Daryl Hall On Blue-Eyed Soul Music

Sound Clip: Hall & Oates “Private Eyes”

Host: “It’s funny. Every time I hear that song I have this flashback, this image. It’s the 1980s. I’m in the back of a station wagon. Somebody’s mom is driving. She’s rocking the big sunglasses. The tunes are blaring on the radio. I digress, but back to Daryl Hall. He sat down with Josh Baron who’s the editor in chief of Relix Magazine. From that interview, that conversation, we hear Daryl Hall talking about blue-eyed soul. If you haven’t heard that term before: Blue-eyed soul. It’s distinctly American. It’s race. It’s religion. It’s music all rolled into one. Hall getting into all this while talking about his upbringing in 1960s Philadelphia. This is Blank on blank.
Daryl Hall: “I grew up singing gospel music and doing all that. I got three preachers in my family. I grew up in the church. I lost my religion a long time ago, but I didn’t lose that part of my religion. And that is the spiritual soul thing that happens. And it’s just a little bit of testifying about… it’s usually just a stream of consciousness stuff that I do at the end of songs, which is very much in the gospel and soul tradition. That’ s where you learn it from. It’s church theater in a lot of ways. Your first audience is the congregation, you really learn timing, you learn about how to bring things down out of God knows where, and testify really, speak your peace.”

Clip: Hall & Oates “Rich Girl”

Josh Baron: “You talked about just now about how you always considered yourself a soul singer. One of the terms that was applied to you and John’s music early on was blue-eyed soul. And I interviewed Bill Medley a couple years ago and I think the Righteous Brothers were the first act to be labeled with blue-eyed soul. Bill talked about they ran into some into issues or problems occasionaly when DJs or promoters discovered they were white.”

Hall: “American music has always been this thing of interplay between African and European influences. That’s the core of American music. The way it goes back and forth on both sides is where the vitality is. Some people do it better than other people. And that confused people every once and awhile. People like the Righteous Brothers early on, they were really singing soul music, real soul music. So that confused a lot of people and they didn’t know what label to put on that. Sort of put what I thought was a racist label. You know you don’t call a somebody a brown-eyed opera singer, if they’re a diva in opera and they happen to be black. It’s all about the interplay. It’s always been here since the dawn of America, since the 1600’s. Anyway, it’s one of those things… I come from Philadelphia, I come from all that. I grew up with all that. I grew up in a very racially integrated and musically integrated music scene. It was my baby food and it defines me. I don’t think about it, it’s just the kind of music I make.

Sound Clip: Hall & Oates “Sarah”

Host: That was Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates on Blue Eyed Soul. And this is Blank on Blank. I want to thank Josh Baron again, the editor in chief of Relix Magazine for adding his interview to the archive. To hear more interviews you can hear nowhere else, head over to blankonblank.org.