This 1966 funky number was never released as a single, and therefore never charted. In 1967, this most uplifting of soulful (and Gospelly)love songs reached #6 on the Pop charts, and #1 on the R&B charts. There is so much love in this Jackie Wilson classic that – along with some ectoplasm – it brought the Statue of Liberty to life to battle the forces of evil in the movie Ghostbusters II.

“(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” by Jackie Wilson Some soft, some hard, some flirty and some sexy, but all filled with good lovin’. The twelve tunes I finally settled on here have no ifs or buts. Finding songs without the “but” was somewhat challenging. Listening to song after song, I found lyrics taking turns like “I love you… but”. As I began pulling tunes, titles were often misleading. So many songs that I thought were love songs took unexpected detours. When I first came up with the idea to make a play list of Soul/R&B love songs from the 1960s, I thought it would be a fun little project, but once I started the project – although fun – it was far from little.

Today, the term can be used to loosely define most African-American urban music, even though soul and funk can be placed in categories of their own.Soul is a music genre born in the United States in the late 1950s and thrived in the 1960s, combining elements of African American Gospel, R&B, and often Jazz, later influencing Rock & Roll, Funk, Disco, Hip Hop and just about every genre to follow it. Over time the name was shortened to R&B as a matter of convenience.īy the 1970s, rhythm and blues was being used as a blanket term to describe soul and funk as well. The “blues” portion came from the lyrics and melodies of the songs, which were often sad or “blue” during the music’s emergence in the World War II era. The meaning behind the name is this: the “rhythm”part comes from the music’s typical dependence upon four-beat measures or bars and employs a backbeat (beats two and four accented in each measure). After the “race music” term was deemed offensive, Billboard began using the Rhythm & Blues name that Wexler created. The “Rhythm & Blues” term was created to replace the designation “race music,” which until then was the standard catch-all phase used in reference to most music made by blacks at the time. In 1949, then-Billboard magazine reporter Jerry Wexler (who later went on to become a music producer) created the term for Billboard to designate upbeat popular music performed by African American artists that combined Blues and Jazz. The term “Rhythm and Blues” was first introduced into the American lexicon in the late 1940s: The name’s origin was created for use as a musical marketing term by Billboard magazine. Rhythm & Blues is a term used to describe the blues-influenced form of music predominantly performed by African-Americans since the late 1930s. Classic Soul Radio 100 Must Have R&B Recordings

R and b 70s old school