Peter Cooper On Music: Aaron Neville explores doo-wop roots

Aaron Neville (photo: Sarah A Friedman)

“I wasn’t being punished,” says Aaron Neville, speaking, oddly enough, of the childhood times when he was being punished.

“I mean, they thought they were punishing me, and I was standing in the corner,” he says. “But I wasn’t being punished, because I had a song in my head.”

Neville is 72 now. He’s kept songs in his head the whole time, and he’s put some in our heads, as well. He’s applied his butterfly falsetto to smash hits “Tell It Like It Is,” “Don’t Know Much,” “Everybody Plays the Fool” and many more, including stellar work with The Neville Brothers and a Grammy for his 1990s duet with Trisha Yearwood on “I Fall to Pieces,” a song made famous by Patsy Cline.

“I love country music,” says Neville, who cracked country music’s top 40 with his 1993 version of George Jones’ “The Grand Tour.”

“I like the old stuff, mostly, like Hank Williams and George Jones. When you hear George Jones sing, he makes you feel his heart and soul.”

Neville knows that “makes you feel his heart and soul” trick, as well. And the language of his heart and soul is often informed by the romantic, street corner music known as doo-wop.

He grew up singing the stuff, learning the harmonies and the nonsensical, multi-syllabic vocal responses, and mastering the cry-of-the-heart vocal style favored by groups such as that moved from the streets to the recording studios: The Del-Vikings, The Skyliners and The Platters and such.

“The Penguins, The Moonglows, The Orioles and the Five Satins,” Paul Simon once sang. “The deep, forbidden music they’d been longing for.”

To Neville, the music was deep, but not forbidden. He internalized it, and then he used it to his advantage.

“My brother Art was really the doo-wopper. He’d sing on the corner at night, and he worked at a record shop where he could bring home The Clovers, The Drifters, The Spaniels and all this stuff. That stuff hit me, hard. I’d sing it all the time. I’d use it to sing my way into the movies, or into basketball games. Whoever was at the ticket counter, I didn’t have money but I’d sing ‘Mona Lisa’ or ‘Wheel of Fortune’ (a 1952 single by The Cardinals) and they’d let me in,” he says.

“Back then, and now, singing is like a cleansing. It’s like medicine for me to be able to do it. When I’m singing, it goes through me like Penicillin.”

Voice of an angel

By the late 1960s, Neville’s singing was being heard by the masses. In 1967, he scored with “Tell It Like It Is,” a top-charting R&B single. He was working on the docks in New Orleans when that single took off — though he says dock work wasn’t really work, because he could sing while he unloaded the ships— and by then he was a graduate of the New Orleans Parish Prison, where he spent six months after being arrested for joyriding.

Aaron Neville (photo: Sarah A Friedman)

Actually, it wasn’t just the joyriding. It was the fact that he was riding with joy in someone else’s car. Try explaining to a judge that stealing isn’t really stealing, because you were singing the whole time.

In 1978, Neville began recording with brothers Art, Cyrill and Charles as The Neville Brothers, to critical approval that wasn’t matched with popular success until 1989’s extraordinary “Yellow Moon” album.

The year 1989 was a good one, as Aaron Neville also hit with the Linda Ronstadt duet “Don’t Know Much.” He and Ronstadt followed that with 1990 hits “All My Life” and “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby,” and Neville was cemented into the national consciousness as a singer for the ages.

“Aaron Neville still possesses the voice of an angelic child whose purity of faith transcends the world’s darker realities,” wrote The New York Times’ Stephen Holden in 1991.

In truth, Neville himself has had to transcend dark realities. He’s been a drug addict and he’s been chronically depressed, and he credits his transcendence to (you guessed it) music and (you might not haveguessed it) St. Jude, the apostle.

He also credits his wife of 48 years, Joel. An enduring New Orleans couple, he and Joel were forced from the city by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They wound up in Brentwood, where they lived for the final two years of Joel’s life.

“I loved the countryside, and Tennessee is a beautiful place,” he says. “But it was a sad time, because my wife was battling lung cancer.”

In 2007, Joel lost that battle and, for a while, even the songs were of little use. But in 2008, The Neville Brothers played JazzFest in New Orleans and Neville was smitten with a woman who came to photograph them. Two years later, he married Sarah Friedman. They now live in New York, the city that birthed so much of the doo-wop music that informed his childhood.

Recently, Neville and friends, including producer Don Was, the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards (who co-produced) and atmospheric guitarist Greg Leisz joined together to make “My True Story,” an album that explores Neville’s doo-wop roots. It has been praised to the nines by every major American music publication.

Live versions of songs from that album have lately aired on PBS, in a Neville special taped at the Brooklyn Bowl that includes guest appearances from Paul Simon and Joan Osborne.

And so Neville arrives in Nashville on a roll for his Sunday show at War Memorial Auditorium.

“No matter what happens, I’ve had a life, a good life,” he says. “It was definitely a ride. Ups and downs in it, but who doesn’t? I was lucky to be doing what I was doing. I mean, so many people just fall by the wayside. I knew what I wanted to do, from Jump Street. I wanted to sing, and I sang.”