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 its
instrumentation 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 pop
charts.

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 and
blues 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 Michael
Lydon describes: "He went for a completely uninhibited gospel sound but
made it sexual. The Raylettes became the choir behind the preacher."

Listen to “What’d I Say” (1959).

James Brown, another young gospel singer was

hot on the heels of Ray Charles. James Brown's
hit “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 that
followed 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 it’s

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 and
she 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 was
heading 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 people
refer 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, “I’d 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-up
call 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 scene’s best-known hits, including "People Get Ready"
by the Impressions, and "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher
and Higher" by Jackie Wilson, featured a
sound 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 bandleader
and 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 band
influenced 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) Sex
Machine" (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 the
musical 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 it
beautiful."

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 singles
were 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, the
Village 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 rhythms
of 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 and
polished, 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 in
melody 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; producer
and 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 still
slickly 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! Toné! and with D'Angelo’s 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 R’n’B.

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).