Each book in the long-running 33 1/3 series is supposed to be about a single record, but Emily Lordi’s 2016 entry, Donny Hathaway Live, does a little more: she calls it a “praise song” for the soul icon’s 1972 live album, but it’s also about his relationship with live performance in general.
But Lordi doesn’t care to perpetuate the posthumous image of Hathaway as a sort of soul-music Van Gogh. In Donny Hathaway Live she stresses the intimate political and social connections he tried to create with his audiences, challenging the idea of Hathaway as a sort of tortured, idiosyncratic loner. Lordi probably couldn’t have avoided biography while writing about a man who’s never before been the subject of a nonfiction book, but her concerns tend more toward the religious and communitarian power of soul: “Insofar as soul music unmoored a spiritual experience of community from institutionalized religion,” she writes, “it allowed people to make their own church in a secular space.” Her detailed, friendly conversation with Betts touched on topics such as black masculinity, the ties between soul music and racial liberation, and the underrecognized experimentalism of soul singers.
As Lordi offered her sermon on a complicated man who lived for music and the people who love it, adherents of Hathaway’s gospel could find a new way to listen. After the talk, almost the entire audience stuck around to chat with Lordi, Betts, or both—and eventually ended up talking to one another. Lovers of music and words, professional and amateur, had come together to appreciate a man who valued the same kind of comfort and intimacy that the event created. Nadine McKinnor, cowriter of “This Christmas,” was in attendance, though she didn’t tell anybody who she was until after the talk. She’d been sitting quietly, listening to Lordi and Betts discuss the song she’d written with Hathaway almost 50 years ago.
