soul comprehensive document

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Special Focus Style- Soul 1

Special Focus Style - Soul

Background

Soul developed as a fusion of two distinct African-American

musics gospel and rhythm and blues . Led by Ray Charles, soul

artists took gospel music and fused it with "profane" blues lyrical themes.

Evolving out of jump blues in the late '40s, R&B laid the groundwork for

rock & roll. R&B kept the tempo and the drive of jump blues, but itsinstrumentation was sparer and the emphasis was on the song, not

improvisation. It was blues chord changes played with an insistent

backbeat. During the '50s, R&B was dominated by vocalists like Ray

Charles and Ruth Brown , as well as vocal groups like the Drifters and

the Coasters . Eventually, as gospel musicians began to perform secular

music, R&B metamorphosed into soul, which was funkier and looser than

its pile-driving predecessor.

Soul came to describe a number of R&B-based music styles. From the

bouncy, catchy acts at Motown to the horn-driven, gritty soul of Stax ,

there was an immense amount of diversity within soul. During the first

part of the '60s, soul music remained close to its R&B roots. However,

musicians pushed the music in different directions; usually, different

regions of America produced different kinds of soul.

In urban centers like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago , the music

concentrated on vocal interplay and smooth productions. In Detroit ,

Motown concentrated on creating a pop-oriented sound that was informed


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equally by gospel, R&B, and rock & roll. In the South , the music became

harder and tougher, relying on syncopated rhythms, raw vocals, and

blaring horns. All of these styles formed soul, which ruled the black music

charts throughout the '60s and also frequently crossed over into the popcharts.

During the '60s and '70s, soul began to splinter apart -- artists like James

Brown and Sly Stone developed funk; Kenny Gamble and Leon

Huff initiated Philly soul with the

O'Jays and Harold Melvin & the Blue

Notes; and later in the decade,danceable R&B became a mass

phenomenon in the form of disco.

During the '80s and '90s, the polished, less

earthy sound of urban ruled the airwaves,

but even then, R&B began adding stylistic components of hip-hop until,

by the end of the millennium, there were hundreds of artists who featured

both rapping and singing on their records.

The Pioneers

After many years touring on what was known as the 'chitlin' circuit' (a

network of black clubs and bars), Ray Charles finally created his own

style - by unifying the sexually-charged music of the dance floor with the

spiritually-charged sounds of the church hall. His 1955 hit, "I've Got A

Woman" was one of the first popular soul songs.

The Atlantic record label, founded by Ahmet


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Ertegun in 1947 took the music to a wider, more mainstream audience,

signing Ray Charles in 1952.

As black music crossed the racial divide in the mid to late 50s, rhythm andblues gave birth to rock 'n' roll , black artists were squeezed out of the

mainstream charts by white covers of their songs and Charles looked back

to his gospel roots for his inspiration and the creation of his own distinctive

sound.

With backing singers the Raylettes, Charles further honed his own sound,

much to the chagrin of the church community. Charles' biographer MichaelLydon describes: "He went for a completely uninhibited gospel sound but

made it sexual. The Raylettes became the choir behind the preacher."

Listen to Whatd I Say (1959).

James Brown, another young gospel singer was

hot on the heels of Ray Charles. James Brown'shit Please, Please, Please in 1956 was the

embodiment of the black American experience. It

spoke of the hurt as well as the hopes and

aspirations of an underclass.

Gospel singer Sam Cooke changed pop music

forever and set the standard for every artist thatfollowed him. His first "cross over" single from

gospel to pop You Send Me (1957) sold a

million worldwide and its success inspired a

generation of gospel singers, including Aretha


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Franklin, Solomon Burke and Ben E King.

Ben E King , followed Cooke into the pop world but his biggest hit Stand

By Me (1961) drew its title from a famous gospel hymn.

Not content with smashing the gospel to pop taboo, Cooke was one of the

first artists to establish control over his own music by setting up his own

label - SAR. Cooke then went on to break away from love songs into social

relevance. After hearing Bob Dylan's iconic Blowin' In The Wind, he

recorded the first political soul song A Change is Gonna Come

(1964).

Tragically, Cooke was killed in 1964 at the prime of his career but he

bequeathed an extraordinary legacy, inspiring a myriad of black artists

from Motown's Berry Gordy to Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin.

Geography Soul Cities and Labels

Southern Soul

With Memphis-based Stax Records at its

epicentre, Southern Soul was gritty, funky soul that

borrowed equally from the fervor of Southern

gospel and the hard-driving energy of R&B. It is

distinguished by a passionate, gospel-tinged vocal,

punchy horns, chicken-scratch guitars, and tight

rhythm sections.

In the summer of 1967 Stax artist Otis Redding performed in front of a


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200,000 strong, mainly white, crowd at the Monterey Pop Festival. Five years

after walking into Stax Records studio in Memphis as an unknown singer, he

was now breaking into the mass white market and seducing its counter culture

without diluting his sound.

Redding became the embodiment of Sixties soul

music, and that of Stax Records as it crossed the

racial divide at a time of segregation.

Classic examples of Reddings definitive soul

recordings are Try A Little Tenderness

(1966) and Sitting On The Dock of The Bay(released posthumously in 1968)

Founded by two whites- Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton - black and white

musicians came together at Stax to create gritty, passionate soul. "Stax Records

was an oddity - it was like an oasis in the desert. Both black and white musicians

became friends because of what they did. It was wonderful. But right outside

those doors it stopped," comments Stax songwriter David Porter.

The sound of the south began to influence other labels. New York-based Atlantic

Records' Jerry Wexler would bring his musicians south whenever they needed

inspiration. Wilson Pickett's huge hit In the Midnight Hour (1966)

resulted from a night in Memphis' Lorraine Motel with Stax songwriter Steve

Cropper and a bottle of "Jack". After Wexler teamed performers Sam and Dave

up with Stax writers Isaac Hayes and David Porter, classic hits included Soul

Man (1967) and Hold On, I'm Comin' (1966).

Wexler was soon alerted to another southern record company - Rick Hall's Fame

Studio in sleepy Muscle Shoals - where Percy Sledge cut southern soul's first

number one pop hit, When a Man Loves A Woman (1966) . It was here

that he brought a new artist he had just signed - Aretha Franklin . "It was so


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evident to me that she was a blazing genius. She was so far ahead of the pack.

explains Wexler.

Fame studio musician Dan Penn describes

Franklin's dramatic entrance. "She sat down by the

piano and played this unknown chord and the

musicians were just like little bugs running for their

instruments." That day she recorded her number

one hit I Never Loved A Man The Way I

Loved You(1967). Her next monster hit was

with Redding's Respect (1967). Imbuing it with

a new social relevance, it became an anthem andshe an icon.

Southern soul emerged in the '60s and reigned until the end of

the decade, when smoother Philadelphia soul became popular.

Detroit and Motown

The Motown label crafted a uniform

house sound so instantly identifiable

that "Motown" unequivocally became

a style unto itself.

During the '60s, Berry Gordy Jr.' s Detroit

label became the biggest independent in the music industry, thanks to its

smooth, sophisticated blend of R&B and memorable pop melodies. At

Motown, the pop side of the equation took on greater importance than ever

before, which helped make the records accessible to a wider audience; their


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velvety elegance helped cement black popular music firmly into

mainstream American culture.

Motown often utilized the same core session musicians on their records, which helped lay the Motown sound's basic rhythmic

foundation of bouncing bass and echoing drums. But their

arrangements were frequently lush and elaborate, adding

strings, horns, woodwinds, piano, extra percussion, or whatever

else might enhance the music's urbane stylishness. This polished pop

craftsmanship, when matched with the smoothly soulful vocals of the

Motown artist roster, became ubiquitously popular during the early '60s,with songwriters like Smokey Robinson and the team of Eddie

Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Brian Holland turning out one gem

after another with almost assembly-line regularity.

When Holland, Dozier and Holland left the label in a dispute over royalties,

producer Norman Whitfield became a major figure at Motown, keeping

the label in step with the harder, funkier direction much soul music washeading in. In 1970, the Jackson 5 became superstars with a funky

bubblegum-soul that began to break away from the established Motown

formula, and during the rest of the decade, performers like Marvin Gaye

and Stevie Wonder took greater control of their own music, investing it

with their own personalities and helping break up the standardized

Motown blueprint. It's that blueprint, which brought artists like the

Temptations, Four Tops, and Supremes stardom, to which peoplerefer when they describe music as "Motown."

Chicago Soul


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Over in Chicago, white-owned, family business Chess Records enviously

eyed up Motown's success. Although the label already had a reputation for

blues and black rock 'n' roll, they wanted a fresh sound

that echoed the mood of the growing aspirational black population. By "sweetening" with strings and pop

arrangements, the gritty Chicago sound was

transformed into sophisticated soul. Etta James (At

Last - 1961, Id Rather Go Blind 1968)

brought Chess a taste of crossover magic and Fontella

Bass's hit Rescue Me (1965) emulated the Motown

formula.

As the 60s wore on, the mood of the nation changed and with the rise of

the civil rights movement and protests over the Vietnam War, it was in

Chicago - not Detroit - that music with a social conscience was first heard.

In People Get Ready (1965) and Choice Of Colours (1969),

Curtis Mayfield captured the zeitgeist and sang openly about community

struggle and racial harmony. The Detroit riots of 1967 were a huge wake-upcall for Motown, who now seemed embarrassingly out of kilter.

Of the three major hotbeds for soul music during the 1960s, Motown had

the hits and Memphis had the grit. Unfortunately, Chicago's fertile soul

community is often left off the map, and if it's recognized at all, it's mostly

for the accomplishments of Curtis Mayfield , both as a member of the

Impressions and later as a solo act.

Curtis Mayfield is rightly the central figure in the rise of Chicago soul,

considering his work as a songwriter and producer as well as bandleader

and vocalist, arranger/producer.


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The Chicago Soul scenes best-known hits, including "People Get Ready"

by the Impressions , and "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher

and Higher" by Jackie Wilson , featured asound based on laid-back yet effervescent

soul, with sweet vocals and a stinging

horn section .

Curtis Mayfield is rightly the central figure in

the rise of Chicago soul, considering his work as

a songwriter and producer as well as bandleaderand vocalist, arranger/producer.

Evolution of Soul

Funk

Named after a slang word

for "stink," funk was indeed

the rawest, most primal

form of R&B, surpassing

even Southern soul in terms

of earthiness. It was also

the least structured, often

stretching out into

extended jams , and the most Africanized, built on dynamic, highly

syncopated polyrhythms. As such, it originally appealed only to

hardcore R&B audiences. The groove was the most important

musical element of funk - all the instruments of the ensemble played


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off of one another to create it, and worked it over and over. Deep electric

bass lines often served as main riffs, with an interlocking web

of short, scratchy guitar chords and blaring horns over the top .

Unlike nearly every form of R&B that had come before it, funk didn't confine itself to the 45-rpm single format and the classic

verse/chorus song structure. Funk bands were just as likely to repeat

a catchy chant or hook out of the blue, and to give different song sections

equal weight, so as not to disrupt the groove by building to a chorus-type

climax. In essence, funk allowed for more freedom and

improvisation , and in that respect it was similar to what was happening

around the same time in blues-rock, psychedelia, and hard rock (in fact,Jimi Hendrix was a major inspiration for funk guitar soloists).

The roots of funk lay in James Brown's post-1965 soul hits, particularly

"Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" (1965) and "Cold Sweat" (1967) .

Sly & the Family Stone , who

started out as a soul bandinfluenced by rock and

psychedelia, became a full-

fledged (albeit pop-savvy) funk

outfit with their 1969 album

Stand! . However, the record

that officially ushered in the funk

era was James Brown's epochal "Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) SexMachine" (1970). The arrangement was spare, the groove hard-hitting,

and Brown's lyrics were either stream-of-consciousness slogans or

wordless noises . Brown followed it with more records over the course of

1970 that revolutionized R&B, and paved the way for the third artist of


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funk's holy trinity, George Clinton . Clinton's Parliament and

Funkadelic outfits made funk the ultimate party music, not just with

their bizarre conceptual humor, but their sheer excess -huge ensembles of

musicians and dancers, all jamming on the same groove as long as they possibly could.

Thanks to Sly, Brown, and Clinton, many new and veteran R&B acts

adopted funk as a central style during the '70s. Funk gradually

became smoother as disco came to prominence in the mid- to late '70s, and

lost much of its distinguishing earthiness. However, it had a major

impact on jazz (both fusion and soul-jazz), and became themusical foundation of hip-hop.

Soul in the Seventies

Two of Motown's biggest stars in the Seventies were

Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder . Both had

established successful careers during the sixties but

played even more pivotal roles in shaping the soul

music of the seventies. Gaye rebelled against his clean

cut, boy-next-door image to record What's Goin' On

(1971) , an anthem for change inspired by his brother's

time in Vietnam. "It's basically a landscape painting of

post-Vietnam Afro-American ghetto life. Marvin takes what is ugly and makes itbeautiful."

Inspired by Gaye, Stevie Wonder negotiated

himself considerably more artistic freedom from


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Motown. He hired TONTO - Malcolm Cecil and Bob Margouleff, two studio whiz

kids who specialized in analogue synthesizers and a new sound was born. Listen

to Superstition (1972), Too High (1973), Boogie On Reggae

Woman (1974).

Philly Soul

Philly Soul was one of the most popular forms of soul music in the early

'70s. Building on the steady groove of Hi Records and Stax/Volt singles,

Philly soul added sweeping strings, seductive horns, and lush

arrangements to the deep rhythms. As a result, it was much smoother ,even slicker, than the deep soul of the late '60s, but the vocals remained as

soulful as any previous form of R&B. Philly soul was primary a producer's

medium, as Kenny Gamble & Leon Huff and Thom Bell created the

instrumental textures that came to distinguish the genre. That isn't to

short-change the vocalists, since the Spinners , the O'Jays, Harold

Melvin & the Blue Notes, and the Stylistics were among many fine

soul singers with distinctive voices, but the sonic elements that made Philly soul distinctive were the creation of the producers. Gamble & Huff worked

with the Delfonics, Archie Bell, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, and the

O'Jays; Bell produced the Spinners and the Stylistics, among others. The

highly produced sound of Philly soul paved the way for the

studio constructions of disco and urban contemporary R&B.

Disco

Disco marked the dawn of the modern era of dance-based

popular music.


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Growing out of the increasingly groove-oriented sound of early '70s and

funk, disco emphasized the beat above anything else, even the singer and

the song. Disco was named after discotheques, clubs that played nothing

but music for dancing. Most of the discotheques were gay clubs in New York, and the DJs in these clubs specifically picked soul and funk records

that had a strong, heavy groove. After being played in the disco, the records

began receiving radio play and respectable sales. Soon, record companies

and producers were cutting records created specifically for discos.

Naturally, these records also had strong pop hooks, so they could have

crossover success. Disco albums frequently didn't have many tracks -- they

had a handful of long songs that kept the beat going. Similarly, the singleswere issued on 12-inch records, which allowed for extended remixes. DJs

could mix these tracks together, matching the beats on each song since

they were marked with how fast they were in terms of beats per minute. In

no time, the insistent, pounding disco beat dominated the pop chart, and

everyone cut a disco record, from rockers like the Rolling Stones and Rod

Stewart to pop acts like the Bee Gees and new wave artists like Blondie.

There were disco artists that became stars - Donna Summer, Chic, theVillage People, and KC & the Sunshine Band were brand names --

but the music was primarily a producer's medium, since they created the

tracks and wrote the songs. Disco lost momentum as the '70s became the

'80s, but it didn't die - it mutated into a variety of different dance-

based genres, ranging from dance-pop and hip-hop to house

and techno.

Into the Eighties and beyond

New Jack Swing


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New Jack Swing evolved in the late

'80s, when urban contemporary soul

artists began incorporating hip-hop

rhythms, samples, and

production techniques into their

sound. Some songs simply had hip-

hop beats, others had rapped sections

and sung choruses, but the overall

result was an edgier, more street-oriented sound that seamlessly

blended both the melodic qualities of soul and the funky rhythmsof rap . It paved the way for the '90s soul, where the dividing line between

rap and R&B was frequently indistinguishable.

Urban

Also known as urban contemporary, Urban was the term given to the

R&B/soul music of the 1980s and '90s. Urban was very smooth andpolished, but while its romantic ballads fit well into quiet storm radio

formats, urban also had room for uptempo, funky dance tracks, which

usually boasted the same high-tech, radio-ready production and

controlled yet soulful vocals. That's why, in spite of its name, urban

didn't usually have the earthy grit associated with the term "soul music,"

preferring to tone down the raw emotion in favor of a slick refinement. Up

until the late '80s, most urban music was highly pop-oriented, often inmelody but nearly always in terms of production. A number of artists, like

Janet Jackson, and Whitney Houston , crossed over from the R&B

charts to the pop charts, although there were others like Freddie


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Jackson and Luther Vandross , whose R&B popularity never translated

quite the same way.

The urban landscape began to shift with the advent of hip-hop; producerand Guy member Teddy Riley crafted a fusion of the two, inserted

occasional rap breaks, and dubbed it new jack swing . New jack made a

superstar of Bobby Brown. In addition to Riley, songwriting/production

duos whose work straddled pop and R&B, like Jimmy Jam & Terry

Lewis (Janet Jackson), and Antonio "L.A." Reid & Babyface ,

dominated urban music at the turn of the decade, with Babyface going on

to a hugely successful singing career in his own right.

Urban and hip-hop continued to cross-pollinate during the early '90s,

eventually resulting in a new hybrid tagged "hip-hop soul."

Hip-hop soul was rooted in new jack swing, but

the beats were funkier, more elastic and

unpredictable; while hip-hop soul was stillslickly produced, it had a grittier, more soulful

feel than new jack. There was still a side of

urban that retained roots in quiet storm and

adult contemporary, though, and regardless of

which side of the spectrum they fell on, the

songs were increasingly becoming showpieces

for elaborate vocal technique . Partly owing to the steep decline of mainstream pop/rock in the wake of alternative, urban more or less

dominated the pop singles charts for the latter half of the '90s ,

with major acts including Mary J. Blige, Toni Braxton, R. Kelly,


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Boyz II Men, SWV, Blackstreet, Jodeci, Monica, and Brandy ,

among others.

Neo-Soul

Neo-soul is a musical genre that

fuses contemporary R&B and

1970s-style soul with elements of

hip-hop.

In contrast to the more single-

oriented, hip hop-based, and

producer-driven sampling

approach of contemporary R&B. Neo Soul incorporates elements of

classic soul music especially the use of live instrumentation .

Neo soul artists "emphasize a mix of elegant, jazz-tinged R&B and

subdued hip hop, with a highly idiosyncratic, deeply personal

approach to love and politics." - (Dimitri Ehrlich, Vibe magazine).

The genre developed in the mid-1990s with the work of Raphael

Saadiq's former band, Tony! Toni! Ton! and with D'Angelos 1995

debut album "Brown Sugar." In 1997, Motown artist Erykah Badu

released her debut LP, Baduizm, the success of which paved the way for a

wave of more bohemian, idiosyncratic singer-songwriters in modern RnB.

D'Angelo's acclaimed second album Voodoo (2000) has been

recognized by many critics as a masterpiece of the neo soul genre


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Subsequently, other neo soul artists attained success upon the early 2000s,

including Bilal, Musiq Soulchild, India.Arie, and Alicia Keys, the

latter of which broke through to broader popularity with her debut album

Songs in A Minor (2001).

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