Top Ten Soul Music Performances Available on YouTube

I've always loved real soul music, starting from being a kid in Detroit. In the early sixties, I paid no attention to the Beatles and the so-called British Invasion. Motown, Stax, and King Records were the inspiration that helped get me through my adolescence. The music of Wilson Pickett, James Brown, Mary Wells, and Aretha as heard on Detroit black radio stations, WJLB and WCHB, entered my body and climbed up my spine like a kundalini rush ... and I was a Jewish boy from the suburbs.

The first "white" album I ever bought was The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Thank you, YouTube, for all the rare classic soul music performances that I'm finding these days. Unfortunately, for the most part, what passes for soul music today (neo-soul?) sounds a lot like the meandering pop music dribble that you'd hear on American Idol, in my opinion, the cultural Spawn of Evil.

Here's my top ten list of amazing soul performances that I've been finding.

1) The year 2006 brought two terrible losses for American soul music: James Brown the Godfather of Soul and The Wicked Mister Wilson Pickett. Here's a live performance of Pickett doing his version of Don Covay's classic "Land of 1000 Dances." In 1965, it hit #1 on the R&B charts and #6 on the pop charts, his biggest hit ever.

2) In the early sixties, I used to sneak out of my parents' house and take a bus to downtown Detroit's Fox Theater to see "Mr. Dynamite" James Brown perform. Back then, I was one of the few whiteys in the audience, but no one minded. They knew that I came for the love of the music. Here he is in a 1971 Paris performance backed up by the smoking hot funky Collins brothers, Catfish and Bootsy, respectively on guitar and bass. And most people forget that he could play one bad-ass organ.

3) Many music critics believe that Curtis Mayfield's score for the hit "blaxploitation" movie "Superfly" was one of the greatest film soundtracks of all time. Unlike other "blaxploitation" soundtracks, "Superfly" didn't glamorize the gangster life. It was the dead honest truth about the hardships of urban life and it sadly still rings true today.