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Waking Up to the Sound

At a recent party celebrating a friend’s eighty-second birthday, his “smart” television, running the Pandora app (rather tech-savvy, this octogenarian), played Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’s “Wake Up Everybody” from the album of the same name released by Philadelphia International Records in 1975. This mid-tempo R&B classic—opening with piano glissandos, punctuated by guitar plucks and strums, and propelled by dynamic strings—displays the talents of the songwriting team of Gene McFadden and John Whitehead with Victor Carstarphen, the ingenuity of producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, and the powerhouse vocals of Teddy Pendergrass. The song opens by alerting listeners—of all races, presumably, women as well as men—to national and world problems: “hatred, war, and poverty.” Its chorus expresses dissatisfaction with the status quo and the passive acceptance of it—“The world won’t get no better / If we just let it be”—even if the song does not argue for a reworking of social, political, and economic structures. Rather than call out those in positions of power, each verse calls on a category of workers—“teachers,” “doctors,” “builders”—perhaps asserting the ability of those addressees and of individuals to make a difference in their local communities, the nation, and the world: “We got to change it, yeah / Just you and me.” Hearing the song triggered memories of my inner-city childhood during the 1970s, including a sense of solidarity in the black community, an awareness of the challenges facing us linked to a confidence that we were all working together as best as we could to confront them. The historical era from which “Wake Up Everybody” dates, the decade following the legislative gains of the modern civil rights movement, is significant to recent studies of US literature. In 2011,