Higher and Higher

He had the greatest voice of his generation, and it bought him almost nothing.

Jackie Wilson could do things with a melody that Elvis and Sam Cooke openly envied: leap an octave inside a word, hold a whole room on a single held note, turn a two-minute pop single into an aria. Between 1957 and 1975 he put record after record onto the American charts. He was copied by everyone, from Elvis to a small boy in Gary named Michael Jackson, and credited by almost no one. He collapsed on stage in the middle of "Lonely Teardrops" and died broke and silent eight years later, while the men who had studied him became the richest entertainers on earth.

He was also, at the height of it, something almost nobody noticed and no one has ever explained: a Black Baptist choirboy from Detroit who quietly converted to Judaism, told no one why, and left barely a trace of how. The reference books shrug and call it a publicity stunt. This book takes it seriously.

Higher and Higher reads Wilson's catalogue one record at a time, and sets each of twenty-seven essential recordings out like a page of Talmud: the song in the centre, and around it the craft, the world it landed in, the man, and the afterlife. It follows the reaching upward that runs through everything he sang, from the gospel of the Detroit church choir to the Psalms of ascent, and asks what happens when the most gifted voice American music ever produced is finally listened to as closely as it deserves.

A song-by-song critical study in the tradition of Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head.