Philly Soul

In between Motown’s mid-’60s heyday and the disco domination of the late ’70s, the City of Brotherly Love was a haven for a sweet, sweeping rush of R&B — a sound that came to be known as Philly soul. MFSB’s “T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia)” is the strutting, stomping, wordless-but-not-exactly-instrumental (thanks, Three Degrees) anthem of the scene surrounding Gamble & Huff’s Philadelphia International label. The silk-sheets-and-candles side of the Philly soul sound is alive and well on jazz-schooled crooner Billy Paul’s lush, laid-back ode to infidelity, “Me and Mrs. Jones.” And let’s not forget local blue-eyed-soul boys Hall & Oates, who channeled their hometown R&B roots to achieve pop perfection on “She’s Gone.”

In Next Steps, Philly soul finds sweet and funky ways to look at love.

If the central theme of Philly soul can be boiled down to four letters, they’d be L-O-V-E. Few sounds as amor-inducing as Lou Rawls’ creamy baritone croon on the romantic rhapsody “Lady Love” have ever entered the human ear. Multiply the bedroom-bound bliss of Rawls by five and you arrive at classic Philly quintet the Stylistics’ celestial slice of love-struck womanly worship “You Are Everything.” On the sadder side of love’s double-edged sword, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ “The Love I Lost,” featuring a young Teddy Pendergrass, proved that even the downhearted can dance up a storm.

Discover unexpected sides of the Philly soul story in Deep Cuts.

The Philly soul story spread a wider net than most folks might realize. The Volcanos, for instance, never soared to the star status of the Spinners or the Stylistics, but their 1965 single “Storm Warning,” one of Gamble & Huff’s earliest productions, is a dizzying downpour of sweet-but-stomping soul. One of the city’s R&B pioneers, Dee Dee Sharp, showed that Philly soul fodder can come from anywhere, by turning U.K. art-poppers 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love” into a lush, laid-back aural aphrodisiac. And even Stax sensation Wilson Pickett took a turn on Gamble & Huff’s love train, cutting 1970’s In Philadelphia with the dynamic duo, and turning out the fiercely funky “Get Me Back on Time, Engine Number 9.”

From the late ’60s through the mid ’70s, Philadelphia was the sweet spot on the R&B map. Producers/writers/entrepreneurs Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff were at the heart of it all with their Philadelphia International label, crafting soul symphonies full of smooth falsetto croons and sleek, sweeping orchestrations. But even the Gamble/Huff empire was only part of the Philly Soul story — from the lovelorn melancholy of Blue Magic’s “Sideshow” to the foot-stomping forward motion of McFadden & Whitehead’s anthem of optimism, “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” we’ve gone strolling through the soul-soaked streets of Philadelphia to grab up the sleek and the sexy, the fierce and the funky, all the must-have moments of the Philly soul phenomenon, and you’ll find them all right here.