Evans is a place on Earth: You Know They Got Soul:Soul America.

BBC4's recent three part series Soul America was both an education and an absolute joy from start to finish which, when your subject is soul music, it really ought to have been. It'd be enjoyable enough just to play three hours of the best soul music videos and cobble together a few celebrities to talk about how much they love the music but this was far better than that, if still not as extensive as some of us may have wished.

I could have happily sat through ten hours of Soul America but the three hours the programme makers gave me were an absolute delight at a trying time in American, and world, history. Soul America told the story of soul music from its origins in the sixties through to the period in the mid-eighties when hip-hop and R'n'B took precedence and prominence as the dominant form of black American music and, while telling the story, it often sketched out a prismatic view of black American history, for which read American history, and the civil rights movement.

Talking heads of the calibre of Candi Staton, Mavis Staples, Steve Cropper, Peabo Bryson, Millie Jackson, Ray Parker Jr, Kenny Gamble, Barrett Strong, Eddie and Brian Holland (no Lamont Dozier?), Fred Wesley, Al Bell, Otis Williams, Mary Wilson, Duke Fakir, David Hood, Spooner Oldham, David Porter, and Nelson George (as well as vintage footage of Ray Charles) sketched out a tail of deep south churches, Detroit riots, and suburban quiet storms and the Texas twang of Carleen Anderson stitched their tales together into a narrative that was never demanding but always interesting while telling the story of a music that, for over twenty years, seemed to express most keenly how it felt to be both black and American.

The story began in Countyline Primitive Baptist Church in Milledgeville, Georgia whose congregation, still - to this day, echoes the the origins of soul music. Gospel songs from the church and spirituals from the fields. When two hundred years of slavery came to end in 1863 the black American church began to grow in strength and by the 1950s the first, fledgling, soul singers emerged in the south and began to tour what became known as the 'gospel highway' circuit.

The Jewell Gospel Trio, featuring a teenage Candi Staton, were the first of the gospel singing acts to tour with a live band and Staton tells of them making so much noise that none of the other acts wanted to follow them as they'd simply be blown off stage.

Jewell Gospel Trio - Jesus Is Listening

While Candi and her band were able to dominate live proceedings it wasn't long before she met someone who was to become even more dominant in the soul scene. Possibly the most respected soul performer of all time. Candi met Aretha Franklikn in 1954. Franklin was the daughter of a famous baptist minister who was known as the 'million dollar voice' and, as we all know now, his daughter could sing a bit too.

Aretha Franklin - Amazing Grace

There was money, or at least a living, to be made on the gospel highway but the big bucks were in the godless, and white, world of pop music and black musicians were, at first, reticent to move over. For reasons, one assumes, of racism from white audiences and of fear of accusations of selling out or selling their soul from the black community.

One night in Chicago, in 1957, the clean cut Sam Cooke took to the stage and instead of his usual performance where he'd sing about his love of God he chose to lend his wonderful voice to a song about the love of a woman. Georgia born Ray Charles, a year later at a gig in Pennsylvania, was a fellow traveller of Cooke's. Charles was trying to impress a 'fine' woman in a red dress in the audience so he improvised a tune for her from the stage. That tune became What'd I Say.

Sam Cooke - You Send Me

Ray Charles - What'd I Say

Many consider it the moment that birthed soul music. If the birth had been surprisingly easy, soul music's formative years would play out to a very difficult background. Segregation in the US had only ended in 1954 and there were still huge racial issues in the country. Ones that, sadly, have still not gone away and have, particularly under the lunatic stewardship of Donald Trump, gotten even worse.

The Civil Rights movement was focused around a charismatic preacher from Atlanta called Martin Luther King Jr who was determined to achieve equal rights and to achieve them via peaceful methods. King found his musical analogue in the band Booker T And The MGs. Signed to the Stax label in Memphis, the city he'd later die in, they featured black and white musicians playing together with little or no fanfare and soon became the label's house band.

Possibly the best singer they ever backed was a farm worker from Macon, Georgia called Otis Redding. His vocal style harked back to the gospel church while simultaneously showcasing a new black confidence. Redding's vocals soundtrack Lyndon Johnson's 1964 signing of a Civil Rights Act. An act that promised equal rights but proved to be, for the most part, merely gestural. Very little actually changed.

Otis Redding - Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)

Otis Redding - Try A Little Tenderness

A rival to Stax emerged in Detroit. Tamla Motown's big acts, initially, were Martha and the Vandellas and, even more so, The Supremes and with the writing team of Holland/Dozier/Holland behind them they were putting some of the greatest tunes ever recorded while at the same time projecting a metropolitan image of black America:- sophisticated, glamorous, and proud.

The lyrics may have been apolitical, love songs for the most part, but the very existence of Motown was a political act in a country whose very existence was forged in race hate. Some complained The Supremes were too Oreo, black on the outside but white on the inside, and complained the music was more pop than soul.

Those arguments don't wash with me but Motown's response came in the more soulful, more authentic if you insist, sound of Detroit's own The Four Tops. Otis Redding didn't play music for white people but he did play music to white people. When he found himself billed alongside The Who and Janis Joplin at the Monterey Pop Festival in California in 1967 he wowed the crowd with his self-penned anthem Respect.

Martha And The Vandellas - I'll Have To Let Him Go

The Supremes - Where Did Our Love Go

The Supremes - Baby Love

The Four Tops - Reach Out (I'll Be There)

The Four Tops - Baby I Need Your Loving

Otis Redding - Shake

Otis Redding - Respect

Otis Redding (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay

After the show was finished he wandered down to the local bay, sat on the dock of it, and wrote a new song. Less than six months later Otis, the King of Soul, was dead. His plane having crashed in Lake Monona, Wisconsin. He was just twenty-six years old and his passing left a void in the soul scene. In Muscle Shoals, Alabama another multi-racial band (featuring David Hood and Spooner Oldham) picked up the crown. If it didn't quite fit on Clarence Carter's head it was a perfect fit for Aretha Franklin who rocked up at the studio, recorded I Never Loved A Man, and almost immediately hit the pop charts and became the Queen of Soul.

Clarence Carter - Slip Away

Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved A Man

Aretha Franklin - Respect

From 1967 onwards soul music would become more involved with the Civil Rights movement. Housing and unemployment discrimination led to an uprising in Detroit that year and the riots and police brutality that followed resulted in forty-three deaths in the home of Motown. How could The Supremes sing Baby Love in this kind of environment?

Or soul musicians elsewhere in the country for that matter? In Memphis, Isaac Hayes and David Porter responded with a track based on some graffiti Hayes had seen in Detroit reading, quite simply, Soul Man.

A strike of, mostly black, sanitation workers in Memphis brought the city to a standstill and Martin Luther King Jr to the city to speak in support of the strike. There, on April 4th 1968, he was shot dead - aged 39. Responses were mixed. Shirley Walton released Send Peace and Harmony Home in hope of inspiring people to treat each other with more respect. Not all felt so forgiving and Memphis was soon in flames - as were at least one hundred other cities across the country.

Not the Stax building though. The rioters knew to leave that alone. The white mayor of Boston, Massachussetts Kevin White spoke passionately to the audience at a James Brown gig as he introduced the star turn. Brown, up to this point, had not spoken out on Civil Rights and people had started to call him a 'sold man' but following the assassination of MLK and various Black Panthers, he could hold back no more and his new song Say It Loud - I'm Black And I'm Proud left little room for doubt as to where Brown's loyalties lied.

Sam And Dave - Soul Man

Shirley Walton - Send Peace And Harmony Home

James Brown - It's A Man's Man's Man's World

James Brown - Say It Loud, I'm Black And I'm Proud

Pacifism had failed and with the rise of more aggressive Black Panthers like Stokeley Carmichael and Bobby Seale it seemed that the only way the white supremacist system could be overthrown was with violent struggle. James Brown appeared to agree. Briefly. Within a year the self-styled number one soul brother was endorsing Richard Nixon for president. Shades of Kanye West's affection for the orange cunt Trump.

Back in Memphis, the Stax bassist Al Bell had the genius idea of moving Isaac Hayes out from behind the writer's desk to become a frontman. Hayes second album, Hot Buttered Soul, featured just four songs - two of them over ten minutes long - and if it wasn't a protest album as such it was a powerful expression of black power. It saved Stax from ruin and set the tone for a new black-centric soul direction.

Isaac Hayes - Walk On By

The Temptations - Ball Of Confusion

Isaac Hayes - Theme From Shaft

Motown's response came from the former pop soul band The Temptations who'd started working with writers Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong and adding a political dimension to their lyrics and a psychedelic flavour to their music. The black identity explored in these songs was reinforced by the Blaxploitation movies of Melvin Van Peebles (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song) and Gordon Parks (Shaft - scored by Hayes who won a rare black Oscar for it).

Hypervisibility of black culture had arrived in the US. 1972's Superfly (dir:Gordon Parks Jr) told the story of a New York pimp and drug dealer called Youngblood Priest and if there was criticism of the film for glamourising drugs and the lifestyle of drug dealers the same could not be said for Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack. Mayfield had written extensively against drug abuse and when Pusherman appears in the film it may not wholly endorse the film's message but it certainly does Mayfield's.

Curtis Mayfield - Pusherman

Another soul artist wishing to essay his musings about American life, Vietnam, and the ecology was Marvin Gaye. Gaye's I Heard It Through The Grapevine had, up to that point, been Motown's biggest hit but his 1971 LP What's Going On, regularly voted the best album in any genre of all time, was a concept album or song cycle that, to the surprise of many and against all industry logic, sold massively and changed the game for Motown, soul music, and, in fact, all music.

Al Bell met with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, The Temptations released Papa Was A Rollin' Stone, and, in August 1972, the Wattstax benefit concert to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Watts riots in Los Angeles took place at the LA Memorial Coliseum and featured performances by Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, Richard Pryor, and Rufus 'Walking the Dog/Do the Funky Chicken' Thomas. It looked ace.

Marvin Gaye - I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Marvin Gaye - What's Going On

The Temptations - Papa Was A Rollin' Stone

Soon Motown had left Detroit for Hollywood and Stevie Wonder, already a huge star, started to have some out there ideas about how music could be made and performed. Ideas that came to fruition in his, quite remarkably, sixteenth studio album Innervisions.

Around the same time, back in Memphis Royal Studios, Hi Records had unearthed a quite different kind of soul star to Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, or even Stevie Wonder (who, as with James Brown, is only touched on in this series). Al Green's Let's Stay Together reached number one in 1972 and whereas previous soul singers were macho, even cocksure, Green sounded feminine, vulnerable, and seductive. Instantly recognisable, he is one of my favourite singers of all time.

Al Green - Let's Stay Together

The O'Jays - Love Train

Green's reinvention of soul music as a gentler, more romantic, style would be held on the backburner, briefly, as Philadelphia was the next city to step up to the plate and add a new flavour to the music. Philadelphia International Records pioneered a new sound, lush, string laden soul c/o MFSB, The Stylistics, and The O'Jays, from Canton, Ohio, whose Love Train, penned by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, was released the day the Vietnam War ended and, it seemed, ushered in a new era of celebration.

They called the music 'funk with a bow-tie' and even Marvin Gaye was starting to feel the love in the air, recording Let's Get It On in LA. Gaye's slowed down take on the sound ushered in an era of 'bedroom soul' and the greatest advocate of that was none other than the Walrus of Love:- Barry White.

Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On

Barry White - Can't Get Enough Of Your Love Baby

Another act on Philadelphia International Records were Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes. Oddly enough Harold Melvin wasn't the main singer in that band and was regularly overshadowed by Teddy Pendergrass who, in 1976, went solo and set himself up as something as a more svelte contender for Barry White's loverman throne.

Like Al Green, Pendergrass loved to show off his not unimpressive body but while Green was sensitive, Pendergrass was uber masculine. Pendergrass, Green, and White would continue playing to huge crowds and carrying the baton for romantic soul music as the main focus shifted towards disco which was taking the world by storm, partially helped by its link with the sound of Philly soul.

Many classic soul acts shifted their emphasis towards disco which offered lucrative opportunities to previously sidelined female soul singers like Candi Staton. Other opportunities came in the movies and when the Queen of Raunch, Millie Jackson, sang Hurts So Good on the soundtrack to 1973's Cleopatra Jones it brought more people to her concerts where she'd stand on stage virtually demanding expertly delivered cunnilingus - and why not?

Harold Melvin And The Bluenotes - If You Don't Know Me By Now

Harold Melvin And The Bluenotes - Don't Leave Me This Way

Teddy Pendergrass - I Don't Love You Anymore

Candi Staton - Young Hearts Run Free

Millie Jackson - It Hurts So Good

When you're unable to speak because you've got your tongue wedged up Millie Jackson's vajayjay things are likely to get a little quiet (although maybe less so for her) so perhaps it's no wonder that the next big direction of travel in soul music was to a destination called 'quiet storm'.

Quiet storm, my smutty mind aside, spoke to the suburban black middle classes who no longer wanted the edgy sounds of the city and reminders of civil rights struggles. Aspirational, smooth ballads performed by men, like Peabo Bryson, in smart suits with hankies delicately perched in their top pockets. As a young man I thought it was the most boring load of old shit ever. I was wrong.

Peabo Bryson - Reaching For The Sky

Teddy Pendergrass - Close The Door

These slow jams may have found themselves mainstays of provincial disco erection sections but they were often sonically innovative and beautifully crafted pieces of work and in Teddy Pendergrass, the quiet storm found its poster boy. So popular with the women was he that he staged ladies only concerts and in footage of his shows from that era we can see vapour rising from his body. He was, quite literally, smokin'.

Until, on the 18th March 1982 - when future chart success seemed inevitable, he was involved in a car crash and ended up wheelchair bound. A paraplegic for the rest of his life, he died in 2010, Pendergrass continued releasing albums but never again found the level of success he'd had before the accident.

Marvin Gaye had been going through a bad patch too. Struggling, he owed the IRS millions and being hooked on crack he was probably spending more than he was earning. A seemingly bizarre decision to move to Ostend in Belgium paid off. Gaye regained both his health and his mojo and, in 1982 he returned to the top of the soul game with Sexual Healing.

Marvin Gaye - Sexual Healing

Gaye returned to LA triumphant where, two years later at the age of 44, he was shot dead by his own father. With Teddy mostly out of action and Marvin dead there was a void at the top of the soul world and the future of soul music looked precarious but though people, sadly, die - music does not.

The next big star to emerge was the footballer's favourite Luther Vandross, a former Chic and David Bowie backing singer from Manhattan whose music left me cold in the eighties but I quite enjoy now. Vandross became the eighties soul king and Anita Baker the eighties soul queen but here the programme falls a little short. There's lots of kind words about the genius of Vandross (less about Baker, quelle surprise) but there's little analysis of what he brought to the game and how he changed or developed the music.

If anything, it's suggested that he perfected the music but to me soul music is far too protean a beast for such assertations. Nevertheless, as the eighties moved on the world witnessed not just the unstoppable rise of hip-hop as a global cultural movement but also saw pop-soul singers like Lionel Richie and Whitney Houston starting to dominate.

As a defining and dominant genre, soul's day was over. Though pure soul acts continue to this day, many of them excellent, for the most part soul was absorbed into the wider realm, the broader church, of pop. Evinced perhaps most tellingly by Aretha Franklin's duet with George Michael.

Soul America ends with Aretha Franklin singing at Barack Obama's inauguration and that footage alone manages to show both how far soul had travelled from the baptist churchs and cotton fields of the south and, in many ways, how little it had really changed on the journey. The word soul means the spirit or essence of a person and though that person may change their appearance and their outlook their soul, it would seem, stays the same. Soul music, too, both forever changes and forever stays the same. Perhaps that's why it speaks so loudly to our hearts.