William DeVaughn’s “Be Thankful for What You Got”: the song, and the whole album of the same name. I start it at the three-way intersection near home, running in place as I do out of superstition and while waiting for the sparse traffic to clear, wanting to hear the sound of the record without thinking of the lyrics, or even of the title of the song, and I laugh through my mask—a bandanna—when its message sinks in.
The song comes from the flash years of Philadelphia soul when that intent, upholstered music—of strings, horns, vibraphones, electric pianos or organs, alert drumming, and singers’ calls for consolation and respect—built a standard of American pop music, at least on the East Coast. Those songs were among the first I came to recognize when I started listening to AM radio.
But this is a scaled-down version of Philly soul—no strings, no horns—and anyway DeVaughn was a visitor to Philly soul: he worked as a civil engineering technician for the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority, designing infrastructure. The three-quarter-face depiction of DeVaughn on his album cover shows him in thought, holding a pencil in his left hand; he could be writing a song, but he could also be drawing a sewer. He paid for his own initial recording of “Be Thankful” with a Philadelphia producer, who then developed it further into a radio hit, DeVaughn’s only one.
The message of “Be Thankful” first speaks into life car-pleasures, car-status, car-desire: a Cadillac with “gangsta whitewalls, TV antennas in the back.” The brown cover of the album it appears on, that particular shade of brown, suggests a brown car from that time, 1974, maybe a Ford Gran Torino. And then the message turns, making the car not particularly special, just relative to other pleasures, another consolation among many. Magically, DeVaughn removes the object of desire: a car song about how cars are beside the point. (The line that grips you is “You may not have a car at all.”)
When I run with music, I know I’ll be listening for a while, without stopping, into the unforeseen future, and so I find it easy to listen in larger expanses. Considering “messages,” I realize the record is full of them. The MFSB house rhythm section at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound Studios—Earl Young / Rusty Jackman / Larry Washington / Vince Montana, and the rhythm guitarist Norman Harris, with his pulsing details, little jets in the offbeats—amount to the sound of highly practiced imprecision. All of them complement and protect one another’s sound. (Blood responsibility was part of the ethos of the musicians, a position greater than the sounds they made: MFSB stood for Mother, Father, Sister, Brother.)
This record is, up to a point, “another record,” of a type. It’s not set against the market. DeVaughn’s vocal performance sounds a bit derivative, particularly of Curtis Mayfield. But the protective impulse spreading through its musicianship also moves outward, which is to say it wants to take care of the listener: it instinctively does more than the minimum to instill some strength in you and help you keep moving. If we can anthropomorphize the song, in a limited way—I’m all right with it—somehow the song knows its reach will be limited, and nevertheless it is trying to reach well, because what are we here for? We imagine a future and make efforts to reach it. DeVaughn’s message isn’t particularly religious; it sounds pre-religious. This record represents realistic goals and limited means.
Limited means might be useful for any sort of daily practice. In a daily practice you might as well be satisfied with who you are each day, because who you are is really all you have—or, rather, the degree to which you recognize your ongoingness is all you have. I stretch for fifteen minutes and go. I’d prefer that the equipment didn’t matter. Twice a year, I buy a new pair of training shoes made by a US company, whose colors are a shame. (Lucky are the sprinters, who get to wear bright, vivid colors.) I run with neutral movements—meaning that at some point after the normal sideways roll of the striking foot, the whole width of my forefoot comes in full contact with the ground—and switch between two different types of shoes for neutral runners. I wear socks until they rip. Generally, I keep only two of everything else: shorts, long pants, jackets.
I use earphones made by a Danish company, which I like mostly because I know they won’t fall out of me, and a Velcro arm-holster thing for my phone. I could carry music more easily through a special watch that could also measure other physical data, but I don’t want a watch for that. I don’t want to know the data. I’d rather be inefficient while checking in with the ongoingness. The acknowledgment of my ongoingness should be unclocked and inefficient—lest it turn, somehow, into an optimizing force, or worse yet, an acknowledgment of my uniqueness. Listening might help. After all, listening is the opposite of holding forth on one’s uniqueness.
But listening is not passive. What’s passive is the subset of hearing that could be called dishearkening, the kind of thing a lot of people do around music designed for backgrounds. Here’s what I figure: if you are ready to really listen to William DeVaughn—to really listen in a way that perhaps you have not done before, to his intent, to what he implied as well as to what he sang—then you are far more likely to also be listening to your own expanded present, a present with some past and some future.
And so as I move forward around the field, I work with DeVaughn’s music by putting my own sensibility next to it, or by working in its gaps, or by responding in kind. I persist, moving at a medium pace, trying to remember who I am and what my limitations are—I don’t train, I don’t race, I don’t run marathons, I can’t be twenty again—and mostly trying to feel whole. (Patience and highly practiced imprecision, I remind myself, like MFSB.)
Certain words and phrases unusual in their everydayness pop out as the record continues. “Hold On to Love” is the only soul song I can think of that contains the word “depressed.” It suggests that you not give up. (DeVaughn gives you this encouragement: “Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, because tomorrow just might be the day.”) Ultimately, he doesn’t need to win, because there is a tomorrow, and tomorrow is bigger than his song.
I run every day to feel whole: Do I listen every day for the same reason? If I don’t, my body aches, my brain is overfull, I lose track of who I am, and I live by rote. It’s a daily practice, but it’s also self-preservation.
“Listening,” wrote my friend Harmony Holiday, “knowing one another by sound and voice, is the first law of Black liberation—without this skill there is no self-preservation.” Her definition suggests what the musicologist Judith Becker might have called Harmony’s “habitus of listening.” Becker, writing in the early 2000s, borrowed the term “habitus” from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. She argued that everyone’s listening is a result of factors that are probably outside their control; that most people are part of a “community of interpretation,” whether they know it or not; that many of us think we’re the captain of our ship when we’re listening, just us and our tunes, but no, there’s always more to it. Becker encouraged us to consider that listeners settle into a certain kind of aural “gaze,” the same way people talk about “the male gaze” (Becker is not the only writer who laments the lack of an equivalent listening word for “gaze”), et cetera, and she supposed this gaze-of-listening might be partly determined by one’s family history, class, locale, values, work, social traditions, and deeper on down the line into the ways of a people.
Within my own habitus of listening, recognition, self-preservation, and liberation don’t have the same implications as they do for my friend. I recognize the world through listening; I also self-preserve and seek a kind of liberation. But because of my own background, and because I became a journalist and critic, I do certain other things. I also still presume a bit of independence, as many of us journalists and critics do, that Becker might find amusing.
That independence—the notion that I can stand at a neutral remove from music, and that a piece of music can be considered somewhat free from the conditions that made it—started at some point to trouble me. The trouble hasn’t stopped. Paradoxically, I am also troubled by the notion that any thorough habitus of listening may require an autobiography, or a thorough explanation of the conditions that made me. Memoirs by critics in book form constitute a tortured genre. A habitus carries a promise of context beyond one’s own standpoint; autobiography does not.
Yet all writers offer privileged information to readers—their writing is determined by what they want and don’t want to offer, what they want to reveal and what they want to conceal. My concern is: Can I write about listening without reverting to a life story?
*
What sort of listener am I?
Here is a crack at my habitus of listening. An isolated, suburban Hudson Valley, 1970s, slow-time-passing, AM radio into free-form FM radio, white, upper-middle-class, atheist, uprooted, art-and-politics, newspaper-and novel-reading household attuned to signs and facts. My father grew up in Ohio, moved to New York in 1955 for art school, and eventually worked as a graphic designer within the Manhattan visual-art world, translating the intent of an artist or a gallery into arrangements of texts and images for exhibition catalogs, posters, advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and books.
I have not lost a slightly haunted habit of wanting to listen outside myself, to get over my old assumptions—because they are always incomplete, if not wrong.My mother grew up in England, studied poli-sci at Oxford, and cowrote a book called British Political Facts 1900–1960 as a research fellow there; in her American professional life, which began in 1963, she continued with facts as a fact-checker for Time-Life Books, then managed my father’s office and did the bookkeeping. They were both fish out of water or birds out of air, which is likely how I learned to feel similarly.
In the part of the Hudson Valley where I grew up, there was no town square. No commuter rail; bicycle and bus instead. No walking to friends’ houses, but plenty of woods. Weather and pines outdoors, records indoors. Not a lot of extended family relations; really just us. I had been born in New York City and spent my early years in England, and when we returned I had some child’s version of critical distance from America and Americans; I was raised nonspiritual and suspicious of institutions, but I learned and worked in a few big ones. Possibly because I did not have much of a neighborhood—geographically, or in terms of family and family customs—I felt free to visit others.
When I started listening to some of the music in our house, I sensed the workings of a neighborhood within specific records—Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, Beatles for Sale, Camille Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals, the early rock and roll and doo-wop from the American Graffiti soundtrack, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives—and then a nearly limitless number of other neighborhoods, adjacent or secretly connected to them. I wanted to know about all music. I dreamed of moving beyond the informed but slowed-down musical knowledge of my parents, and of hearing music (always male music, at the time) that most people didn’t know about, from now or the past, while remaining close to but critically distant from the communities of that music.
I became so invested in music that I worried it might make me a monster unless I betrayed it a bit, was disloyal to it. I felt wary of any club liable to induct me, even the ones near me, even New York hardcore, even New York jazz, both of them listener-clubs that valued integrity and loyalty. I was happiest with romantic partners who were not “into music.”
At twenty-one I walked into a show at the Museum of Modern Art called Fragmentation and the Single Form: paintings, collages, ceramic tile, sculptures, and photographs selected from the museum’s collection by Ellsworth Kelly, all demonstrating ways to loosen the story around a single form, ways (in Kelly’s words) “for emptying shape of representational content and for projecting it into a new space.” Here was a late Cézanne, some Picasso and Georges Braque paintings, a Hans Arp collage, an Edward Weston photograph, and also something that seemed to come from a different menu: a painting of a roseate tern made by John James Audubon in 1832. The big, detailed bird filled most of the picture space, angled down and to the left; you might want to say it was dive-bombing a fish, but to say that would tell a story. The tern had been cut out tightly from one sheet of paper and applied to another sheet of watercolor-blue background. Its flattened edges looked strange against the presumed round volume of sky; it was in the air and not in the air. The tern messed with my head for several reasons. Audubon, great artist and repellent man, had taken the bird out of its context just to the extent that the image was no longer easily understood as a matter of figure and ground; or had suggested a new dimension of possibilities where figure and ground were not predetermined. Surely that tern had something to do with my parents, and me, and people I was drawn to.
But more to the point, it was Kelly who clarified the tern for us by taking a beautiful image of a bird for the enjoyment of those who liked birds and putting it alongside other works of art that had been generally coded as “abstract.” The idea of grouping things together that were not usually grouped together eventually took hold of me as a listener even more than as someone who sometimes looked at art.
Later, via the work of writing about music four or five times a week for a newspaper, jazz and metal and hip-hop and Puerto Rican and Brazilian and African music—because that’s what the news of a New York week in music was—I came to value the part of live music where “material” (the copyrightable entity) becomes neutral, and suddenly there is no explicit emphasis on beginning and end, such that one finds the ongoing middle, even better if genre or style markers become limited in use and suddenly don’t have to matter: one is lost, the ground has given way, and that is where the real writing might begin.
My community of interpretation for listening had at first been a group of other roseate terns, figures with unclear relationships to the ground (usually male, some very sensitive or chaotic; a few died young). With them I spent a lot of time in record stores and sitting next to stereos and making tapes, always moving music around, sending it forward, replicating the message-in-a-bottle promise that any song carries with it when made public. Then, later, my community became those who listen for any reason—I am eager to share sound with anybody, and even prefer that they not be like me. Must get free of old clans.
The imprecise and useful myth in my family was that we had no old clans. My mother was far more compassionate than her communist parents—Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, published just after she finished university, described her parents’ arrogant and argumentative world somewhat—but by her moral system, nostalgia was an affliction on the order of narcissism. And so I listen to my old favorites cautiously, skeptically, although I am happily surprised by realizing which music has and hasn’t become a part of me.
Otherwise, I have not lost a slightly haunted habit of wanting to listen outside myself, to get over my old assumptions—because they are always incomplete, if not wrong—and to see if I can learn to tune myself up with music that is not all-about-me. The electric fences of the habitus are snob, bore, nostalgist, narcissist. When I am these things, and I am, I must know how I am these things, and try to be them such that I can try to see the positions from the outside, as part of the habitus.
I run as a single form, a figure with an unfinished relationship to its ground, listening to Harmony’s idea about listening, first on its own; then for how it explains something about what William DeVaughn might be listening for; then for how my own listening to DeVaughn might be opened up a little bit.
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From Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening by Ben Ratliff. Copyright © 2025. Available from Graywolf Press.
