Solomon Burke
Solomon Burke
Solomon Burkewas an American preacher and singer, who shaped the sound of rhythm and blues as one of the founding fathers of soul music in the 1960s and a "key transitional figure in the development of soul music from rhythm and blues. He had a string of hits including "Cry to Me", "If You Need Me", "Got to Get You Off My Mind", "Down in the Valley" and "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love". Burke was referred to as "King Solomon",...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionR&B Singer
Date of Birth21 March 1940
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
Im still amazed people remembered and didnt give up on me.
Girls were coming from every angle. I couldn't love them all. But I tried.
Sometimes its controversy, but we all have our choices that we make.
We started the publicity, we started moving in the same direction with them, and then the devil came in and just turned that right around.
You gotta do it with class and integrity. If not, you're gonna drag yourself through the mud.
We had some problems - my children were kidnapped during that time, and it just changed my whole way of thinking, from being in show business and everything else.
We were using the record as a tool to invest money into real estate all through the South, because we were living in an era where the South was changing.
I walked out of the Chinese restaurant with a fat check, a record deal, and a box of shrimp egg foo yung!
That was my choice at that time, and I still say Nixon was a great president. A very beautiful and wise man.
I didn't need to depend on the record company to publish my records.
The deals that were made for Black artists at that time were not the deals that were made for white artists.
But we didn't have the financial structure, like the right attorneys, the right managers, the right accountants, and we were going against the grain of what black entertainers is supposed to do.
If we could buy these properties and then invest in the Black community, with our own McDonald's, with our own Kentucky Fried Chickens, it was gonna be a great move.
We were grooving, at that point, in the same direction, but remember, Roy Hamilton and myself were going into a path and a direction that had no programming.