Soul

When the Gospel of the South met the Rhythm & Blues of the Midwest, it brought the spirituality of a Sunday Revival into the Boogie-Woogie world of Rhythm & Blues. Out of this fertile union, Soul was born. The backbone of Soul is a solid rhythm section with a decidedly secular groove. The guitar usually takes a back seat to a Hammond B-3 organ, as horns moan and flare above. However, almost all Soul centers around impassioned, soaring vocals with occasional improvisational touches. Soul implores its listeners to look for love, to forgive for love, or to simply shake their tails for some good loving. Impassioned artists like Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and Al Green verge on blurring the line that separates the soul singer from the evangelical preacher. You could almost call Soul music religious music without the religion.

Cities like Detroit and Philadelphia were the hotbeds of mainstream Soul as it crossed over to the masses in the mid- to late '60s, while developments in Alabama's Muscle Shoals and Memphis' famous Stax/Volt studio kept Soul music relevant through to the birth of Funk. Soul's effect on American popular music reverberates through the Blue-Eyed Soul of the '70s on to today's R&B hits by artists including the acrobatic vocalist Mariah Carey and The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.