Word: soul
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...That's what most of the soul songs are all about," says Negro Comedian Godfrey Cambridge. "Take Aretha's Dr. Feelgood...
Rats in the Basement. No amount of empathy from outside can give a singer the realism and believability that constitute soul. He has to have "been down the line," as Negroes say, and "paid his dues" in life. Aretha, in spite of her youth, has paid heavily. "I might be just 26, but I'm an old woman in disguise?26 goin' on 65," she says only half jokingly. "Trying to grow up is hurting, you know. You make mistakes. You try to learn from them, and when you don't it hurts even more. And I've been hurt?...
Then 18 months ago she switched to Atlantic Records, which for two decades has specialized in bedrock rhythm & blues. Savvy Producer Jerry Wexler backed her with a funky Memphis rhythm section (which she ably joined on piano), and cut her loose to swing into the soul groove. Her first disk, I Never Loved a Man, sold a million copies. "It had looked for the longest time like I would never have a gold record," she says. "I wanted...
Hollers & Blues. Negroes have been sifting their sorrows in songs like this for centuries. It started, says Mahalia Jackson, who is now 56, with "the groans and moans of the people in the cotton fields. Before it got the name of soul, men were sellin' watermelons and vegetables on a wagon drawn by a mule, hollerin' 'watermellllon!' with a cry in their voices. And the men on the railroad track layin' crossties?every time they hit the hammer it was with a sad feelin', but with a beat. And the Baptist preacher?he the one who had the soul?...
Chitlin Circuit. It was not long before the soul sound began to move directly into the white market of pop music, and its purveyors started outstripping their white imitators. Charles was the first to reach a mass white public, starting as far back as 1955 with his hit record, I Got a Woman. In more recent years, a string of others have come along behind him. Lou Rawls, for example, is a former gospel trouper who spices his blues songs with reminiscences of his boyhood in Chicago's South Side slums. He used to work only in the Negro nightclub...