Soul / R&B

Soul was born when Black church music fell in love with the earthly world — gospel fervor in the service of desire, tenderness, and, when needed, protest. Aretha demanded R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Marvin Gaye asked 'What's Going On', and Otis Redding left his whole soul in every take. Soul is the emotional root of nearly everything that followed.

Key exponents

Keep rewinding

00s

soul

Duffy

She told it first

Rockferry (2008) was the best-selling album of the year in the United Kingdom, with 1,685,000 copies, three BRITs in 2009 and the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album. In 2020 Duffy told it herself, before anybody else, that she was drugged, held captive and raped. And it is not an epilogue: a new song in 2024, a Disney+ documentary announced in 2025 and a signing with TaP Management in 2026.

80s

soul

Hall & Oates

The craft they called a guilty pleasure

Daryl Hall and John Oates put six songs at number one in the United States, and Billboard named them the most successful duo in Hot 100 history — a measure of chart performance, not of records sold. They met in Philadelphia in 1967 and ended up in a Nashville court in 2023, over the sale of the company that held their name and royalties.

90s

soul

Seal

The song that embarrassed him, and the scars he never hid

The song that won the Grammy for record of the year sat in a drawer for years because its author thought it was bad and was embarrassed to show it: it took a producer who believed in it more than he did. With the scars on his face he did the opposite: he never covered them.

80s

soul

Dionne Warwick

The voice at the centre of a family and of a cause

The voice that made the impossible songs of Bacharach and David sound easy, and also the one that called on Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight to raise money against AIDS in 1985, when almost nobody wanted to talk about it. Her cousin was Whitney Houston.

70s

soul

Roberta Flack

The voice that turned silence into power

She sang quietly, almost whispering, in a soul that rewarded the shout, and with that she won the Grammy for record of the year twice in a row: nobody had done it before. ALS took from her at the end exactly that, the voice.

60s

soul

Aretha Franklin

She took the song away

She took a man's song and turned it into the anthem of women and of civil rights. Its own author admitted it, on stage, with resignation and humour.

50s

soul

Ray Charles

The church and the bar

He took two worlds separated by a wall — gospel and the blues — and fused them. Out of that mixture, which many called blasphemy, came soul.

80s

soul

Tina Turner

She left with almost nothing at thirty-seven, and came back a queen at forty-four

In 1976 she left her husband and with him the band, the commercial name and the security, escaping a marriage marked by abuse. Eight years later, at forty-four, "Private Dancer" made her the biggest star on the planet.

80s

soul

Billy Ocean

From Trinidad to the world, with a velvet voice

He was a tailor and worked in a car factory before the world surrendered to his voice: the first hit came in 1976 and the American number one only in 1984, with "Caribbean Queen". He sang that the tough get going after having done it himself.

00s

soul

Alicia Keys

The classically trained pianist who swept the Grammys at twenty-one

She arrived in 2001, when pop was lip-syncing and choreography, with a real piano, classical training and songs of her own. At twenty-one she took home five awards on her first Grammy night; years later she decided to appear in public without make-up.

70s

soul

The Jackson 5

Four number ones in a row, and a boy who changed everything

Out of an industrial town in Indiana, in 1969, came five brothers in colourful suits with split-second choreographies who did something no group had managed before: topping the Hot 100 straight out of the gate, without a single miss. Out front, a boy of eleven.

00s

soul

Amy Winehouse

The whole truth

She wrote about her own life with raw frankness, and people loved her for it. Then, when that truth became hard to look at, a whole country consumed her agony in slow motion. People who are drowning are helped, not watched.

80s

soul

Lionel Richie

The world's tenderness

Some artists give the world their pain; he gave it his tenderness. The saxophone player from a small Alabama town wrote a number one song every year for nine straight years, and today, in his seventies, he is loved more than at his peak.

70s

soul

Stevie Wonder

He took the wheel

Blind since the incubator, number one at thirteen, and at twenty-one he demanded total control of his music from Motown. Stevie Wonder survived a coma, got a country to honour Martin Luther King and is the bright counterexample to geniuses devoured by their own myth.

90s

soul

Simply Red

A credit given away

"Holding Back the Years" is signed by two people. Hucknall has said the second did not co-write it: he gave him the credit to remember the good times. It has been paying out for forty years.

70s

soul

Diana Ross

The one who ran the mix

Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards handed her a finished album. She remixed the whole thing without consulting them, they nearly pulled their names off it, and her version became her biggest solo hit.

60s

soul

Ben E. King

From psalm to plea

He took a church hymn and some verses from Psalm 46 and turned them into something you can say to another person. Seven million broadcasts later, it isn't his any more.

60s

soul

Etta James

The suitcase by the door

She gave the world the song of love fulfilled from a life that was exactly the opposite. That's why it rings true: she sang it from the side of the lack.

50s

soul

The Platters

The crack in the wall

In a country with charts segregated by race, they recorded no protest songs: they recorded love ballads so perfect nobody could file them away. And they got there first.

10s

soul

Michael Kiwanuka

The Name in Capitals

Michael Kiwanuka, or why what they tell you to erase is usually the best thing you have. The industry asked him to swap his surname for a more commercial one; the doubt nearly drove him out of music and he binned an entire album. He came back titling the next one with that very surname, enormous and in capitals on the sleeve, and won the Mercury Prize. On the faith that held him up and the name that was never the problem.