The Search For Soul

I've been seeing promos for "Soul Train" on my local cable channels, the vistas of huge Afros, vintage Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gay, Billy Paul, the Jacksons and the rest reviving funky musical memories, as well as the soul drenched ,basso profondo voice of Don Cornelius, the hippest MC of all time, which made me start thinking about "soul". It is one of those terms like "sustainability" that people use but never really define."Soul" to me has always been synonymous with Motown, the lush orchestral backgrounds and soaring vocal harmonies combining in plaintive ballads about lost loves.


In search of clarification, I turned to that pinnacle of internet knowledge - Wikipedia - to see what soul is. The article quotes the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame , defining soul music as: "music that arose out of the black experience in America through the transmutation of gospel and rt hymn and blues into a form of funky, secular testifying." Wikipedia says soul began in the US in the late 1950s and flourished from the 1960s to the 1980s. The most interesting aspect of the entry to yours truly was that (the) "Motown Sound" is defined as a "sub genre" while "Memphis soul, Philly soul" etc., are all called "regional scenes." The article goes on to document the soul sound "spectrum" but my eyes glazed over pretty quickly once I started drowning in terminology. For example, the Stax/Volt sound - Booker T, Steve Cropper, Wilson Pickett - is closer to what I would call funk - but then James Brown is included as a subset of soul as well and if JB isn't funky, then what is? There's also something called "blue-eyed soul" which must be a catch-all term for people like Michael McDonald and all those other white guys with "soul".


After all this in-depth research, I still don't know exactly what soul is, but I feel the closest I may have ever come to hearing soul raw and unplugged was at a South Carolina church service. I volunteered one February to go with both my daughters to Hollywood, South Carolina as part of a mission trip to rehab houses for residents of the Sea Islands. We all stayed in a day care center attached to a church, and Sunday was the first full day on site, so we began with a marathon three hour church service. Besides piano and electric organ, the church had a bass player and a drummer and a chorus that all sounded exactly like Aretha -soul live and in person from the heart.

Bottom line, no matter what soul really is, you either have it or you don't, which applies to artists from Tom Jones to Usher to Patti Labelle to Beyonce. Say amen, someone.