Deep Soul Ballads

About Deep Soul Ballads

Deep Soul Ballads looks back to an earlier era in soul music from a contemporary viewpoint and rediscovers132 ballads recorded by (mostly) black American soul singers across a 25-year post-war period. Much of the best soul music of the Sixties and Seventies never received much mainstream exposure, and was little heard or appreciated except by those who deliberately sought it out. One of the aims of Deep Soul Ballads is to bring these neglected performers into the spotlight and introduce readers to some of their finest recordings. But the book also looks at tracks by well-known artists ranging from Doris Day[!] to Aretha Franklin by way of Otis Redding and The Four Tops. Deep Soul Ballads is a personal selection rather than a historical overview. The aim is to encourage the reader to undertake his or her own journey but, as with every journey of exploration, the enjoyment lies in reading one’s own map, going down byways and detours and, in the process, discovering sites of pleasure not mapped out by others.

Why has the period covered by Deep Soul Ballads (1950–76) been chosen? Laurence Cole explains: “These years cover the birth, rise, peak and decline of the ‘deep soul ballad’. During the Fifties, ‘deep soul’ hatched from gospel then, in the early Sixties, flapped its wings and prepared to leave the nest. The years 1965–8 were its glory days when it flew around in full shriek as a confident and mature bird. It then slowly expired in the early to mid-Seventies from having its breathing constricted by the thinned-out atmosphere of ‘lighter’ vocal and ‘poppier’ orchestral approaches. With a few exceptions from later years, Stevie Wonder’s recording of ‘Joy Inside My Tears’ in 1976 bade farewell to the church’s presence in popular song, and makes a suitably commemorative end point.”