What is Soul?
"Soul is a ham hock in your cornflakes," sang the band Funkadelic. Lead singer George Clinton posed the question "What is Soul?" in 1970 in the debut album, also titled Funkadelic. Soul was so prevalent and meant many things to many people and the question was a loaded one. Yet Funkadelic’s metaphor for Soul was so colorful and gritty that America could feel, hear—and taste it—but were less able to define it. Funkadelic provided more hints in the song, including “Soul is the ring around your bathtub,” “a joint rolled in toilet paper,” “rusty ankles and ashy kneecaps,” and “chitlins foo young.”
Soul music originated from Black churches. Illustration by J.D. Humphreys
To further the first metaphor, the “ham hock” had been cooking since the 1950s and hissed, popped when it hit the sweet cornflakes and milk of the 1960s. The “cornflakes” provided the sweetness of unity and romanticism delivered by handsome men in mohair and beautiful women adorned in sequins who took to the stage and filled the airwaves to coax ears, move feet, while conquering the hearts of Black and white audiences alike. Soul influenced social policy, gave the Civil Rights Movement an evolving soundtrack, generated incredible revenue, flipped norms, stirred up white supremacists and religious zealots, and provided white and Black America unity beyond the dancefloor.
Even in the early 1970s, the answer to “What is Soul?” was not so definitive. Perhaps the “ham hock” celebrated the greasy and gritty Chitlin’ Circuit that Black artists had bravely blazed despite the Jim Crow danger and blatant racism around every turn from Main Streets to the backroads. The venues were often ramshackle establishments throughout the South yet provided safety and libations to its Black music talent and clientele. The Chitlin’ Circuit could pay decently, though never guaranteed, for those few acts who earned a fan base and could navigate the hostile environs once outside the venues. The experience of traveling through the South directly inspired Sam Cooke and the Staples Singers who wove personal narratives of despair and frustration into their music. For more experienced singers like Ray Charles, Ike & Tina Turner, and James Brown, they took the “ham hock” straight on with Black excellence amid unfair setbacks.
Soul was born in the 1950s through Rock & Roll but its conception was realized years later when the music took on defined sub-genres, oftentimes as the result of experimentation in the studio. Soul and Rock & Roll music received intense criticism from older and conservative generations who saw this unfamiliar music as a threat to their white way of life. The music industry was already in upheaval in the 1950s and entirely vulnerable to criticism and attacks. By 1952, records outsold sheet music for the first time. Live performances faded and radio became dependent on records. Jazz became endangered as most songs did not fit on traditional 45 records and could not keep up with the market and emerging buying habits and teenage demographic. As a result, Jazz lost its traditional Black market and shifted towards older white audiences.
Soul’s ingredients can be traced to 1948 when record industry magnate and producer Jerry Wexler coined the term "Rhythm and Blues" because of its diverse song structure that included ballads and acapella singing. Simultaneously, the beat originated from blues and gospel. Rhythm and Blues also softened the outdated term "race music" as white artists began to imitate R&B and white audiences began to consume it. Therefore, Soul, a sub-genre of R&B, had to be short and hard-hitting to the human soul and then quickly flee to create the desire for more.
Sometimes thought of as interchangeable or synonymized with the heart, the soul is the innermost part of human existence and is believed to be immortal after the physical being is gone. Soul is also the energy, passion, and intellect that goes into a performance or work of art as in “putting your soul into it.” When that intensity hits the human soul, the result is divine stimulation of the spirit, or “touches our soul,” evoking a condition that cannot be verbally expressed. The song or music is the conduit to the human soul.
“How do you define Soul, James?” talk show host David Frost asked James Brown.
“When other people don’t understand what you’re saying, you try to get it across in a song.”
- James Brown
“The truth,” Brown responded. “The down-to-earth truth. It’s from the ghetto, it’s a definition of hard knocks, it’s a way of explaining yourself. When other people don’t understand what you’re saying, you try to get it across in a song. It’s kind of frightful thing to avail, so you had to go through a song. Soul explains that, it explains the hard knocks, it explains everyday life, telling it like it is. The truth.”
While Soul music evokes a range of emotions, the universal subject matter of love resonated with a large audience and created crossover potential. Soul music capitalized on the notion that love provides a myriad of experiences and emotions— intense euphoria to pain when it goes awry. The latter was a renewed focus of many memorable Soul numbers towards the end of the sixties with changing societal norms allowing discussion of infidelity, promiscuity, finding and falling out of love, sexual challenges, and obsession. Heart and soul can oftentimes be combined to one entity with love providing everlasting purpose and Soul music as the bond holding it together.
While not always sweet, Soul also serves as a direct means of raising social awareness and expressing displeasure with an oppressive and unequal society. Or, more optimistically, Soul championed inclusiveness (“Friendship Train” by Gladys Knight & The Pips) or Black Pride (“Say it Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” by James Brown) and provided a voice amongst white supremacy. The sixties were filled with plenty of hope and heartbreak with Soul music serving as the decade’s soundtrack.
“It’s the word ‘can’t’ that makes you a Soul singer,” Brown said. “A Black man… has had extra hard knocks and he’s lived with the word ‘can’t’ for so long, so every time he can sing about it, it comes out a little bit stronger.”
Soul music was celebratory and highlighted society’s achievements. By 1967, Soul music’s influence was already apparent when singer Arthur Conley released “Sweet Soul Music” that paid homage to a handful of Soul’s greats, including Lou Rawls, Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and Wilson Pickett. That same year, the duo Sam & Dave released “Soul Man” that proudly proclaimed “I’m a soul man” twenty times in the song’s two minutes and thirty-six second duration. Coincidentally, singer Brenton Wood in 1967 released “The Oogum Boogum Song” which contains the lyrics, “You got soul (you got too much soul),” in which Wood admits he is paranormally smitten for a girl who wears hip hugger suits and high heeled boots. To “have soul” had meaning beyond just being keenly aware of trends but having “the essence of life; feeling, passion, emotional depth—all of which are believed to be derived from struggle, suffering and having participated in the Black Experience. Having risen above suffering, the person gains ‘soul.’”
Brenton Wood. Illustration by J.D. Humphreys
“Growing up in the poorer section of Los Angeles is not one of the easiest things that can happen to a child,” wrote Jacoba Atlas for KRLA Beat on Brenton Wood in 1967. “Breaking the cycle of poverty is even more difficult. Yet that is exactly what Brenton Wood has done. One of eleven children, he spent his childhood selling Coke bottles, catching fish to sell to restaurants and dreaming the dreams that eventually freed him from the Ghetto.”
LISTEN TO “THE OOGUM BOOGUM SONG” BY BRENTON WOOD
Wood would add, “Every singer is trying to tell the public something. He is trying to show people how he feels. The songs that I have recorded so far are dreams that I have had in the past. They are the way I picture things to be, in my own mind. You have to have a story to tell in a song, and to be able to explain it sincerely. I want to do all my songs this way. My songs aren’t really way out, they are something that I’ve felt inside.”
With segregation and racism ingrained into American society, Black singing groups found solace in music. The Black church was a haven where the spiritual uplift provided a respite from pain, sorrow, and struggle. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that, “The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement, still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and long yet born on American soil.”
“Backbeat means the church feel, the handclap.”
- Howard Grimes / Session Drummer
Animated and lively, the Black church instituted a holy groove that would leave an impression on many future musicians. “Backbeat means the church feel, the handclap,” said Howard Grimes, a Memphis session drummer. “When they didn’t have pianos in church, you heard the stomping of the feet and the clapping of hands. The foot was on the beat, and the handclap was on the ‘and.’ In me, it comes from my mother. She used to have parties at home, and I used to hear her popping her fingers. Everybody would be so joyful, and I had no idea that that was backbeat.”
Freedom Songs, which are Soul expressions, were crafted in the church and became a collective voice outside with their lyrics of protest and defiance to Jim Crow laws and bigotry. The Five Blind Boys of Alabama sang "Free at Last" years before Martin Luther King would use the same words in his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.
Wherever the Freedom Riders traveled, so did the Freedom Songs. In 1961, twenty-seven were arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, for challenging segregation on public buses. More than three hundred Freedom Riders were arrested with the goal of purposely filling up jails to reap attention. Many were sent to the harsher Parchman Penitentiary. Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett gave instructions to Parchman’s warden on how to treat the Freedom Riders: “Break their spirit, not their bones.”
“There was a sense of victory among the Freedom Rider in the jails,” said Freedom Rider and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) director James Farmer. “We were moved from jail to jail because we really, literally filled up the jails and we sang. This was a way to keep our spirits up. We sang the Freedom Songs and they wanted us to stop singing because they were afraid our spirit would become contagious and the other prisoners would become Freedom Riders.
“So, they threatened to remove our mattresses. Now the mattresses were the only convenience we had in those little cells. They were our link with civilization, so to speak. People were quiet for a while until finally Jim [James] Bevel, who was a Bible student at the time and a Freedom Rider, made a little speech pointing out that what they were trying to do is take your soul away. It’s not the mattress, it’s your soul! Everybody said, ‘Yes! Yes! But we’ll keep our soul, come get my mattress, I’ll keep my soul!” And they came in and took the mattresses away and people sang as they never sung before.”
Eileen Southern, the first Black tenured full professor at Harvard University, wrote, “The enduring feature of Black music is neither protest nor self-expression. It is communication, and one cannot imagine a time when Black musicians will have nothing to say, either to others or to God.”
According to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Soul is “music that arose out of the Black experience in America through the transmutation of gospel and rhythm and blues into a form of funky, secular testifying.”11 For many future Soul artists, their musical experience started with the church singing gospel, including Johnnie Taylor, Aretha Franklin, the Staple Singers, Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, Bobby Womack, and many others.
“We like to think that what we do is Soul music,” said Autry DeWalt, known as Junior Walker of the Motown group Junior Walker and the All Stars. “I’d say ‘soul’ was at the roots of all popular music, and we want to get at them roots, man.”
Even in 1966, Walker knew to credit its origins: “It comes from the church spiritual music, this music we play. A lotta people, they start callin’ it different names. But it comes from the church, there ain’t no doubt about that. My brother and sister were spiritual singers and I learned a lot from them. It just gave you a wonderful feelin,’ sittin’ and listenin’ to them. I tell you, you just gotta have this feelin’ to make people take notice. You can tell a person that’s got this feelin’—he can really let loose, man. It’s just there. It makes you feel good inside.”
Gospel “quartets,” referring to their singing style and not the number of singers, hit their stride after World War II. These quartets established a lead singer and an animated stage presence that would have a profound influence on music groups decades later. The Soul Stirrers, led by Rebert Harris, sang with the fervor and spirit of the Pentecostal church and their movements on stage drove audiences to pandemonium. The Soul Stirrers would pave the way for all subsequent quartets, including the Sensational Nightingales, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, the Swan Silvertones, the Famous Blue Jay Singers, and the Spirit of Memphis Quartet.
“These are the guys that I lived by musically, I just adored them,” said Memphis artist Luther Ingram. “They gave me a lot of different concepts and vocal ranges, different feels.”
Harris, at 34-years-old, left the Soul Stirrers in 1950 and a 19-year-old Sam Cooke took his place. As a Soul Stirrer, Cooke wrote and sang many gospel classics such as “Nearer to Thee,” Touch the Hem of His Garment,” and “Be With Me Jesus,” attracted a younger crowd to Gospel and girls would rush to the stage to catch a glimpse of the handsome singer. Cooke’s ascent to music deity was inevitable.
The intersection of Gospel and Blues are what formed Soul. The two genres were different in many aspects; both come from the human heart of pain, love, and longing. Gospel came directly from the church and sung to God, whereas Blues came from hardship and the cotton fields. Blues commands the present moment, is secular and often sung to a loved one, such as a spouse or lover. 
Both Gospel and Blues uplift the spirit and release participants from their plight by giving in. Gospel and Blues were two forms that existed in society’s vocabulary, whereas the term “Soul” was applied to music in the late fifties, having been acknowledged much later, that was of Jazz style the blended hard bop with Gospel and Blues elements. This new sound traveled with the population of rural Black southerners who sought employment in post-WW II urban defense factories in the north and west.
Throughout the sixties, the sub-genres of Rhythm and Blues were defined through geography and style: Detroit/Motown Soul, Deep/Southern Soul, Memphis Soul, New Orleans Soul, Chicago Soul, Florida Soul, Philadelphia Soul, Psychedelic Soul, Blue-eyed Soul (R&B performed by white artists), British Soul, and Northern Soul.
“I felt the spirit of God at church,” said Dolores “La La” Brooks who would later become lead singer of the girl group, the Crystals. “In fact, it used to drive my mother crazy. A lot of the kids, seven or eight years old, would be in the street playing ball or rope. But sometimes inside my soul, as a kid, I couldn’t play for so long in the street because I had to go to church. 
In those days, they used to be called storefront churches. In my mind, as a kid, I had to stop playing and go to those storefront churches and I’d be the only kid in the back with a fan in my hand, tapping my feet, and the old ladies looking back at me giving me a smile. And then I’d hear my mother, ‘La La! La La!’ and I would be sitting there quiet. She’d find me and say, ‘Why you go in them storefront churches? It ain’t church today.’ I just liked to sit there.”
Brooks, enamored with the churchgoing experience in Brooklyn, wandered into a white storefront church across the street on a day when the Black churches were closed. Brooks said with laughter, “Mama was looking for me. I sat in the back and all the white people were like, ‘What is this Negro doing sitting back there?’ White church was boring but I was a kid and I didn’t know the difference since they were talking about God but I was wondering why they were singing out of tune there. The Black churches were very animated with tambourines and stuff like that. White churches were like… (Brooks imitates by singing white Gospel in slow, exaggerated monotone). I was sitting back there bored as heck but I didn’t want to leave and disrespect God.”
At the juvenile detention center where he was imprisoned for robbery, James Brown was nicknamed “Music Box” for his love of harmonizing and listening religiously to the Black gospel radio program on WLET in Toccoa, Georgia, that featured The MelloTones. Brown focused on how Gospel made him feel even though he was not quite of the faith. Gospel taught him how to construct a story with his vocal delivery and informed how parts of the song worked together.
“Singing Gospel’s a good way to learn about music in general,” Brown would later say. “There’s a format for Gospel; you learn the different parts, and then you start putting them together…” Brown was known to get emotional and surrender to the supernatural feeling Gospel evoked. While in jail, Brown created a group and made connections for life.
“I started out in church singing my little heart out,” said Barbara Harris of the girl group, The Toys. Harris started singing in her hometown churches in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, as a child before moving to Queens, New York. “Reminded me of Tina Turner’s story and how they tried to shut her up [laughing]. I used to sing it all loud too. But that was an experience. I learned a lot. Learned how to play the tambourine. It was a good journey.”