Philadelphia Soul

Philadelphia in 1971 smelled like possibility. While Motown's assembly line sputtered in Detroit, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff took over 309 South Broad Street—a converted Cameo-Parkway Records building where Chubby Checker had launched the Twist a decade earlier. Philadelphia International Records opened with CBS backing, Clive Davis writing checks that Atlantic Records had refused to cut. Berry Gordy finally had a rival.

The Sound of Philadelphia evolved slowly. Gamble and Huff had spent the late sixties producing simpler tracks for The Soul Survivors and The Intruders, learning the machinery of hit-making. By 1971 they'd refined their ambitions: lush string arrangements played by Philadelphia Orchestra members, basslines that rattled car windows, sliding hi-hat rhythms that would define disco before disco had a name. Fred Wesley, James Brown's trombonist, called it “putting the bow tie on funk.” Accurate. This was funk smoothed for pop radio, gospel intensity wrapped in seventy-piece orchestras, the groove made elegant without losing its sweat.