Insert cogent, witty introduction here.

  • Gamble and Huff
  • Thom Bell
  • Philly Soul: the 60s
  • Philly Groove Records
  • Philadelphia International Records
  • David Bowie
    • "Philly Dogs"
    • Young Americans
  • Todd Rundgren
  • Philly Soul: ten examples
  • Philly Soul: miscellaneous
  • Daryl Hall
  • Philly World Records
From the "don't start a node you can't finish" department. Welcome to an under-construction node. Philadelphia is beyond my core competencies. I'll ramble for now, then do some fact-checking and proofreading later.

Of course, David Bowie based himself in Philly for Young Americans, that LP of "plastic soul" that ranked, for many years, as my least-favorite Bowie stuff, until (fill in the blank with any post-Let's Dance stuff that doesn't include Reeves Gabrels). And, of course, you had that about-face midway through the "Diamond Dogs" tour - the scaled-down, let-the-music-come-first, soul-besotted "Philly Dogs" part, with alternate versions of the old setlist; "Panic in Detroit" came out nicely. But I digress.

Elton John's "Philadelphia Freedom" was a tribute, in part, to the Philly Sound, IIRC - I'll have to check. (There was also a thing called World Team Tennis back then, and one of the franchises was the Philadelphia Freedoms - I believe there was a connection; I think Elton and Billie Jean King were part of it. But I digress).

The very definition of "Philly Soul" is the writing/production team of Gamble and Huff - their home base of Sigma Sound studios was where Bowie brought his Bronx phenoms (Vandross, Alomar, Clark...) to do Young Americans.

Clive Davis at CBS, feeling a need to shore up the company's black music holdings (the bastard never - ever - gave a tinker's damn about jazz, but we'll leave that for later - it deserves a node in its own right), signed up G&H, and CBS' Philadelphia International label was the home of all those classics, by the O'Jays, Teddy Pendergrass (both solo and as a member of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes - he was, once, only the drummer, I think), and many others. McFadden and Whitehead's "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" used to get introduced on WBLS as "The National Anthem" by the morning-drive DJ; this may have been the beat that was sampled for Will Smith's "Gettin' Jiggy with It", but don't quote me on that. TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia) was, IIRC, just some of the musicians and singers at Sigma (or was it MFSB, and not TSOP? brain cramp, anyone?); they did the Soul Train theme. I haven't seen the show in about ten years (I would rather have weasels eat my flesh than sit through some Hollywood dance-party TV show), but I suspect their current theme is some trendy reworking of TSOP's version.

That's enough for now. I'll get this thing done. Someday. I promise. I haven't even gotten started on the 60s stuff. This will have to be divided into a whole bunch of different nodes, won't it? I apologize. I've made a heaping cesspool of verbiage. This is unacceptable.

"That's not writing - that's typewriting", as Truman Capote once said about the work of Jean-Louis Kerouac.

This, too, is typewriting.

But

at least I've added punctuation

and

paragraph tags.

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