Skip to content

History of Soul Music

The soul, the first step for dance music

Soul was born in the United States from the mix of musical styles such as rhythm & blues or jazz. The soul was the seed for dance music all over the world and spoke, almost always, of community. Many artists of the soul passed into history after the boom of the ’50s and ’60s.

In the Evangelical Churches of Georgia, Philadelphia or Mississippi were the real geniuses: Sam Cooke (you send me, 1957), Ben E. King, who composed with his band The Drifters the classic There Goes My Baby in the summer of 1959 and who would later leave his Stand by Me for the story or Ray Charles (I got a Woman, 1954), about which we will talk more in this delivery.

It’s hard to determine where soul starts, but there’s one thing for sure, it served to make the up-to-date second-rate citizens, who had to give up their seat on the bus, become themselves leaders of the new humanity.

The rhythm that marked the steps to a new era

Soul songs jumped from the churches to the street and from there to the premises where there was a piano or a stage, becoming the best work outlet in the 1950s and 1960s for any black citizen who could sing. A phenomenon that featured numerous record labels, such as Motown (Detroit) or Philadelphia International Records.

Over time, the white community noticed these songs, and the music served to make both races find points of similarity. In this delivery, we give you more details about how the headwaters of the marches led, among others, by Martin Luther King, used the soul as a means to spread their message. I’m Black I’m Proud of James Brown, who would be the father of the Sex Machine some twenty years later.

Northern Soul in the UK

The music of black American crossed the pond to the mid ’60s, teen of the cities of the north of the United Kingdom began to collect vinyl of this genre as a form of entertainment, meeting mythical era organized marathons of plastic where the party got out of control in some cases, and the choreographies were invented (most had not seen a black dance). It was what became known as Northern Soul and meant the first dance footprint in Europe.

The phenomenon of the soul gained speed in the ’70s; a young Stevie Wonder will inspire thousands of new generations and appear in some myths as the Don’t Let Me This Way Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes. LINK: or the hits of Teddy Pendergrass. The genre will continue to evolve until the 1980s when it is mixed with the first bars of disco music.

This type of music has been a means of expression since the late 1950s in a sector of society in conditions of extreme poverty. What were initially love songs would then become critical and protest songs. This gave rise to the white audience, which in its inception, was welcomed very well to this genre, give them back to the end of the 60 the same due to its social content and criticism. Later, the label given to this style of ethnic music would disappear, and the whole population would accept it.