Oldies Music Glossary: "Deep Soul"

Definition: The subgenre of Southern Soul known as "Deep Soul" is marked by its extreme adherence to soul's gospel roots: while all soul music can be viewed as a mixture of gospel and R&B, most early soul (Ray Charles, Sam Cooke) refined the more raw (and often, rural) side of gospel and urbanized it, making it sleek and sprightly for upwardly mobile urban blacks. Southern soul, by its very nature, was more rhythmic, less polished, and more countryfied, but deep soul takes the difference to its extreme, designing songs so that they wring every single drop of emotion from their performances. With deep soul, pain usually trumps the groove.

The typical deep soul song is achingly slow and impassioned, features an extreme amount of vocal ad-libbing over one compelling but repetitive set of chords, and is concerned primarily with love as slow, endless, unavoidable torture -- or, when happiness is called for, secular love as a rock from which to ride out life's storms. Unlike country-soul, to which it is often compared, deep soul rejects the acceptance of everyday pain -- the blues -- in favor of some sort of redemption to be gained through obsession.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. Arthur Conley's "Sweet Soul Music," for example, is uptempo and uplifting, lifting its gospel roots directly from Sam Cooke's "Yeah Man," itself a rewrite of some ancient ubiquitous call-and-response. As soul became poppier in the late Sixties, and black audiences moved on to funk grooves, deep soul more or less died out. However, it still thrives in certain Southern markets even today, and the style proved to be a tremendous influence on rock singers like Janis Joplin and Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant.

Also Known As: Southern Soul, Country-soul