Soul and Funk Music of United States

In the middle of the year, female soul singers such as Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick and Diana Ross were famous, while inventive artists like James Brown initiated a current pattern of soul known as funk. Influenced by psychedelic rock, which was leading the chart at the period, funk was a very rhythmic, dance-able type of soul. Later in the year and getting into ye 70s, funk too divided into two components. Sly & the family Stone made the pop funk palatable for the audiences, while George Clinton and his P Funk collective initiated a current psychedilia- and heavy metal-influenced type of avant-garde funk. Album-oriented soul also emerged very late in the year and into the following year, with musicians like Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and Al Green taking the soul beyond the place of single into cohesive album-length artistic statements with a difficult social integrity.

source of picture: ioanavintu.com

It was in this setting, of the album-oriented soul and funk, influenced by Black Power and the civil rights trend, that Africans in Harlem initiated the hip hop music.