Musicians - Blue-eyed soul

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	Musicians - Blue-eyed soul

Blue-eyed soul is a term used to describe soul music performed by white people. It is (strictly speaking) a misnomer: the musician does not have to have blue eyes. Here, "blue-eyed" is synonymous with Caucasian. It is also a misnomer in that it's not a discrete style of music; the meaning of "Blue-eyed soul" has changed over the past forty years, and involves two distinct groups of artists:

Caucasian singers of mainstream Rhythm and Blues, such as Teena Marie
, Jonathan Buck, Michael McDonald and Joss Stone
In the 1980's, it was also applied by the British music press to a generation of british artists - among them Alison Moyet, Simply Red, Human League, Rick Astley
, Spandau Ballet and Culture Club, who co-opted elements of classic Motown and Stax/Volt styles.

White Soul, however, as the term was used in the 1960s and early 1970s, was applied to white singers whose style was heavily borrowed from the rhythm and blues of the day. It was applied to the likes of Eric Burdon, Dusty Springfield and Van Morrison at first, and evolved through artist like The Box Tops and Joe Cocker. In some cases (most notably The Flaming Ember and The Young Rascals among them) the artists initially "passed" as black on the radio - deliberately, in many cases, to avoid alienating receptive black radio audiences.

History

Blue-eyed soul began when Southern white musicians re-made black music to play for mass audiences, due to segregation laws that prevented blacks from performing for whites. Often the music was diluted for its new audience, a move that angered many African-Americans. Elvis Presley would sing songs written by a black artist to mainstream acclaim when the black artist's performances were not allowed on the radio. He then split the profits with that artist. Eventually, other white musicians starting playing the music, both in America and abroad. Much of this music would eventually become rock and roll in the mid and late sixties.

The regional "beach music" or "shag music" phenomenon in North and South Carolina and surrounding states of the late 1950s and 1960s is, at least partly, a manifestation of blue-eyed soul. It dove-tailed with the beginnings of other such groups in the early 1960s, when local white bands backed up nationally-popular black R&B artists at their road gigs, and also performed on their own at fraternity parties and other college social events in the region. The widespread popularity of the Carolina shag enabled many of these groups to keep their careers going up to the present day. According to "beach band" historian Greg Haynes, national artists such as Bonnie Bramlett and The Allman Brothers (as The Escorts) began their careers on this same college "kegger circuit". Bill Deal and The Rhondells and The Swinging Medallions are "beach bands" which have charted nationally.

Blaxploitation Era

In the 1970s, as integration overcame segregation, black culture sprang up in earnest. Soul music flourished, and musicians such as Richard Rudolph helped to pave the way for what we know today in America as blue-eyed soul. Artists including Hall & Oates, The Young Rascals, Van Morrison, Bobby Caldwell, and especially Michael McDonald were examples of the "white person with the black voice".

Modern-day blue-eyed soul

In the eighties, artists such as Michael McDonald and Rick Astley scored for the blue-eyed soul movement. Boy George, although not having the "black voice", is considered a blue-eyed soul artist because so much of the music of Culture Club fits in the genre of R&B. Audiences were shocked by the soulfulness of Teena Marie. However, a backlash ensued in the late eighties as some African-Americans felt whites were cashing in on the new popularity of their music. This backlash was so strong that in 1990 Ebony Magazine ran an article deriding whites singing black music. At the top of their list was a young Mariah Carey, who, though she looked Caucasian, was in fact multiracial, and Celine Dion. Dion, while having a powerful voice, has built a career in the pop and adult contemporary genres and is not usually considered a blue-eyed soul artist.

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