Talking About Soul(1)

Soul music had humble origins, in the black communities of the united states of America, at the time gospel music and rhythm and blues were the main singing tool of the black community who were proud of their culture, as the music developed it eventually became representative of the whole popular music of black people at the time, and so people produced this soul music and it became a staple of American culture and even more so the Motown records label, which originally produced pop music but because of the large number of artists who were signing with Motown they had a large percentage of artists who performed soul records and famous examples of people who are consider soul artists are:

Marvin Gaye
Stevie Wonder
The Superemes
The Jackson Five

As you can see there are a number of well known artists, and often their work is referred to as classic and imaginative, but the genre of soul only lasted until the late 1990's when the music industry decided that Hip-Hop is what appealed most to the younger listens of today as the industry decided children and teenagers often wanted the most trendy and cool music and would bug their parents to purchase it.

So this was a small part of the larger area known as the genre of soul.

Smokey Robinson said of Motown's cultural impact:

Into the '60s, I was still not of a frame of mind that we were not only making music, we were making history. But I did recognize the impact because acts were going all over the world at that time. I recognized the bridges that we crossed, the racial problems and the barriers that we broke down with music. I recognized that because I lived it. I would come to the South in the early days of Motown and the audiences would be segregated. Then they started to get the Motown music and we would go back and the audiences were integrated and the kids were dancing together and holding hands.