Soul Music

The Founding Fathers of Soul Music
The gospel revival and doo-wop merged into the great season of soul music. Soul music was enabled by the commercial boom of "race" music, that had led to the creation of channels and infrastructures run by black enterpreneurs for black artists. This class of black enterpreneurs hired and trained a generation of session musicians, producers and arrangers (not to mention songwriters) who were specifically meant to serve the needs of black music.
Soul music was also enabled by an unstoppable trend towards black and white integration, as more and more white folks accepted the idea that black culture was not evil or degrading, simply different (African instead of European). The sociopolitical inroads made by jazz also helped legitimize black pop music with the white masses.
Soul music was also, indirectly, helped by rock music. Rock music buried white pop music but did not quite offer an alternative. On the other hand, rock music legitimized black pop music (rock music was basically a white version of rhythm'n'blues), and black pop music did offer an alternative to the Italian crooners and the likes. As the civil rights movement staged bigger and bigger demonstrations and increased African-American pride, soul music became more than party music for young blacks: it became a rallying flag for the black nationalist movement. While never truly political in nature, soul music's ascent in the pop charts came to represent one of the first (and most visible) successes of the civil-rights movement.                                                                                                                 Soul music was born thanks to the innovations of a generation of post-war musicians who, essentially, turned gospel music into a secular form of art. The 1950s recordings of Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and James Brown are commonly considered the beginnings of soul music.
                                                  Ray Charles... [continues]

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