Love That Won't Quit: Soul Songs as Everyday Resistance

Chapter Two is the second studio album by Roberta Flack, released on August 12, 1970, by Atlantic Records  . It followed her debut, First Take (1969), and continued to showcase her lush vocals and thoughtful song selections

Soul music is more than sound. It keeps memories alive, voices protest, and shelters longing and survival. Scholar Robert Montero says that choosing love in a world built to crush it is a rebellious act because it refuses the roles oppression tries to impose. Put simply, when the odds are stacked against you, loving openly already looks like defiance.

Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” shows how romance can double as resistance. On the surface it is a tender promise between two people. Listen closer and you hear a quiet shield against the early seventies backdrop of war, racial tension, and economic struggle. From a phenomenology angle, the power lives in Green’s voice. His gentle falsetto rises on the word “together,” then dips into a low grit that feels like gravel under bare feet. That shift lets listeners sense both softness and strength, turning the idea of lasting commitment into something you can feel in your chest. Green grew up in poverty and church choirs shaped by segregation. Singing about unwavering love under those conditions hints at the grind of holding families together when wages are low and incarceration looms.

Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul” carries this thread into the present. She frames self love and community care as an anthem for workers burned out by corporate grind and a pandemic economy. The song’s chant to “release your job” flips club energy into labor protest, showing that soul still maps blueprints for freedom through connection instead of conquest. Listening with an existential lens, both songs ask what it means to stay authentic and hopeful when systems tell you to give up.

Soul keeps teaching me that protecting love, sharing food, holding hands, singing out loud, is resistance in real time. It turns romance into a communal promise that hardship will not name the whole story. When I play “Let’s Stay Together,” I picture love as a small kitchen light that never goes out even when the power grid flickers. Soul reminds us that keeping that light on is everyone’s job and everyone’s right.

With gratitude,

JC (he/him)

Sources

1. “Let’s Stay Together,” Wikipedia, last modified June 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Stay_Together_%28Al_Green_song%29

2. Ale Russian, “Morgan Freeman Joins Al Green for Duet of ‘Let’s Stay Together’ at Mississippi Bar,” People, January 2 2025. https://people.com/morgan-freeman-al-green-new-years-duet-lets-stay-together-8768554

3. Neal A. Lester, “Beyoncé’s ‘Break My Soul’: An Anthem of Courage, Resistance, Peace, and Community,” Journal of Popular Culture, October 2024. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.13374

4. Maud Cucchi, “Researching Music as a Political Tool, an Expression of Resistance and a Way to Nourish the Soul,” University Affairs, November 23 2022. https://universityaffairs.ca/features/researcher-explores-how-music-can-be-used-as-a-political-tool-an-expression-of-resistance-or-even-as-a-way-to-nourish-the-soul/