Carolina Soul & Consumer Culture
Tuesday, June 08 2010
by Frank Stasio and Lindsay Thomas
www.carolinasoul.org
In the 1960s and 1970s, African-Americans in the South could count on record stores in their neighborhoods to stock the latest R&B and soul music that white stores refused to carry. These black-owned businesses also served as informal community centers where people would gather to socialize and discuss issues of the day. In North Carolina, black music entrepreneurs like Curt Moore of Charlotte also recorded local artists on their own small, independent labels. Though the artists they signed rarely ever reached national celebrity, the music they left behind is a reflection of the times and of the close relationship between black record stores, black record labels and black radio in the Civil Rights era. This relationship has been noted by Jason Perlmutter and Joshua Clark Davis. Perlmutter is the founder of the Web site, www.carolinasoul.org, a unique discography of local soul music. Davis recently earned his Ph.D in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has researched the way Civil Rights battles of the 1960s affected black consumer culture in the next decade. Both join host Frank Stasio to talk about North Carolina’s little-known soul music legacy and the significance of the black-owned record store in the segregated South.
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