9. Soul and funk

The early days of soul, ushered in by Sam Cooke and Ray Charles were a secular form of gospel music, human love became the object of worship (Goffman, 2010). Black people were starting to move away from the church and God defining them and their actions in America and began taking pride in their blackness. The term “soul” was a symbol of this newfound confidence and their ability to show the oppressors of their race that they no longer felt inferior (Small, 1998). Defining elements of soul music included the use of gospel-like backing singers, their own use of call and response (Ray Charles used this a lot with his backing singers, The Raelettes), shouts and cries from gospel and blues and more vibrant rhythms, more so than the ones used in R&B. Solomon Burke combined not only gospel and R&B into his kind of soul but also country music, with his cover of Patsy Cline’s Just out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms) charting at #24 (Cline’s original didn’t) and rock music, which led him to dub himself the “King of rock ‘n soul”. Charles, like Burke, also added elements of country into his own music, both with ideas of closing the racial gap through music. Soul was something of an amalgam of culture and sound