Soul & the passage of Time

Soul music would go on to last many decades past the sixties. Overtime definitions can get fuzzy over the passage of time. What starts out as a specific term for a “new” sound can become a general or a catch-all phrase with the passage of time where the term has lost its original definition. This has happened to terms like Soul, R&B, Rock & Roll. The soul of the sixties sounds considerably different than the seventies, eighties or nineties.

Soul would go on to produce many great artists and groups that would last several decades. Initially, soul was influenced by a number of Gospel-flavored R&B songs that manifested into Ray Charles and his “I’ve Got A Woman” and also in to songs by Little Richard, James Brown, Etta James, Clyde McPhatter, Hank Ballard, Ruth Brown in the mid-fifties; soul music got its king in Sam Cooke starting in the late fifties along with soul men like Jerry Butler, Jackie Wilson, Solomon Burke, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Gene Chandler and Ben E. King.

By the early sixties, Soul becomes a thing, a term, a description of a new form of popular music. Family owned labels pop up like Motown & Stax which began to compete with the bigger record labels who were pushing soul music like ABC/Paramount, Atlantic and RCA/Victor. Soon there is a myriad of soul artists that flooded the sixties airwaves giving us names like Mary Wells, Martha & the Vandellas, The Four Tops, The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross & the Supremes from the Motown camp; Carla & Rufus Thomas, Booker T & the MGs, Otis Redding, Wilson Picket, Sam & Dave & Isaac Hayes in the Stax and Muscle Shoals Camp;

And then 1967 came around to introduce us all to the Queen of Soul: Aretha Franklin. This seemed to be the pinnacle years of soul 1967 to 1970 with lots of great songs and lots of experimentation. Soul as a genre would go on to spawn new genres like psychedelic soul, funk and then in the seventies Disco while still maintaining its own identity.