Soul & Motown

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Link to Spotify playlist: Mus115 - 07. Soul & Motown

Otis Redding

"I am not a blues singer or an R&B singer, I'm a soul singer. We go into the studio without any-thing prepared, just record what come out. That's soul - the way you feel" - Otis Redding

  • I've Been Loving You Too Long
  • Respect


Thomas Dorsey

"(Soul) is what comes from within; it's what happens when the inner part of you comes out. It's the part of playing you can't get out of the books and studies. In my case, I believe that what I heard and felt in the music of my church...was the most powerful influence on my musical career. Everyone wants to know where I got that funky style. Well it comes from the church. The music I heard was open, relaxed, impromptu-soul music" - Milt Jackson

"It was first in the Negro church. When I was a little boy, the churches couldn't afford an organ and the sisters sat in the amen corner and kept rhythm by clapping their hands. There is no need for some fellow born yesterday to come up and tell me now that soul is something new. At church, they do more foot tapping and hand clapping than they ever did" - Thomas Dorsey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHqg-tGisW8


Aretha Franklin

"Soul to me is a feeling, a lot of depth and being able to bring to the surface that which is happening inside...It's just the emotion, the way it affects other people." - Aretha Franklin


James Brown (godfather of soul, aka the hardest working man in show-buisness)

"I tried the heavy approach two or three times, and every time I tried, I got stopped. Just have to keep coming back and simplifying it. It's a funny thing. You make a little three-finger chord on the guitar and they'll sell a million copies, and the minute the cat spreads his hand out across the neck, you can't give the record away." - James Brown


Ray Charles

"What is a soul? It's like electricity - we don't really know what it is, but it's a force that can light a room." - Ray Charles


MOTOWN

For the soul music section, I thought I'd let the artists speak for themselves. Those were the breakthrough artists who made it out of predominately "Black" music markets and into "mainstream" music markets. But most of this kind of music's success was driven by the Motown Records empire, started by Berry Gordy Jr, who was somewhat embarrassed by simple R&B and preferred the much more sophisticated jazz music of the time. He started a small independent record label called Tamla with $700 he borrowed from a friend. Note - wikipedia says he borrowed $800 from his family, but the book I used to source this said from a friend. Who's to really know?

He had a few minor hits that kept him afloat, but with working with "The Miracles" (including Smokey Robinson), the label released "Shop Around", which became a number 2 hit on the pop charts. It was the first million seller for Tamla records, and their follow up hit "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" really cemented the label's success. Tamla and Motown merged into Motown Record Corportation, and the Detroit Motown music scene began.

One of the important aspects of popular music was that even though rock was a synthesis of many cultures and backgrounds, most of the big acts were white. Even Chuck Berry and Little Richard had brief successes before being supplanted by white artists renditions of their music (early Beatles, Stones, etc...), at least on the "mainstream" charts. Only the dance craze kept black musicians on the charts. Berry Gordy had an ambition to take black music to prominence in both white and black markets, and to take over the tops of the "mainstream" charts.

He did this with artists and writers like Smokey Robinson, male groups like The Four Tops and The Temptations, female groups like Mavelettes, Martha and the Vandellas, and The Supremes, and solo sensations Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. They also struck a goldmine with Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Brian Holland as writers and production managers for all this tallent. Holland-Dozier-Holland (or H-D-H for short) was the backbone of the Motown sound for the artists who didn't write their own songs, which was most of Motown, aside from Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder).

Motown follow up and epilogue:

Stevie Wonder did his first recording for Motown when he was 12 - "Fingertips 1 & 2", a mostly instrumental jam. He had a string of hits as he grew up and wrote songs for others on the label, but did not really come into his own until the late 70's with the aforementioned and linked "Uptight". After this, he eschewed the standard Motown treatment and fought to self-produce his own works (Signed, Sealed, and Delivered), and when he turned 21, he setup his own studio, preparing to distribute on his own until Motown came back with an unprecedented offer - they would distribute his recordings and split the songwriting royalties 50-50, and let Stevie have complete artistic control. For a company like Motown and a micro-manager like Berry Gordy, this was unheard of. This was just the beginning of Stevie's career, and we'll hear more from him later.

in 1971, Motown left Detroit for Los Angeles, and continued their success with the Jackson Five, the Commodores, Diana Ross, and of course, Stevie Wonder. In June 1988, Motown was purchased by MCA records, thus bringing to an end the largest black owned-and-operated company in America.

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