Soul Music

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Timothy Berg

Soul music emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s as one of the most distinctive forms in the history of American popular music. For black Americans especially, soul music defined the 1960s, offering a cultural soundtrack to the civil rights movement and the larger awakening of black consciousness and pride. Soul hits dominated the charts during that decade, but defining exactly what soul was proved no easy task, even for some of its greatest artists. Wilson Pickett defined soul as "nothin' but a feelin'." Don Covay said, "For a singer, soul is total vocal freedom." Aretha Franklin explained, "Soul to me is a feeling, a lot of depth and being able to bring to the surface that which is happening inside. ... It's just the emotion, the way it affects other people." Elements of the genre live on, but the classic period of soul music, from about 1960 to 1975, remains one of the most important contributions to American popular culture for its style, its raw, emotive power, and its depth of feeling. Alongside jazz, it is one of America's most original contributions to world culture.

If defining soul music proved elusive, its origins were not. Soul music emerged during the 1950s as a cross between rhythm and blues and gospel music. Soul music combined the Saturday-night sinner and the Sunday-morning repentant into one person or one song, just as they existed in real life. In combining the R&B themes with gospel elements (call-and-response singing, close harmonies, and themes of celebration, loss, and longing), early soul artists often secularized gospel tunes by changing key words: the gospel song "Talkin' 'Bout Jesus" became "Talkin' 'Bout You"; "This Little Light of Mine" became "This Little Girl of Mine"; "I've Got a Savior" became "I Got a Woman." This transition reflected changes occurring in the black community after World War II as more and more black Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North. Early arrivals in the North had created R&B music in the mid-1940s as an expression of the new realities of life in these urban neighborhoods. Later, as more Southern blacks poured into these communities, they brought with them elements of Southern gospel music. Both musical forms coexisted as separate expressions of black life. They soon crossed, however, producing what became soul music.

The acknowledged father of this cross was Ray Charles. All of the secularized gospel songs mentioned above were hits for Charles in the mid-1950s. Born in 1930 in Albany, Georgia, Charles moved to Seattle as a teenager and emerged in the late 1940s as a Nat "King" Cole-style crooner playing local clubs such as the Rocking Chair and the Black and Tan. There he caught the attention of Swingtime Records, one of the early black-owned R&B recording companies, and he released a number of blues and Cole-inspired tunes, among them "Kissa Me Baby" and "Confession Blues." Moving to Atlantic Records in 1952, Charles began developing an earthier style that he picked up working with blues musicians Guitar Slim and Lowell Fulsom. At Atlantic, he began to combine blues elements with gospel stylings he had picked up as a child in Georgia. That style became the basis for soul music and provided Charles with a string of hits during the 1950s, including "Lonely Avenue," "I Got a Woman," "Hallelujah I Love Her So," and perhaps his biggest hit, "What'd I Say," which combined a gospel call-and-response segment between Charles and his backup singers, the Raelettes, moans that could easily have come from either the bedroom or the pulpit, and a driving R&B band.

Following close on Charles's heels was Sam Cooke, who had come to prominence as the lead singer of the gospel group the Soul Stirrers before developing a more pop-oriented soul style which brought him such hits as "You Send Me," "Twistin' the Night Away," and "Bring It on Home to Me." Jackie Wilson similarly had started out in a vocal group, the Dominoes, before forging a driving pop-soul style with such songs as "Reet Petite," "Lonely Teardrops," and "Baby Workout." While Charles's music maintained a close connection with the raw elements of R&B music, Wilson and Cooke moved the R&B and gospel marriage closer to the realm of pop.

It took three record companies to bring soul into the mainstream. They were Atlantic Records in New York City, Motown Records in Detroit, and Stax/Volt Records in Memphis. While numerous smaller labels made invaluable contributions to soul music, these three labels were responsible for some of the most explosive soul music of the 1950s and 1960s. Most of the major talents in soul music, with some very notable exceptions, were on these three record labels. And, while there were major individual talents on each label roster, each company managed to build a unique sound that identified each artist with his or her particular label.

Herb Abramson and Ahmet Ertegun formed Atlantic Records in 1947. Their initial releases were in the jazz vein, but they moved into R&B in 1949 and became one of the dominant independent record labels in that field in the 1950s due to their successes with such R&B artists as Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, Joe Turner, LaVern Baker, the Clovers, and others. With the success of Charles's records in the emerging soul style, Atlantic moved even further into soul music. In the early to mid-1960s, Atlantic had soul hits with The Drifters' "Up on the Roof," "This Magic Moment," and "Save the Last Dance for Me"; Ben E. King's "Stand by Me" and "Spanish Harlem"; Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a Woman"; Wilson Pickett's "Land of 1000 Dances," "Mustang Sally," and "Funky Broadway"; Don Covay's "Seesaw"; and Solomon Burke's "Just out of Reach." Atlantic's major sound innovation was to bring soul "uptown" with a more polished, professional sound accomplished by adding string arrangements and by using professional Brill Building songwriters.