It can hardly be denied that the past 20 years of American popular music have been shaped by the deep and resilient influence of 1960s soul.1 Artists such as Adele, John Legend, Corinne Bailey Rae, and the late Amy Winehouse have all been heavily influenced by the sounds, artists, and recording methods that characterized the genre’s 60s heyday.2 While these artists may have tapped this era for inspiration, others, such as Leon Bridges, Moses Sumney, and Meshell Ndegeocello, have found themselves pigeonholed by the genre’s rigid constraints.3 As Bridges told The Guardian in 2018, despite his soft-spoken, crooner sensibilities, his sound was often lumped together thoughtlessly with more emotive “soul shouting” vocalists with whom he had little in common.4 In the same feature story, other contemporary Black artists describe how the demanding requirements of the soul genre limit their ability to take on new influences and achieve novelty and originality in their music.It is worth asking then, why are the boundaries of the soul genre so rigidly interpreted, and why is unbridled emotion—the type that Bridges found so constraining—considered one of its hallmark characteristics? And more importantly, why do the media and popular discourses so often burden young Black artists with the legacy of 60s soul and the stylistic conformity that comes with it? As I argue in the following pages, popular histories of the genre are largely responsible for shaping the criteria by which we continue to judge a soul performer’s “authenticity.” In establishing these criteria, historical accounts of the genre often conceal troubling assumptions about race in seemingly objective descriptions and benign observations about the genre’s origins. In fact, in many of these histories, soul seems to have been conjured from thin air—an innate characteristic of Black Americans unencumbered by the fussy editing, meticulous planning, and formal training of other, more purportedly intellectual genres. It is worth recognizing that many of these popular histories of soul music were written by white authors, a fact that cannot be dismissed in assessing how these understandings of soul were established, accepted and circulated. As mass-produced books written for wide audiences, these histories exert considerable influence in shaping how soul music is perceived by popular audiences. Their popularity helps contribute to a type of “canon” of writing on Black popular music that is often not meaningfully conversant with Black authors, a point that Daphne Brooks makes in her new Liner Notes for the Revolution.5By the logic of these popular histories, soul is said to be instinctive, and to have soul suggests that one isn’t guided by the constraints of formal training or the sterile aspirations of a perfect musical sound. This essay describes how these two features—the celebration of emotive spontaneity and the foregrounding of imperfection—reveal the racialized assumptions that underlie popular histories of soul music. In doing so, I hope that this essay might be useful for critics of popular music in better identifying the rhetorical work that claims to authenticity make in establishing the “rules” that define musical genres.The rest of this essay will proceed in three parts: first, I describe how popular histories of soul have located spontaneity as a formal characteristic of “authentic” soul, while viewing more “planned” approaches to songwriting as suspicious and inauthentic; next, I describe how many of these same histories prioritize the perceived authenticity of imperfection over the inauthenticity of a more “perfect” sound; I conclude with a discussion of the implications of such delineations for scholarship in popular music studies.As I have mentioned, many historians and critics of soul music make arguments about authenticity without investigating the assumptions on which they are based. For instance, they often suggest that characteristics such as spontaneity and imperfection are what delineate authentic 1960s southern soul music from the more orchestrated finesse of Motown, Atlantic Records, and Chicago soul. These become the primary lines of distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic. For example, historian Craig Werner suggests that “Memphis soul grew out of a much freer, improvisational process” than that of Motown and that the southern soul of Memphis’ Stax and Goldwax produced some of the “funkiest and grittiest” soul of the era.6 While Werner acknowledges that Motown and Stax musicians exhibited mutual appreciation for one another’s work, he nevertheless argues that a typical Stax session “involved building a record out of scraps of lyrics, the idea of a melody, a few chord changes.”7 Such a process involved “laying down a groove” and creating a sense of space between the notes.8 These songs were meant to swing and groove, and part of cultivating that sound involved avoidance of the “wall of sound” production techniques and assembly line aesthetics of the Motown machine.9 Gerri Hirshey makes a similar argument when she states that “unlike gutbucket soul, sprung from a moment, Motown was built, layer by layer, with a conscious aural blueprint.”10 Hirshey implies that authenticity emerges from the moment, as if having a conscious plan requires too much deliberation to possibly ring true as a statement of authenticity. Many of these characterizations are informed by interviews of the performers themselves, such as when guitarist Steve Cropper of Booker T. & the MG’s suggests that their classic hit “Green Onions” came about as a result of simply “jamming around” on a riff.11 He also states that Otis Redding, with whom Cropper penned so many soul classics, would often simply ad-lib lyrics and that the tight schedule at Stax produced a spontaneous recording environment that forced a sense of hurried urgency on the performers.12Peter Guralnick, whose 1986 book Sweet Soul Music remains one of the more comprehensive accounts of 60s soul, argues that even the arrival of Otis Redding at Stax Records in Memphis was, “like almost everything else that happened at Stax…both unforeseen and unplanned.”13 In a story whose veracity has been disputed, Guralnick states that Redding was merely the valet for another singer, Johnny Jenkins, the day he came to Stax Records. Because the session went so terribly, Redding pleaded with guitarist Steve Cropper and Stax founder Jim Stewart to let him use the last 30 minutes of the session to cut a track. The band’s regular keyboardist, Booker T. Jones, had already left the session, forcing Cropper onto the keys, where he nervously laid down the iconic triplets that open Redding’s classic “These Arms of Mine.”14 Gerri Hirshey adds that “often one night’s live blooper would ripen into a habit,” such as when Redding would forget a lyric and cue his band to play a few extra verses to build momentum until he remembered the lyrics.15Robert Gordon makes similar observations about Stax Records. At Stax there was “free passage between the control room and the studio floor.”16 Gordon asserts that “no musician’s parts were written, nothing was worked out in advance” and that Rufus Thomas’ hit “Walking the Dog” was entirely improvised.17 Guralnick states that one of the other “authentic” locales for southern soul music, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, derived much of its acclaim through the “intangible sense of inspired chaos” that permeated the personalities and the place itself.18 In the early 1970s, as performers became more conscious of their audiences and the elusive vagaries of contemporary tastes, much of the “soulful spontaneity” of earlier-period soul was lost, never to be regained.19 In this sense, commitments to careful orchestration and product viability were characteristic of inauthenticity. It was not merely a matter of “selling out,” I contend, because both 1960s soul and early- to mid-1970s soul were both wildly successful as commercial enterprises. It speaks, instead, to the idea that authenticity comes to the artist in unplanned moments, and that the spirit of the soul is compromised if it is overwrought, overthought, and planned ahead of time. These stories are illustrative of the type of narrative mythology that accompanies notions of authentic soul music because it reinforces the oppositional relationship between Stax and Motown by envisioning the “authentic” as something realized spontaneously. Motown, in Guralnick’s view, was “so much more socially acceptable, so much more arranged and predictable, so much more white.”20 Robert Gordon argues that Berry Gordy, Motown’s founder and executive, “applied the assembly-line technique to music—a real contrast to the organic group think at Stax.”21The organic and spontaneous features of Memphis’ Stax Records were accompanied by a concomitant factor that contributed to its perceived authenticity—Stax was “imperfect.” This sense of imperfection manifested itself in its approach to recording and served as a way of differentiating itself from Motown, Philadelphia Soul, and Chicago Soul. Perhaps more than any other historical inconsistency, this one has had the most persistent influence on contemporary soul music, as the sense of imperfection has become a cherished declaration of one’s obligation to authenticity among contemporary artists. In the following section I describe the second oppositional dichotomy on which claims of authenticity are made—the perfect v. the imperfect.Stax was stubborn in its refusal to be as clinical and precise as its peers, and these ideals were foregrounded in the recording process itself. At Stax, the rhythm section called the shots, with the arranger only adding embellishment.22 Such a choice reinforced Stax’s adherence to a “mono sensibility” even though stereo technology, allowing for two tracks of playback, was already widely used by most recording studios.23 Such obsolescence gave Stax, in Robert Gordon’s words, a sense of spirit that its contemporaries lacked. Craig Werner similarly argues that another “authentic” recording studio, Memphis’ Hi Studio, used “obsolete equipment that precluded multiple tracking.”24 Werner implies that such choices were part of why the studio’s famed Hi Rhythm section was able to “lay down simmering rhythmic grooves for [Al] Green’s vocal explorations.”25 Gerri Hirshey goes as far as to suggest that soul music spirit burned out when “voices lost out to production technique” and “rhythm went from being an exhorter to a tyrant.”26Eventually Stax would succumb to market pressures and purchase a four-track recorder allowing for overdubbing and mixing, but the fact that its earliest hits were recorded on a mono machine prevented them from cleaning up mistakes without recording the entire performance over again. The recording preferences of Stax and its southern soul contemporaries introduced a new associated characteristic of authenticity—a strangely revered sense of imperfection. Craig Werner argues that “many Southern soul classics incorporate ‘mistakes’ that Motown would have edited out.”27 Examples of this include the horn section that mysteriously disappears during the second chorus of Sam & Dave’s hit “Hold On I’m Coming,” and the noticeably out-of-tune horns at the beginning of Percy Sledge’s indelible “When a Man Loves a Woman.”28 Guralnick proclaims with assuredness that soul music from the South was “a musical mode in which the band might be out of tune, the drummer out of time, the singer off-key, and yet the message could still come across—since underlying feeling was all.”29 Here again, Stax is positioned as “authentic” soul for embracing impurities that its contemporaries might smooth over. Historical recollections like Werner’s and Guralnick’s foreground these stylistic imperfections while simultaneously attaching them to honest feeling and uncompromised emotion. In general terms, tolerance for imperfection may have superficially distinguished Stax from Motown, but the arguments made in these histories imply that these imperfections are in and of themselves what made the music “authentic.” In doing so, these writers contribute to Stax’s “authentic” stature by providing their own justifications for why that status ought to be taken as accurate.Beyond these two record labels, this championed sense of imperfection is built into the narratives of the performers themselves. For example, FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals recorded its first hit, “You Better Move On,” with an unknown small-town bellhop named Arthur Alexander, whose deferential personality and unsure singing style made him an unlikely star.30 Stax’s house band, Booker T & the MG’s, comprised mostly kids from the neighborhood, as was FAME’s Swampers rhythm section. Whereas Motown had entire staffs dedicated to carefully manicuring a performer’s star quality, Muscle Shoals’ early days were characterized by a dedicated insistence that imperfect singers with imperfect backgrounds could be counted on to produce authentic performances. It was even stated that FAME’s rhythm section, The Swampers, looked like they should be bagging your groceries, not backing up soul singers.31 Percy Sledge himself—whose “When a Man Loves a Woman” made FAME a globally recognized studio—was a completely unknown hospital orderly from rural Alabama with a rough, untrained voice when he entered FAME’s studio in 1965.32 Guitarist Jimmy Johnson states that “Percy was so out of tune” on “When a Man Loves a Woman,” that “we thought his voice might break a window. It was almost painful.”33 Despite Sledge’s utterly imperfect voice, Johnson contends that the song affected people so powerfully that he had heard stories of “people driving off the road when they heard that record come on the air.”34Even Ray Charles was said to have significant “technical deficiencies” in his voice, preventing him from having much natural range.35 As a result, Charles had to “explore every nook and cranny of its [his voice’s] emotional resources.”36 Peter Guralnick argues that soul’s “message from the heart”—perhaps its most foundational statement of authenticity—is what proves it to be a “truly democratic arena open to anyone as much on the basis of desire as technique, as much on the basis of gut instinct as careful calculation.”37 These narratives of authenticity suggest soul is expressed as an imperfectly packaged outpouring of spontaneous emotion. Its ephemerality results from its lack of precision, its resistance to assembly line technique. Authentic soul, in this view, privileges the loose contours of rhythm over the delicate precision of vocal technique. Authenticity is an ideal achieved through feeling, emotion, voice, and vibration—not something reflected on philosophically or verified empirically.This particular rendering, however, also implicitly subordinates the intellectual to the emotional. This is especially problematic given that characteristics of “white,” inauthentic soul music can be seen as primarily intellectual in nature. “White” soul made for white audiences is said to be well thought out, orchestrated, manicured, and precise in intent. “Black,” authentic soul music is correspondingly emotional, spontaneous, lacking in pruned sophistication, and messily imperfect. In a careful critique of this view, historian Brian Ward argues that such conceptions of authenticity are rooted in white romanticization of Black primitivism.38 Such articulations connect Black musician’s perceived effortless spontaneity to “sensual, rather than mental priorities.”39 Even more importantly, Ward argues that such a view precipitates the prevailing wisdom that “real Black music…springs from the instinctual needs of the body, rather than the intellectual or meditative workings of the mind.”40Ward’s refutation also connects this stereotyping directly to the narratives of spontaneity and imperfection that accompany notions of the authentic. Ward argues that the “crude reification of Black spontaneity” is linked to “the enduring belief that all real Black music must be visceral rather than cerebral in character.”41 Ward also suggests that such beliefs were perpetuated by the musicians themselves, who often played into these stereotypes by advertising the dexterity of their improvisations and ignoring all of the post-production edits that spliced together many of the session’s best takes into a single song.42 For example, James Brown’s classic “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” did not actually emerge from an impromptu jam despite the recollections of Brown’s trombonist Fred Wesley.43 Instead, the song was sprung from a “potent combination of inspiration, contemplation, and technological manipulation.”44 In making these arguments, Ward seeks to frustrate the conventional wisdom that privileges spontaneity, imperfection, and technological obsolescence as features of authenticity. Further, his analysis suggests there is far greater similarity between southern soul and northern soul, Stax and Motown, and “authentic” and “inauthentic” soul music than is suggested in much of the existing literature on the topic. Even more perceptively, Emily Lordi has argued for “soul” as a “logic of resilience” for Black musicians.45 In viewing soul as a “logic” rooted in a communal purpose, the lines of delineation between the authentic and inauthentic become increasingly difficult to untangle, and, seemingly, less necessary to do so. Any number of these record labels and musicians might justify themselves as motivated by a shared sense of artistic and cultural resilience—a perhaps unstated assumption about what soul means and how it is expressed. In this way, there is much more connecting these musicians than the arbitrary criteria used to separate the authentic from the inauthentic in these popular histories of the genre.As should be clear at this point, conceptions of authentic and inauthentic soul music are wrought with racial, social, and technological complications. As I have argued, these complications can at least be partially understood as organized along a couple of oppositional dichotomies: planned (inauthentic) v. spontaneous (authentic) and perfect (inauthentic) v. imperfect (authentic). The notion of authenticity is paramount in understanding these oppositions, as it is often used as a way to select the criteria upon which judgments of value are made. As I have shown, historians and critics have vehemently disputed authenticity’s claim to an irrefutable, objective essence while nevertheless imagining differences in taste and quality to be built on assumptions of authenticity that rely on racist assumptions. These assumptions burden the genre’s Black performers with expectations of authenticity, but they also needlessly taint any white influence in soul as reflexively “inauthentic.” Doing so has a tendency to fetishize Black performers by subjecting them to the “authenticity” criteria of their white chroniclers. Because of white performers inability to live up to these criteria, most notions of “authentic” white performance can be seen as inherently suspect.These practices of authenticity, such as the insistence on stylistic and sonic imperfection, antiquated technology, and the virtues of spontaneity have also been applied by these contemporary artists to present-day circumstances. The insistence of some contemporary critics to apply the standards of authenticity set by soul’s original contexts misdiagnoses much about what is at stake in contemporary disputes of authenticity in modern-day soul music. Critics and historians of soul have sometimes painted in sloppy broad strokes when discussing issues of race. As the opening anecdote suggests, performers are still feeling the effects of these demands on authenticity. What is crucial, then, is for historians, critics, and appreciators of soul music to resist the temptation to view any shift in musical style or recording sensibility as an affront to the genre’s integrity; rather, soul music does enough on its own to justify its outsized reputation. Its contemporary Black performers have managed to innovate despite the stereotyped expectations of critics and despite the lingering historical demands of the genre’s heyday. Such obsessions, I argue, have a tendency to disregard the types of anxieties that are animating concerns of authenticity in contemporary soul music. These new anxieties intersect with the legacy of classic soul, but their manifestations do more than simply comment on the residual influence of the past—they also speak to contemporary concerns about what constitutes artistic, social, and racial progress. In this sense, authenticity still does a lot of rhetorical work even though its “soul” has, and should, change with the times.