Southern Soul: Part 1

What is Soul?

If the blues had a baby and they called it rock'n'roll, then soul was the child of gospel and R&B, with more than a touch of country thrown in. It was music that had gone to church, and remembered the lessons it had learned there. It was a deep, truly heartfelt sound. Soul was what you got when Brother Ray Charles changed the lyrics to an old gospel song he'd probably sung growing up in Florida and released it as "I Got A Woman" in 1954. Soul was James Brown and the Famous Flames' "Please Please Please." It grew from the parentage of B.B. King and the Soul Stirrers, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, Bobby "Blue" Bland, and Hank Williams. It was nurtured on the streets of Memphis and Macon, Georgia, in the juke joints or the clubs that made up the chitlin circuit, and grew up to be the sound of the south for a generation. And make no mistake, soul, true soul, was southern.

"Soul never pretended to be anything other than basic music. It was always about the feel, not fancy arrangements - if anything, less tended to be more."

What came out of the Motor City was often called soul, but it wasn't. Remarkable as Motown's achievement was, the music was nothing more than black pop that hit a white audience. It was a catchy song, well performed, that vanished when the next catchy song came along a couple of months later. It was product, skin deep. Soul, real soul, the kind that could only come from below the Mason-Dixon line, was never so ephemeral - or so calculated. Maybe it was because, for African-Americans there, life had always been hard, and music had been one of the few releases from an endless grind. So it had to hit home, it had to penetrate to the core. So it went below the skin, past the veins are the arteries, all the way to the bones and the heart.

Soul never pretended to be anything other than basic music. It was always about the feel, not fancy arrangements - if anything, less tended to be more. Get the groove, get in the pocket, keep it tight, and let the singer hit you right where you lived. For a decade and a half, soul was a soundtrack of America, a music that went all over the world, but kept its feet firmly planted in Southern soil. The labels - Sound Stage 7, Malaco, SSS, Fame, even the might Stax - might have been small, often shoestring, operations, but what they put out made people sit up and listen. The studios at American, Stax, and Muscle Shoals became revered names for their sound and the funky economy of their musicians.

Unlike its northern counterpart, Southern soul had space - what wasn't played was as important as each note hit. For all its African-American associations, soul was essentially a music without color. Otis Redding was black, Solomon Burke, Clarence Carter, Joe Simon, and a whole string of acts, but take a listen to Charlie Rich's demo for "Feel Like Going Home," just him and his piano, or Eddie Hinton singing "Hard Luck Guy," Dan Penn on "I Hate You," or any Steve Cropper guitar break (not to mention the Muscle Shoals band) and it's apparent that soul was color blind.

And the fact that it could cross racial boundaries is important. Most people think of the South in the Sixties as a place where segregation lingered on, even after the Civil Rights movement. Maybe it did - but not in soul. Not when half the house musicians at Stax, Fame, and Muscle Shoals were white, or when the writers and producers (like Chips Moman and Rick Hall) were white guys, coaxing these deep, deep performances from the singers. Soul, to put it briefly, was feeling, the weight of history and hurt put in a time and place and pressed on vinyl.

How It All Began

The roots of soul, and R&B - gospel and blues - were essentially two sides of the same coin, the sacred and profane, the Sunday morning that followed Saturday night. After World War II, R&B had largely taken over from blues in the public consciousness. It was blues with some horns added, and more electricity in the sound (not to say blues had died; from it). The sound of soul never hid its musical lineage.

But there's another strand in the picture. For a long time, if you grew up in the South, all you were going to hear on the radio was country music. It didn't matter if you were black or white, that was your choice. And a lot of blacks loved it - a whole generation of soul singers thrilled to the sound of Hank Williams, often citing him as a major influence - their childhood Saturday evenings spent, like their white neighbors, listening to the Grand Ol' Opry. Different but still very much the same. A big turning point came when Memphis station WDIA changed its format and began playing black music - which meant R&B. All of a sudden, for the very first time, there was a choice, and people picked up on it. John Richbourg in Nashville, and Dewey Phillips, also in Memphis, were hip to the new sound, and started featuring it (this was several years before Alan Freed began playing the music). Suddenly blacks had their own music readily available, and there were also some white kids getting into it - including a young Elvis Presley.

Now all the elements were in place. While there's endless discussion over what might be the first soul record, a solid case could be made for Ray Charles's "I Got A Woman," recorded in Atlanta, on November 19, 1954. Charles, born in Florida, had grown up in the church, but was also very conversant with both jazz and R&B. He'd traveled to the Northwest, and had been a fixture on Seattle's Jackson Street, before heading to L.A., where he'd become bandleader and arranger for Guitar Slim before becoming a solo act and signing for Atlantic. "I Got A Woman" was a breakthrough for him - a breakthrough all the way to his roots. It wasn't R&B, it wasn't gospel. It wasn't blues, it wasn't jazz. But in that one song there were elements of everything that made it transcend genre.

"I got a lot of criticism from the churches," Charles told Robert Palmer, "and from musicians, too. They said I must be crazy and all that, and then, when they saw it was working, everybody started doing it."

Among those people doing it, down in Georgia, was a gospel-turned-R&B-singer by the name of James Brown. From Augusta, Ga. He'd been in prison for car theft, and almost literally sang his way out of there with gospel music, as part of the Gospel Starlighters, who became the Flames. He'd recorded a song called "Please Please Please," which was enough of a local hit for him to be signed to Syd Nathan's King label, based in Cincinnati. Brown and his band rerecorded the song, but at first Nathan didn't want to release it, deeming it a mess (nor did Nathan see the point in a James Brown live album in 1962, either. He wondered why people would want to buy live versions of songs they already had on record. The album, James Brown Live at the Apollo, Volume 1, spent 66 weeks on the Billboard charts and remains acknowledged as one of the greatest live albums ever). "Please Please Please" would have been little more than R&B were it not for Brown's pleading vocal, straight out of church, which took it way over the top. When he ached, you believed every word; he took you to another place.

Southern Soul: Part 2

Southern Soul: Part 1

What is Soul?

"Soul never pretended to be anything other than basic music. It was always about the feel, not fancy arrangements - if anything, less tended to be more."

How It All Began

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