pleasures—hers in giving it, ours in receiving it—give Crutcher’s lyric a moral dimension that’s a part of the song’s excitement. McCord sings, “Wasn’t me that touched your shoulder; it was death,” it becomes a pivotal moment because it shifts the lyric’s focus on what you may have assumed was the vocalist and an errant lover in need of correction to the vocalist and you and me. Known for her work with both James Cleveland and the Rance Allen Group, McCord’s mezzo-soprano is a brilliant example of the power of the American female voice before misogyny and sexual assault forced the politicization of women’s bodies. Twentieth century pop music is a history of the voice of the female body, and of our feeble attempts to hold its mystery before culture imposes its will to fantasy upon it in our catastrophic need to mechanize it into a dispensary of sexual desire. In 1985, Pauline Kael wrote of the Patsy Cline biopic, “Sweet Dreams…is a woman’s picture of a new kind—a feminist picture not because of any political attitudes but because its strong-willed heroine is a husky, physically happy woman who wants pleasure out of life. Lange’s Patsy Cline doesn’t have to talk about her art; we can see that she’s happiest and rowdiest and most fully alive when she sings…What the movie makes you feel is her lust for living.” Gospel singing satisfies that lust through religious ecstasy, which a secular audience can experience through an artist like the great Louise McCord.  It’s also how many Americans feel the illusion of freedom. 


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