Soul

Soul lives somewhere between 70 BPM ballads and 130 BPM uptempo cuts, built around electric guitar, bass, drums, a horn section, organ, and piano. The vocal is the center of gravity: melisma, shouts, and pleas carried directly over from Black church singing, often answered by a small backing chorus. Arrangements favor short, repeated horn riffs and a strong rhythm-section pocket rather than long instrumental passages. Mixing engineers push the vocal forward and let the kick and bass do the underwriting.

The genre coalesced in the late 1950s in several cities at once: Stax in Memphis with Otis Redding and Booker T. & the M.G.'s, Motown in Detroit with Smokey Robinson and the Temptations, and Atlantic in New York and Muscle Shoals with Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett. Ray Charles's secular adaptation of gospel ('I Got a Woman,' 1954) is widely cited as the doorway. Through the 1960s and 70s the form branched into Philly soul, Memphis grit, and the singer-songwriter introspection of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Curtis Mayfield, before disco, quiet storm, and new jack swing extended the lineage into the 80s.

Listen for the call-and-response between lead and background vocals — often the most musically interesting line in the record. The horn section usually plays short stabs as punctuation, not extended solos. Notice how the rhythm section sits 'in the pocket': the drums and bass are slightly behind the beat, which is what gives soul records their relaxed forward motion.

Single: Aretha Franklin, 'I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)' (1967), recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals. Album: Marvin Gaye, 'What's Going On' (1971) for the form at its most ambitious.

The Funk Brothers, Motown's house band, played on more number-one hits than the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, and Elvis Presley combined, but went uncredited on Motown LPs until the 1971 release of 'What's Going On.'