“Get down with the Philly Sound!”  I can’t remember when I heard that phrase for the first time, but I must have been very young, because my father’s voice shouting it is one of my first memories. He would make the vowels were extra drawn out, emphasizing the Philadelphia accent he’d tried so hard to lose: “Get daaawn with the Philly Saaaund!”

I knew that this Philly Sound was the reason there was food on my family’s table; the reason my dad sometimes came home just as I was waking up (still wearing his extra-dark Ray-Bans, reeking of all kinds of smoke, and too hyped up to sleep) with his cello case stuffed full of cash; the reason some of his friends had names like “Mighty Whitey,” and others drank my cough syrup when my mother wasn’t looking; the reason there were gold records hanging on our living room wall.

I was in high school when I realized the Philly Sound’s significance went beyond my family’s living room.  Before then, I hadn’t considered that the people who made this music – my father included – were pop revolutionaries: progenitors of funk, disco, and hip-hop, and happy thwarters of the entertainment biz’s racism.

For over ten years, almost every day, my dad went to work at the now legendary Sigma Sound Studios.  Passersby would not have guessed that this inconspicuous low building on 12th Street, in the heart of Center City, housed writers, producers, engineers, and musicians plugging away around the clock on hit after hit after hit.  The crew ranged from black dudes as fresh off the streets as their lyrics to Italian paisan string players still longing for the relative ease of the big-band days.

Soul music has its own fables.  Some men sit down at a piano, they’re wearing shiny suits, and they’ve got afros, one guy’s mama’s is in the kitchen cooking up a fine meal for them because they’re hungry fellas, and, suddenly!  they write a hit!  Cut to the long, fancy Cadillacs, gorgeous women, and red velvet tuxedoes.  Then there’s the fall from grace, including, but not limited to, religious conversion, drug overdose, lawsuits, and, finally, Where Are They Now?  Grayer, wiser, still wearing shiny suits and Afros, the former hit makers explain how it all happened in regretful yet addled tones.

Leon Huff

When it comes to Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Thom Bell, founding fathers of the Sound of Philadelphia, the fable doesn’t even begin to cut it.  In the seventies, they produced and wrote an unprecedented sixteen number one R&B hits.  At a time when their city was losing everything, they had the chutzpah to name their publishing company Mighty Three Music.  Gamble and Huff also made history on the business side when they signed Philadelphia International Records (PIR) to Columbia Records (Bell preferred to work independently).  While other black label owners had cut deals with majors, they never were able to command the autonomy that Gamble and Huff demanded and received.  Eventually, PIR became the second biggest black-owned corporation in the United States.

Now, disco and its urban soul antecedents are thought of as hip-hop’s elegant, funky uncle, the first bling-bling genre.  This is an interesting interpretation, but less compelling than the sound of the Sound of Philadelphia.  The brilliance was – and still is — in its contrasts.  Church-rooted signing, with sweet elegant strings, jazz horns, and country guitar.  As hot as those singers and rhythm players could get, the instruments surrounding them kept cool, cool, cool – a musical baked Alaska.

And, of course, Philly singers were hair raisingly great.  To name a few: the O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes, Teddy Pendergrass, Bunny Sigler, the Three Degrees, the Intruders, Billy Paul, McFadden and Whitehead, Patti LaBelle, the Delphonics, the Stylistics, the Soul Survivors, the Jacksons, Wilson Pickett, Jerry Butler, Dusty Springfield, Laura Nyro, and the Spinners.

Ironically, as the Sound of Philadelphia thrived, the city itself seemed to be crumbling.  The problems may have been emblematic of the country’s as a whole, but that made them no better in the details.  Though Philly had once been called the Workshop of the World, by the sixties and seventies its industries had tanked.  Most of the factories closed, and white flight was epidemic.  This rapid decline was presided over by Frank Rizzo, the former police commissioner-turned-mayor, who thought that sticking a billy club in the cummerbund of his tuxedo was a great way to accessorize a formal outfit.  Philly Soul’s peak years may, in retrospect, seem bittersweet, obvious halcyon days.  But TSOP’s song titles give a more complicated portrait of the time: “Love Train,” “Wake Up Everybody,” “Disco Inferno,” “Bad Luck,” “Only the Strong Survive,” “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” “Back Stabbers.”

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