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A successful popular music style, soul music
is derived from black GOSPEL MUSIC, with its highly decorated,
emotional singing style, fervent backup choruses, and rhythmic
instrumental backing. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, BLUES
singers such as Bobby Bland, and vocal groups like the Ravens,
used a gospel-tinged sound. Church singers and groups began
to record popular music in the 1950s, among them The Dominoes,
led by Clyde McPhatter, and Sam Cooke, who was well known
as a gospel singer before he "crossed over" to popular
music. The most important names in 1950s soul music, however,
were James BROWN, whose 1956 "Please, Please, Please"
had all the raw urgency of black preaching, and Ray CHARLES,
whose 1959 "What'd I Say?" took the new sound to
a wide audience.
The soul style was greatly popularized in the 1960s by the
success of the MOTOWN group of record labels, and by Aretha
FRANKLIN, the daughter of a well-known Detroit preacher, whose
recordings became national hits. Other important soul singers
of the 1960s included Otis REDDING and Wilson Pickett, who
were practitioners of the so-called Memphis sound. Throughout
the 1960s the soul style was smoothed and softened to make
it more acceptable to mass audiences. This tendency continued
during the 1970s and '80s, when "soul music" became
an accepted element of American popular music, growing increasingly
sophisticated but retaining its basic church elements: decoration,
drive, and verve.
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