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| | The New York Review of Books: One Nation Under a Groove |
 | | The boogaloo is, or was, one of the thousand dances the land was full of in the 1960s, enumerated in inventory songs such as James Brown's "There Was a Time" and the Isley Brothers' "Nobody But Me": the skate, the swim, the pony, the monkey, the camelwalk, the shing-a-ling. |
| | Considerably more edifying is the story of George Clinton, once a barber from Plainfield, N.J., who nurtured a group called the Parliaments from his teenage years, through a brush-off by Motown (which employed Clinton briefly as a songwriter) and a single hit in the 1960s, "(I Wanna) Testify" (1967), to, finally, hitsville in the 1970s. |
| | But gospel created its own renegades, the first and best-known example being Ray Charles, who galvanized audiences beginning in the mid-1950s by taking nearly everything specific to gospel—the song form and the vocal style and the ragged, crying, handkerchief-waving passion —and applying it to strictly carnal ends. |
| www.nybooks.com /articles/16478 (3744 words) |
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