A History of Soul and Funk

In the 1950s, gospel and secular music were kept strictly apart. Gospel belonged to the church; rhythm and blues belonged to clubs and jukeboxes. Ray Charles crossed that line. His "I Got a Woman" from 1954 put gospel form and gospel singing on a love song, and in 1955 he turned the spiritual "This Little Light of Mine" into "This Little Girl of Mine". Some listeners heard it as blasphemy.

Others followed. Sam Cooke came from the gospel group the Soul Stirrers and became one of the defining soul singers; his "A Change Is Gonna Come" from 1964 is a slow ballad with strings that still sounds like a sermon. What these singers brought along was more than a vocal style. They brought call and response between singer and choir, the gradual build of a church service, and the idea that a performance should grow toward a peak instead of simply ending.

The term rhythm and blues itself started as a label, not a style. In the late 1940s a music trade paper used it to replace the term "race records", which covered almost everything recorded by or for Black Americans. The music that came out of that mix of church and club during the civil rights years became known as soul.

Soul was made in studios with house bands, and each studio had its own sound. At Motown in Detroit, a fixed group of musicians known as the Funk Brothers played on hit after hit. The records were bright and compressed so they would work on a car radio, with tambourine on the backbeat and melodic bass lines. The Temptations' "My Girl" from 1964 is a famous example of a bass line that works as a second hook.

At Stax in Memphis, the house band from 1962 was Booker T. & the M.G.'s. Songs were often arranged on the spot, with nothing written down. The studio was a converted movie theater with a sloping floor, and its large, raw room is audible on the records. Where Motown put backing vocals, Stax put horns. Muscle Shoals in Alabama added a third sound, rougher and heavier.

The difference is also a matter of timing. In broad terms, the Detroit records push the snare and tambourine slightly ahead, while the Memphis records lay the snare a little late. Both can play at the same tempo and still feel completely different. Aretha Franklin's "Respect" from 1967 is a good place to hear the Southern side. Otis Redding wrote it and recorded it first in 1965; Franklin's version was recorded in New York with musicians from Muscle Shoals.

The guitar in soul is a rhythm instrument. One guitar plays short, muted chord stabs on the offbeats; the other fills or doubles. The Hammond organ, played through a rotating Leslie speaker, holds chords and answers the singer. The horns play short punches at the end of a vocal line instead of long parts. The bass does not just play roots; it writes a second melody.

The harmony is richer than in rock. Soul uses seventh chords and ninth chords where rock would use plain triads. Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" from 1971 is built on major and minor seventh chords, which was unusual in this style at the time. The Soul and R&B style guide shows these chords and how the parts fit together.

In the mid-1960s, James Brown and his band started to strip the song down to its rhythm. On "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" from 1965, the form is still close to a blues, but Jimmy Nolen's muted guitar already plays a tight sixteenth-note pattern. On "Cold Sweat" from 1967, the chords barely move at all. The band stays on one harmony for so long that the groove itself becomes the composition.

The central idea is the one. In most popular music, the weight sits on the backbeat, the snare on two and four. In funk, the snare still plays two and four, but the whole band aims at beat one: kick, bass, guitar and horns land there together, then spread out and leave gaps until the next one. Bootsy Collins has told how James Brown, when Collins played too many notes on bass, told him to slow down and give him the one.

Other bands took the idea in their own directions. The Meters from New Orleans recorded "Cissy Strut" in 1969, an instrumental full of empty space. Sly and the Family Stone's "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" from 1970 made Larry Graham's slap bass technique a standard. Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" from 1972 put a clavinet riff at the center, a keyboard part that works like a drum pattern. Syncopation and the Offbeat explains the rhythmic placement behind these grooves.

Funk records often contain short passages where most of the band drops out and the drums carry on alone. In 1970, Clyde Stubblefield played such a break on James Brown's "Funky Drummer". It became one of the most sampled pieces of drumming in music. Listen to how much of what he plays is barely audible: ghost notes on the snare between the main hits.

When DJs in the Bronx started extending breaks with two copies of a record, funk and soul records were their source material. A History of Hip-Hop follows that story, and Sampling shows how producers later cut and repeated those fragments.

In Philadelphia, soul went in another direction. Drummer Earl Young played the kick on every beat with an open hi-hat between them on "The Love I Lost" by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes in 1973, the pattern that became the basis of disco. MFSB's "TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)" from 1974 became the theme of the television show Soul Train. Funk and Disco compares the two drum patterns.

From the late 1970s, soul became smoother and more electronic. In the second half of the 1980s, new jack swing put R&B singing on hip-hop rhythms, and modern R&B grew from there. In the late 1990s, artists such as D'Angelo and Erykah Badu returned to live instruments, jazz harmony and a deliberately late, loose feel. The term neo-soul was coined by a record executive as a marketing label, and several of those artists rejected it. What runs through all of these waves is the same core: seventh and ninth chords, a backbeat, and singing that comes from the church.

1. Put an early Ray Charles record next to a gospel recording. Listen for the call and response between the lead voice and the backing singers.
2. Compare a Motown single with a Stax single at a similar tempo. Clap on two and four and notice whether the snare feels slightly early or slightly late.
3. Play "Cold Sweat" or another mid-1960s James Brown record. Count how long you wait for a chord change, and listen to how heavy beat one becomes.

Each prompt focuses on one musical decision. One record cannot stand for a whole studio or decade.

Soul brought the church into the dance hall, and funk turned the band into one large rhythm instrument. A drum break from 1970 can still be heard on records made decades later.