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By the early 1970s, soul music had been influenced by psychedelic rock and other genres. The social and political ferment of the times inspired artists like Gaye and Curtis Mayfield to release album-length statements with hard-hitting social commentary. Artists like James Brown led soul towards funk music, which became typified by 1970s bands like Parliament-Funkadelic and The Meters. More versatile groups like War, the Commodores and Earth, Wind and Fire became popular around this time. During the 1970s, some slick and commercial blue-eyed soul acts like Philadelphia's Hall & Oates and Oakland's Tower of Power achieved mainstream success, as did a new generation of street-corner harmony or city-soul groups like The Delfonics and Howard University's Unifics.

The syndicated television series Soul Train, created hosted by Chicago native Don Cornelius, debuted in 1971. The show provided an outlet for soul music for several decades, also spawning a franchise that saw the creation of a record label (Soul Train Records) that distributed music by The Whispers, Carrie Lucas, and an up-and-coming group known as Shalamar. Numerous disputes led to Cornelius spinning off the record label to his talent booker, Dick Griffey, who transformed the label into Solar Records, itself a prominent soul music label throughout the 1980s. The TV series continued to air until 2006, although other predominantly black music genre such as hip hop began overshadowing soul on the show beginning in the 1980s.

As disco and funk were dominating the charts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, soul went in the direction of quiet storm. With its relaxed tempos and soft melodies, quiet storm soul took influences from soft rock and adult contemporary. Many funk bands, such as Con Funk Shun, Cameo, and Lakeside would have a few quiet storm tracks on their albums. Among the most successful acts in this era include Smokey Robinson, Teddy Pendergrass, Peabo Bryson, Atlantic Starr, and Larry Graham.

After the decline of disco and funk in the early 1980s, soul music became influenced by electro music. It became less raw and more slickly produced, resulting in a style known as contemporary R&B, which sounded very different from the original rhythm and blues style.

The United States saw the development of neo-soul around 1994. Mainstream record label marketing support for soul genres cooled in the 2000s due to the industry's re-focus on hip hop.

Detroit and Motown Records
Detroit was the home of Motown Records, a company that "created the sound of young America, which appealed to whites as much as to blacks". Notable for being black-owned, and guided by Berry Gordy Jr., the company successfully developed a style of music &mdash; sometimes called "pop-soul" but more often simply the "Motown Sound" &mdash; that was aimed at the pop charts and drew on gospel roots, R&B, rock and roll, and traditional popular music. Its records were strongly rhythmic and often featured raw gospel-derived vocals with a call-and-response style; their sophisticated instrumentation and polished production appealed to dancers and radio listeners. The Motown sound typically included a powerful bass line, hand clapping and/or a tambourine, violins and [[Bell (instrument)|bells].

Hits were made using a quasi-industrial production-line approach. Some considered the process to be mechanistic. but producers and songwriters such as Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland were rarely out of the charts. Motown Records' house band became known as the Funk Brothers. The company nurtured and promoted many highly successful, innovative and influential black singers and songwriters, including Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Diana Ross and The Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Marvin Gaye, and The Jackson Five. By the late 1960s, the company's commercial approach came into conflict with the demands by musicians such as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye for more creative independence, and leading writers Holland, Dozier and Holland left the label. Berry Gordy moved the comapny's headquarters to Los Angeles in 1972.

Though Detroit was dominated by Motown,

Motown specialized in a type of soul music it referred to with the trademark "The Motown Sound". Crafted with an ear towards pop appeal, the Motown Sound typically used tambourines to accent the back beat, prominent and often melodic electric bass-guitar lines, distinctive melodic and chord structures, and a call-and-response singing style that originated in gospel music. Pop production techniques such as the use of orchestral string sections, charted horn sections, and carefully arranged background vocals were also used. Complex arrangements and elaborate, melismatic vocal riffs were avoided. Motown producers believed steadfastly in the "KISS principle" (keep it simple, stupid).

The Motown production process has been described as factory-like. The Hitsville studios remained open and active 22 hours a day, and artists would often go on tour for weeks, come back to Detroit to record as many songs as possible, and then promptly go on tour again. Berry Gordy held quality control meetings every Friday morning, and used veto power to ensure that only the very best material and performances would be released. The test was that every new release needed to fit into a sequence of the top five selling pop singles of the week. Several tracks that later became critical and commercial favorites were initially rejected by Gordy; the two most notable being the Marvin Gaye songs "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and "What's Going On". In several cases, producers would re-work tracks in hopes of eventually getting them approved at a later Friday morning meeting, as producer Norman Whitfield did with "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and The Temptations' "Ain't Too Proud to Beg".

Many of Motown's best-known songs, including all the early hits for The Supremes, were written by the songwriting trio of Holland–Dozier–Holland (Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland). Other important Motown producers and songwriters included Norman Whitfield, William "Mickey" Stevenson, Smokey Robinson, Barrett Strong, Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, Frank Wilson, Pamela Sawyer & Gloria Jones, James Dean & William Weatherspoon, Johnny Bristol, Harvey Fuqua, Gil Askey, Stevie Wonder and Gordy himself.

Gordy relocated Motown to Los Angeles in 1972, and there it remained an independent company until June 28, 1988, when Gordy sold the company to MCA and Boston Ventures (which took over full ownership of Motown in 1991), then to PolyGram in 1994, before being sold again to MCA Records' successor Universal Music Group, when it acquired The PolyGram Label Group. As of summer of 2011, Motown has been reactivated under The Island Def Jam Music Group division of Universal Music Group. Motown is headquartered in New York City.

Popular during the 1960s, the style became glossier during the 1970s and led to disco.

In Detroit, producer Don Davis worked with Stax artists such as Johnnie Taylor and The Dramatics. Early 1970s recordings by The Detroit Emeralds, such as Do Me Right, are a link between soul and the later disco style.

His master strokes for cracking the uptown, white establishment was hiring both Maxine Powell, who ran the Artists Development finishing school, and white marketeer Barney Ales, who ensured that the company always got paid. Supreme Mary Wilson recalls: "It was Maxine Powell's job to refine us. She very early on told us that we were all diamonds, in the raw, and we needed refining." Over in Chicago, white-owned, family business Chess Records enviously eyed up Motown's success. Although the label already had a reputation for blues and black rock 'n' roll, they wanted a fresh sound that echoed the mood of the growing aspirational black population. By "sweetening" with strings and pop arrangements, the gritty Chicago sound was transformed into sophisticated soul. Etta James' Only Time Will Tell brought Chess a taste of crossover magic and Fontella Bass's hit Rescue Me emulated the Motown formula. As the mood of the nation changed, with the rise of the civil rights movement and protests over the Vietnam War, it was in Chicago - not Detroit - that music with a social conscience was first heard. In People Get Ready and Choice Of Colours Curtis Mayfield captured the zeitgeist and sang openly about community struggle and racial harmony.The Detroit riots were a huge wake-up call for Motown, who now seemed embarrassingly out of kilter. Cracks appeared in the company when, after a dispute about money, Holland/Dozier/Holland left, producer Mickey Stevenson departed and Supreme Flo Ballard was fired. But Gordy was a survivor and, determined to prove the company could move with the times, he released Love Child by Diana Ross and the Supremes.The song, which had a social message, became one of the biggest selling records in Motown's history. Gordy moved the business out to LA and it entered a second golden age. But the age of innocence for Motown was over.

Stax Records and Atlantic Records
These independent labels produced high-quality dance records with such singers as Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. They tended to have smaller ensembles marked by expressive gospel-tinged vocals. Brass and Saxophones were also used extensively.

Later examples of soul music include recordings by The Staple Singers (such as I'll Take You There), and Al Green's 1970s recordings, done at Willie Mitchell's' Royal Recording in Memphis. Mitchell's Hi Records continued the Stax tradition in that decade, releasing many hits by Green, Ann Peebles, Otis Clay, O.V. Wright and Syl Johnson. Bobby Womack, who recorded with Chips Moman in the late 1960s, continued to produce soul recordings in the 1970s and 1980s.

Deep soul and southern soul


The terms deep soul and southern soul generally refer to a driving, energetic soul style combining R&B's energy with pulsating southern United States gospel music sounds. Memphis, Tennessee label Stax Records nurtured a distinctive sound, which included putting vocals further back in the mix than most contemporary R&B records, using vibrant horn parts in place of background vocals, and a focus on the low end of the frequency spectrum. The vast majority of Stax releases were backed by house bands Booker T and the MGs (with Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, and Al Jackson) and the Memphis Horns (the splinter horn section of the Mar-Keys).

Florence, Alabama, was the home of FAME Studios. Jimmy Hughes, Percy Sledge and Arthur Alexander recorded at Fame, and Aretha Franklin recorded in the area later in the 1960s. Fame Studios (often referred to as Muscle Shoals after a nearby town) enjoyed a close relationship with the Memphis label Stax Records, and many of the musicians and producers who worked in Memphis contributed to recordings in Alabama. Another notable Memphis label was Goldwax Records, which signed O.V. Wright and James Carr. Carr's "The Dark End of the Street" (written by Chips Moman and Dan Penn) was recorded in 1967 at two other Memphis studios, Royal Recording and American Sound Studios. American Sound Studios owner Chips Moman produced "The Dark End of the Street", and the musicians were his house band of Reggie Young, Bobby Woods, Tommy Cogbill and Gene Chrisman. Carr also recorded songs at Fame Studio with musicians David Hood, Jimmy Johnson and Roger Hawkins.

Memphis soul
Memphis soul is a shimmering, sultry style of soul music produced in the 1960s and 1970s at Stax Records and Hi Records in Memphis, Tennessee. It featured melancholic and melodic horns, organ, bass, and drums, as heard in recordings by Hi's Al Green and Stax's Booker T. & the M.G.'s. The latter group also sometimes played in the harder-edged Southern soul style. The Hi Records house band (Hi Rhythm Section) and producer Willie Mitchell developed a surging soul style heard in the label's 1970s hit recordings. Some Stax recordings fit into this style, but had their own unique sound.

New Orleans soul
The New Orleans soul scene directly came out of the rhythm and blues era, when such artists as Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Huey Piano Smith made a huge impact on the pop and R&B charts and a huge direct influence on the birth of Funk music. The principal architect of Crescent City’s soul was songwriter, arranger, and producer Allen Toussaint. He worked with such artists as Irma Thomas (“the Soul Queen of New Orleans”), Jessie Hill, Kris Kenner, Benny Spellman, and Ernie K. Doe on the Minit/Instant label complex to produced a distinctive New Orleans soul sound generating a passel of national hits. Other notable New Orleans hits came from Robert Parker, Betty Harris, and Aaron Neville. While record labels in New Orleans largely disappeared by the mid-1960s, producers in the city continued to record New Orleans soul artists for other mainly New York and Los Angeles record labels—notably Lee Dorsey for New York–based Amy Records and the Meters for  New York–based Josie and then LA-based Reprise.

Chicago soul
Chicago soul generally had a light gospel-influenced sound, but the large number of record labels based in the city tended to produce a more diverse sound than other cities. Vee Jay Records, which lasted until 1966, produced recordings by Jerry Butler, Betty Everett, Dee Clark, and Gene Chandler. Chess Records, mainly a blues and rock and roll label, produced a number of major soul artists,including The Dells and Billy Stewart. Curtis Mayfield not only scored many hits with his group, The Impressions, but wrote many hit songs for Chicago artists and produced hits on his own labels for The Fascinations, Major Lance, and the Five Stairsteps.

Philadelphia soul
Based primarily in the Philadelphia International record label, Philadelphia soul (AKA Philly Soul) had a lush orchestral sound and doo-wop-inspired vocals. Thom Bell, and Kenneth Gamble & Leon Huff are considered the founders of Philadelphia soul, which produced hits for The O'Jays, The Intruders, The Delfonics, The Stylistics, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, and The Spinners.

http://www.allmusic.com/subgenre/soul-ma0000002865 Soul music was the result of the urbanization and commercialization of rhythm and blues in the '60s. Soul came to describe a number of R&B-based music styles. From the bouncy, catchy acts at Motown to the horn-driven, gritty soul of Stax/Volt, there was an immense amount of diversity within soul. During the first part of the '60s, soul music remained close to its R&B roots. However, musicians pushed the music in different directions; usually, different regions of America produced different kinds of soul. In urban centers like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, the music concentrated on vocal interplay and smooth productions. In Detroit, Motown concentrated on creating a pop-oriented sound that was informed equally by gospel, R&B, and rock & roll. In the South, the music became harder and tougher, relying on syncopated rhythms, raw vocals, and blaring horns. All of these styles formed soul, which ruled the black music charts throughout the '60s and also frequently crossed over into the pop charts. At the end of the '60s, soul began to splinter apart, as artists like James Brown and Sly Stone developed funk, and other artists developed slicker forms of soul. Although soul music evolved, it never went away -- not only did the music inform all of the R&B of the '70s, '80s, and '90s, there were always pockets of musicians around the world that kept performing traditional soul.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/static/p/episodes.pdf EPISODE GUIDES Soul Deep - The Story Of Black Popular Music The Birth Of Soul - Ep1/6 BBC Two 7 May, 9.00-10.00pm Soul music has conquered the world in the last 50 years - growing from the raw, electric rhythms of the black underclass, it is now a billion dollar industry with R&B and hip-hop dominating the world's charts. It's been the soundtrack to some of the most extraordinary social, political and cultural shifts. And, together with the civil rights movement, it has challenged the white hegemony, helped breakdown segregation and encouraged the fight for racial equality. This new six part series, made by the BBC team who produced the critically-acclaimed Lost Highway,Walk On By and Dancing In The Street series, charts the evolution of soul music -with a fascinating combination of rare archive and contemporary interviews. From rhythm and blues to today's R&B, via gospel, southern soul, Motown, funk and hip-hop soul, Soul Deep tells the story of the rise of black popular music - in the words of its greatest performers, producers, musicians and commentators. Starting with a previously unseen BBC interview with Ray Charles, he reveals how his innovations first brought soul to a wider audience. "Ray was the genius. He turned the world onto soul music," comments Bobby Womack.The term rhythm and blues was coined by Billboard Magazine journalist Jerry Wexler after he was asked by his editor to find an alternative for the label 'race music'. After many years touring on what was known as the 'chitlin' circuit' (a network of black clubs and bars) with artists like Ruth Brown, Ray finally created his own style - by unifying the sexually-charged music of the dance floor with the spiritually-charged sounds of the church hall. Life was hard and sometimes dangerous for black musicians in a segregated society. Ruth Brown explains: "When the dance was over sometimes it was so scary we wanted to get out of town as soon as we could.There were still crosses burning in the middle of the night.There was a price paid for this music." The creation of the Atlantic record label took the music to a wider, more mainstream audience. Ahmet Ertegun who, with his brother Nesuhi, started the label, says: "We had a good feel for where the music was going. Our target audience in the beginning was the black audience - which understands the music they like.Their tastes change and, once they change, don't go back." As the black sounds crossed the racial divide, rhythm and blues gave birth to rock 'n' roll - a far more sanitised version of the black sound which was seen to be "too uninhibited, too loose, and too sweaty." Ray Charles says: "Rock 'n' roll is the white version of rhythm and blues.There was a big difference, if you really listened to the music, between the two styles. One is more pure, one is more dirty. R&B has got more toe jam in it." Black artists were squeezed out of the mainstream charts by white covers of their songs and Charles looked back to his roots for his inspiration and the creation of his own distinctive sound. He quotes his mother's influence in his music and his fusion of gospel and sheer dance hall sex. "I started taking my music and saying it the way that I felt it - the gospel sound that was part of my growing up. I knew all I was doing was being myself." With backing singers the Raylettes, Charles further honed his own sound, much to the chagrin of the church community. Charles' biographer Michael Lydon describes: "He went for a completely uninhibited gospel sound but made it sexual.The Raylettes became the choir behind the preacher." Another young gospel singer was hot on the heels of Ray Charles - James Brown's hit Please, Please, Please in 1956 was the embodiment of the black American experience. It spoke of the hurt as well as the hopes and aspirations of an underclass. "If you really enjoy it, the spirit comes out," Brown tells Soul Deep

EPISODE GUIDES Soul Deep - The Story of Black Popular Music The Gospel Highway - Ep2/6 BBC Two May 14, 9.00-10.00pm Gospel singer Sam Cooke changed pop music forever and set the standard for every artist that followed him. His first "cross over" single from gospel to pop You Send Me sold a million worldwide and its success inspired a generation of gospel singers, including Aretha Franklin, Solomon Burke and Ben E King. BBC Two's Soul Deep, which charts the evolution of soul music, looks at the world of black music before and after that revolutionary moment in 1957 when Cooke went pop. "You couldn't have the popular music we have today without that crossover from church to pop," explains expert Peter Guralnick. As a member of Chicago's Soul Stirrers, Cooke travelled the gospel highway (a network of black American churches) from 1950 for seven years, along with stars like Candi Staton and Mavis Staples. Candi and Mavis describe the harsh realities of racism and life on the road. But when they hit the road they were treated like superstars. Bobby Womack says: "Sam was electrifying.The places were jam-packed - it was like Elvis Presley was coming." It was in front of these ecstatic crowds that artists like Cooke learned to work an audience. Ben E King, followed Cooke into the pop world but his biggest hit Stand By Me drew its title from a famous gospel hymn. "Stand By Me was a love song that went way beyond a love song. It has a meaning for people that I never thought it would," King explains. Not content with smashing the gospel to pop taboo, Cooke was one of the first artists to establish control over his own music by setting up his own label - SAR.This, in turn, was to bring protÈgÈes - such as Bobby Womack and Johnnie Taylor - their first taste of fame. Cooke then went on to break-away from love songs into social relevance. After hearing Bob Dylan's iconic Blowin' In The Wind, he recorded the first political soul song A Change is Gonna Come. Tragically, Cooke was killed in 1964 at the prime of his career but he bequeathed an extraordinary legacy, inspiring a myriad of black artists from Motown's Berry Gordy to Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin.

EPISODE GUIDES Soul Deep - The Story of Black Popular Music The Sound Of Young America - Ep 3/6 BBC Two May 21, 9.00-10.00pm Motown changed the landscape of pop, rewrote the rulebook and created the sound of young America, which appealed to whites as much as to blacks. Crossover soul was the vision of Motown's founder - Svengali figure Berry Gordy. "Motown was a little hit factory, and I got the idea from the assembly line that I worked in at an automobile plant," he explains. Reflecting the optimism of the early Sixties and the promise of integration, Gordy's artists were coached, groomed and targeted at the lucrative white audience. Gordy's crack song-writing team Holland/Dozier/Holland in Detroit pumped out 40 hits for artists such as The Supremes, Martha Reeves,The Temptations and The Four Tops. "If we didn't get the goose bumps or the hair standing on the arms, then something was missing," comments Lamont Dozier. His master strokes for cracking the uptown, white establishment was hiring both Maxine Powell, who ran the Artists Development finishing school, and white marketeer Barney Ales, who ensured that the company always got paid. Supreme Mary Wilson recalls: "It was Maxine Powell's job to refine us. She very early on told us that we were all diamonds, in the raw, and we needed refining." Over in Chicago, white-owned, family business Chess Records enviously eyed up Motown's success. Although the label already had a reputation for blues and black rock 'n' roll, they wanted a fresh sound that echoed the mood of the growing aspirational black population. By "sweetening" with strings and pop arrangements, the gritty Chicago sound was transformed into sophisticated soul. Etta James' Only Time Will Tell brought Chess a taste of crossover magic and Fontella Bass's hit Rescue Me emulated the Motown formula. As the mood of the nation changed, with the rise of the civil rights movement and protests over the Vietnam War, it was in Chicago - not Detroit - that music with a social conscience was first heard. In People Get Ready and Choice Of Colours Curtis Mayfield captured the zeitgeist and sang openly about community struggle and racial harmony.The Detroit riots were a huge wake-up call for Motown, who now seemed embarrassingly out of kilter. Cracks appeared in the company when, after a dispute about money, Holland/Dozier/Holland left, producer Mickey Stevenson departed and Supreme Flo Ballard was fired. But Gordy was a survivor and, determined to prove the company could move with the times, he released Love Child by Diana Ross and the Supremes.The song, which had a social message, became one of the biggest selling records in Motown's history. Gordy moved the business out to LA and it entered a second golden age. But the age of innocence for Motown was over.

EPISODE GUIDES Soul Deep - The Story of Black Popular Music Southern Soul - Ep 4/6 BBC Two May 28, 9.00-10.00pm In the summer of 1967, Otis Redding performed in front of a 200,000 strong, mainly white, crowd at the Monterey Pop Festival. Five years after walking into Stax Records studio in Memphis as an unknown singer, he was now breaking into the mass white market and seducing its counter culture without diluting his sound. Soul Deep follows both Redding's rise, as he became the embodiment of Sixties soul music, and that of Stax Records as it crossed the racial divide at a time of segregation. Founded by two whites- Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton - black and white musicians came together at Stax to create gritty, passionate soul. "Stax Records was an oddity - it was like an oasis in the desert. Both black and white musicians became friends because of what they did. It was wonderful. But right outside those doors it stopped," comments Stax songwriter David Porter. Redding's triumphs at Stax encouraged other labels to look for this new style raw talent.The local Gold Wax label signed an incredible talent - James Carr. One of his rare, previously unseen television performances features in Soul Deep. Classics include Love Attack and At The Dark End Of The Street. "The roar, the depth of soul that we hear when James opens his mouth is the voice of the south. It's that depth of pain and longing for something better," comments Alan Walden, Redding's former manager. The sound of the south began to influence other labels. New York-based Atlantic Records' Jerry Wexler would bring his musicians south whenever they needed inspiration.Wilson Pickett's huge hit In the Midnight Hour resulted from a night in Memphis' Lorraine Motel with Stax songwriter Steve Cropper and a bottle of "Jack". After Wexler teamed performers Sam and Dave up with Stax writers Isaac Hayes and David Porter, classic hits included Soul Man and Hold On, I'm Comin'. Wexler was soon alerted to another southern record company - Rick Hall's Fame Studio in sleepy Muscle Shoals - where Percy Sledge cut southern soul's first number one pop hit,When a Man Loves A Woman. It was here that he brought a new artist he had just signed - Aretha Franklin. "It was so evident to me that she was a blazing genius. She was so far ahead of the pack. She made a lot of beautiful records for Columbia but they were all over the place, they had no focus, no direction," explains Wexler. Fame studio musician Dan Penn describes Franklin's dramatic entrance. "She sat down by the piano and played this unknown chord and the musicians were just like little bugs running for their instruments." That day she recorded her number one hit I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You. Her next monster hit was with Redding's Respect. Imbuing it with a new social relevance, it became an anthem and she an icon. In 1968, in a strange twist of fate, Martin Luther King was murdered in the same Memphis motel where Pickett and Cropper penned In the Midnight Hour a few years before. His death heralded the end of an extraordinary era of hope as black attitudes hardened. "The fraternalism between black musicians and white musicians seemed to suffer," explains Wexler. A new black sound was on it way

EPISODE GUIDES Soul Deep- The Story of Black Popular Music Ain't It Funky - Ep 5/6 BBC Two June 4, 9.00-10.00pm The tough, urban syncopated rhythms of funk were the sound track to the riots and revolutions of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Soul Deep traces the roots of funk from James Brown's seminal Papa's Got A Brand New Bag to the crazy psychedelia of George Clinton. By emphasizing the first beat of every bar in Brand New Bag, Brown created a musical revolution that changed the course of rhythm and blues, opening the way for hip hop. Brown says: "Well, I took it off the top and put it on the bottom". Brown's music mirrored a new era for African Americans defined by the Black Panthers and a new racial epithet - negro was out and black was in. Rickey Vincent, funk expert, explains: "People said 'what we have is tight, what we have is cool.We gotta lot of raw style, we gotta lot of rhythm.We're bad ass." The night after Martin Luther King's murder Brown performed an extraordinary concert in Boston which was televised live to lure potential rioters back into their homes. Here he appealed for peace, using his status as a black man. Later that year he released Say It Loud I'm Black And I'm Proud - a song which was embraced by black people but rocked the whites - with many radio stations refusing to play it. Born out of liberal San Francisco, Sly and The Family Stone was a funk act which brought the psychedelic into soul. A multi-racial band, it entered the Seventies with one of the most influential funk tracks ever - Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself." And it was this new edge which influenced two emerging songwriters at Motown, Norman Whitfield and Barratt Strong, who became the architects of that label's psychedelic soul years. "When Motown saw what was happening, they shifted.They shifted as much out of commercial acuity as artistic integrity," describes commentator David Ritz. Two of Motown's biggest stars in the Seventies were Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. Gaye rebelled against his clean cut, boy-next-door image to record What's Goin' On, an anthem for change inspired by his brother's time in Vietnam. "It's basically a landscape painting of post-Vietnam Afro-American ghetto life. Marvin takes what is ugly and makes it beautiful." Inspired by Gaye, Stevie Wonder negotiated himself considerably more artistic freedom from Motown. He hired TONTO - Malcolm Cecil and Bob Margouleff, two studio whiz kids who specialized in analogue synthesizers and a new sound was born. If previous soul musicians reflected social unrest and the plight of the Afro American, George Clinton's psychedelic glam-funk was in the realms of fantasy. "I was a traffic cop, ringmaster, a bridge between great musicians.The humour had to be there because it was so serious in those times," he explains. But just when funk looked like it had had its day, a new style emerged from the burnt-out Bronx bringing the music back to gritty social reality - hip-hop.

PISODE GUIDES Soul Deep - The Story Of Black Popular Music From Ghetto to Fabulous - Ep 6/6 BBC Two June 11, 9.00-10.00pm Mary J Blige, the queen of hip-hop soul, speaks candidly about her journey from ghetto to fabulous in the final programme of Soul Deep. Her music represents the fusion of R&B and hip-hop and completes the journey that started 50 years ago with the emergence of the early soul sounds of Ray Charles and ends with black R&B artists' domination of the charts today. The extraordinary story of the unstoppable rise of urban R&B, with its diamond-dripping, darlings of the media, high profile celebrity artists - such as BeyoncÈ and Destiny's Child - is traced back to the housing projects in Yonkers in the Eighties where Mary J Blige started out. Her tempestuous career began when producer Andre Harrell signed her to Uptown Records. "She wasn't an album, she was a movie," comments Andre. On the way up, the pressure of stardom nearly destroyed her. "To cope with life in the music business, I had to get wasted all the time," she admits. But her music spoke to the streets. She brought the rawness of classic soul into the hip-hop era. Andre says: "We took her pain and put it on a platform to be the communicator for all that generation of women who grew up in the Eighties in a single parent decade, with crack being the main drug - which took whole households out." Her music has had a massive influence. Kelly Rowland from Destiny's Child says: "I think of Mary J Blige as the Aretha Franklin of our generation because she's got so much soul." Producer and former Fugees,Wyclef Jean discusses the meteoric rise of Destiny's Child (which has made them The Supremes of the R&B generation) and comments: "It's the hard rhythmic singing style of BeyoncÈ Knowles that makes her an extraordinary vocal figure." A pre-cursor to hip-hop soul was the emergence of new jack swing, epitomised by the alpha male performance of Bobby Brown. He brought black masculinity and ghetto style back to the game. Another part in the jigsaw of world domination by R&B artists was played by video producer Hype Williams. A former graffiti artist, he placed black artists in dreamy, exotic locations which brought urban R&B music to a wider audience. Images like Missy Elliott in an inflatable rubber suit,TLC on a swing and Puffy on a yacht "did for the video world what Picasso did to the art world - turned it on its head," comments writer Barry Michael Cooper. The combination of all these factors has meant that R&B - with its roots in soul music which has been evolving over the last 50 years - has moved from ghetto to ghetto-fabulous to simply fabulous.