This class is a follow-up to the Fall 2019 course Soul Music: The Soundtrack of a Generation. This course will provide a survey of musical artists and styles focusing on different cities and regions such as LA, the Bay Area, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Memphis Ohio, New York/New Jersey, the P-Funk Mob and James Brown. The artists will include well-known musicians like Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind and Fire, Sly and the Family Stone, the Commodores, and Kool and the Gang plus many artists who had hits on the R&B charts that didn’t reach the pop charts.

We will discuss topics such as how the music reflected the changing African American community culture, the emergence of multi-racial bands (Sly and the Family Stone, WAR, Tower of Power, etc.) and how funk helped shape the development of hip-hop.