Forgotten Southern Groups That Rivaled Both Stax and Motown

Most people know two names when they think about 1960s soul music. Motown in Detroit. Stax in Memphis. But the American South is a large place. And before those labels defined what the world thought soul music sounded like — and alongside them, in their shadow — there were groups recording music just as powerful, just as sophisticated, and just as culturally significant. The history books left them out. Tonight we put them back. The Dixie Cups were not supposed to record "Chapel of Love." Phil Spector had already tried it with Darlene Love and failed. He'd tried it with the Ronettes and failed. When three unknown women from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans recorded it for Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's brand-new Red Bird label in 1964, Spector was — as Stereogum confirmed — "mightily pissed." On June 6, 1964, "Chapel of Love" knocked the Beatles' "Love Me Do" from the number-one position on the Billboard Hot 100. It stayed there for three weeks. The Dixie Cups never saw a royalty check. Rosa Lee Hawkins confirmed it herself. Isaac Hayes assembled the Soul Children in 1968 specifically to replace Sam and Dave after Sam and Dave left Stax. He hand-selected four singers — two men, two women, all of them capable of singing lead — and built a group whose entire purpose was to fill the gap that his own best creative work had left behind. They went to number seven on the R&B chart. Shelbra Bennett, the group's lead female voice, died in Memphis in 2013. Most people who know "Soul Man" and "Hold On, I'm Comin'" have never heard a single Soul Children record. The Charmels recorded "As Long As I've Got You" in 1967 in Isaac Hayes's Stax studio. According to the group's own documented account, the songs were often written "while the group was hanging around the piano eating chicken and drinking Cherry wine." The record never charted nationally. In 1994, the Wu-Tang Clan sampled it for "C.R.E.A.M." — one of the most celebrated hip-hop recordings of the decade. The women who wrote and recorded the original in 1967 received a sample credit twenty-seven years later. The Gentrys were seven Treadwell High School students in Memphis who formed to play local dances. Lead singer Larry Raspberry had never sung "Keep On Dancing" before the recording session. It was assigned to him as a B-side. The Memphis Music Hall of Fame confirmed it: he admitted he did it because "there was nothing to be lost with my not having a good voice." That B-side hit number four on the Hot 100 and sold one million copies. One of the seven students in that group was a young man named Jimmy Hart — who later became a WWE Hall of Fame professional wrestling manager known as "The Mouth of the South." General Norman Johnson wrote a song in New Orleans in 1961 called "It Will Stand" — a declaration that rock and roll music cannot be killed, cannot be stopped, cannot be forgotten. He was correct. The song became a Northern Soul anthem, played at all-nighter events in Wigan and Blackpool by British dancers who believed every word. Johnson later co-wrote "Patches" — the Grammy-winning Clarence Carter hit. #SouthernSoul #ForgottenSoul #BlackMusicHistory #MusicHistory #StaxRecords #Motown #DixieCups #ChapelOfLove #SoulChildren #IsaacHayes #TheCharmels #WuTang #TheMasqueraders #TheGentrys #TheOvations #Dixiebelles #TheTemprees #FiveRoyales #JamesAndBobbyPurify #TheTams #TheShowmen #MusicDocumentary #60sSoul #SoulMusic