Pocket, voice, and the records that hold up when nothing is in a hurry. Coverage that takes its time on purpose.
When a singer reaches the line where the voice almost gives out and the room leans in, they are using a vocabulary that soul, blues, and R&B spent a century building. The serious singers across every American genre are still working from that book.
Published May 23, 2026
Crossover is treated as a marketing move and read as a marketing move. The honest version is structural. The catalogs that compound across decades almost always cross at least one genre line on purpose.
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An R&B-rooted look at how phrasing, pocket, and space turn a country lyric into a human delivery.
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In April 2026, the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency (CMRRA) marked its 50th anniversary with a notable announcement: the organization distributed $94 million in mechanical royalties to publishers and self-published songwriters in
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The 2025 R&B renaissance was not solely a story of major label success. It was also, and perhaps more importantly, a story about what the independent music infrastructure has become. From boutique imprints releasing albums that made Billboa
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The legal battle unfolding between major record labels and AI music startups is one of the most consequential disputes in the history of the music industry. For blues artists, a community whose musical catalog spans everything from pre-copy
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When 2025 ended, R&B had accomplished something that would have seemed improbable just three years earlier: it had reclaimed a genuine presence at the center of mainstream pop culture. Songs like Leon Thomas's "Mutt" and Kehlani's "Folded"
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On November 7, 2025, the Recording Academy announced the nominations for the 68th Annual Grammy Awards, with the ceremony scheduled for February 1, 2026. For R&B, the announcement was more than a list of names, it was a validation of a genr
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January is a reasonable time to look at any genre and ask where it is. For the blues, entering 2026, the honest answer is more interesting than the question usually gets: the genre is neither dying nor dominant, but it is doing something th
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**Q: What made R&B's 2025 mainstream resurgence different from previous moments?** Unlike earlier R&B crossover moments that relied heavily on radio rollouts, 2025's breakthrough was streaming-native and audience-led. Songs like "Folded" an
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By December 2025, the year had produced enough blue-letter moments in the blues world to warrant a genuine accounting. This is From The Stem's year-end review, not a comprehensive list of every recording and event, but an editorial perspect
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**Instagram/Facebook:** $407.6 million. 32 shows. 1.6 million tickets. The Cowboy Carter Tour was 2025's biggest solo touring achievement, and a nightly argument about what R&B and country have always shared. Full analysis at the link.
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Larkin Poe, the sister duo of Rebecca and Megan Lovell, earned a 2025 Americana Honors and Awards nomination for Duo/Group of the Year at a moment when the independent music world was paying close attention to artists who had built genuine
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The headline from Luminate's 2025 Year-End Report about R&B/hip-hop is that the combined category remained the most-streamed core genre in the US, a position it has held for years. The more interesting data point, the one that matters for a
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When Joe Bonamassa released his "100+ Years of Blues and Blues Rock" playlist on Spotify in the summer of 2025, it arrived as more than a streaming curation exercise. It was a statement about stewardship, a documented argument that the blue
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The assumption that radio airplay is the primary engine of R&B artist discovery has been obsolving for years. In 2025, it is functionally obsolete for most independent R&B artists. The infrastructure for building a genuine, loyal fanbase no
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June 15 is four days before June 19, Juneteenth, the date that has marked African American freedom since 1865 and federal holiday recognition since 2021. It is a reasonable moment to look backward: to trace how the blues, the African Americ
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On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, with news that the Civil War was over and that the more than 250,000 enslaved people still held in the state were free. Nearly two and a half years after President Lincoln's Eman
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Nashville has always been a city that rewards a certain kind of ambition, the kind that shows up week after week to a Tuesday residency, plays the full two sets, and lets the word of mouth do the rest. In the summer of 2025, that patient ap
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The Super Bowl halftime show is the most-watched musical performance in the United States in any given year, reaching audiences that no touring or streaming campaign can match in a single moment. When Kendrick Lamar headlined Super Bowl LIX
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Southern soul music operates in one of the most commercially robust and most consistently undercovered ecosystems in American music. Its regional touring circuit, historically called the Chitlin' Circuit, sustains full professional touring
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Texas guitarist Ally Venable was not waiting for permission. By the time [Joe Bonamassa added her to his "100+ Years of Blues and Blues Rock" Spotify playlist](https://www.facebook.com/JoeBonamassa/posts/stream-over-100-years-of-blues-blues
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**Is Cowboy Carter an R&B album or a country album?** Beyoncé herself said, "This ain't a Country album. This is a 'Beyoncé' album." Critics categorized it across country pop, R&B, Americana, and multiple other genres. The album's stated co
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Gary Clark Jr.'s 'JPEG RAW' (2024) was a deliberately maximalist, genre-crossing record that pushed against the blues-rock guitar hero template while remaining rooted in it. The album prompted debate about what the blues guitar tradition owes its own future.
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Ruthie Foster has won two Grammy Awards for blues music and built a career rooted in Texas blues and gospel that resists easy categorization. Her 2023 work and continuing presence illustrated what self-directed blues artistry looks like over the long haul.
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Marcus King won Best Americana Performance at the 2023 Grammys and had built a soul-inflected rock catalog by his mid-twenties that confounded genre categories. How a Greenville, South Carolina upbringing produced one of the genre's most interesting voices.
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When SZA's "SOS" arrived in December 2022, it did something that is genuinely rare in popular music: it changed what people believed was possible. Not just commercially, though the commercial record was real and substantial. It changed what
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When Robert Glasper released *Black Radio* in 2012, critics and listeners scrambled for accurate containers. Was it jazz? Neo-soul? Something that had slipped through a seam between Herbie Hancock's *Head Hunters* and D'Angelo's *Voodoo*? T
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The return of Southern blues festivals in 2022, including King Biscuit, the Blues Blast Music Awards Festival, and the Chicago Blues Festival, after pandemic closures documented how the live economy still sustains the genre's artists and community more than streaming does.
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Beyonce's 'Renaissance' (July 2022) was a house and dance music record that embedded its ambition in meticulous production choices and credit-sharing with dozens of artists. It was also the beginning of a multi-year project that would later address country.
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The conversation between gospel, funk, and secular soul has structured American popular music since Ray Charles crossed the church and the juke joint in the 1950s. In 2022, with Beyonce exploring those roots and Maverick City redefining gospel, the conversation was alive again.
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By 2022, SZA's 2017 debut 'CTRL' had accumulated streaming numbers that dwarfed most new releases. Five years of organic discovery building its audience, right before 'SOS' arrived. What slow-burn R&B catalog looks like.
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Leon Bridges did not arrive quietly. His debut single "Coming Home" circulated on SoundCloud in 2014 before he had a label deal, and by the time it appeared in physical form it had already shifted the conversation about what contemporary so
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The Blues Music Awards in Memphis in June 2022 named Christone 'Kingfish' Ingram as Blues Artist of the Year, a signal about where the genre saw its future. The full awards picture offered a snapshot of a genre in the middle of generational transition.
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The Record Company's catalog through 2022 demonstrated how blues-rock can be produced on lean budgets with deliberately raw aesthetics and still reach meaningful audiences. Their approach challenged the assumption that production investment scales with commercial potential.
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Broadway and touring productions built around country and soul catalogs in 2022 drove significant streaming activity for catalogs ranging from Tina Turner to Hank Williams. The stage-to-streaming pipeline and what it means for catalog strategy.
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Christone "Kingfish" Ingram was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the county seat of Coahoma County, Mississippi, a place whose name alone carries the weight of blues mythology. Clarksdale is where the Mississippi Delta blues tradition runs
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Lake Street Dive's 'Obviously' (2021) built their largest touring audience yet through 2022, without mainstream pop radio play and with a sound that drew from soul, pop, and rock in equal measure. Their career is a case study in genre-ambiguous independent music reaching scale.
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Adia Victoria has been based in Nashville for most of her adult life, which is both logical and somewhat ironic. Nashville has a substantial blues and roots music scene that the country and Christian music industries tend to overshadow. It
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Released on February 25, 2022 via Loma Vista Recordings, Robert Glasper's *Black Radio III* arrived ten years after the original *Black Radio* and nearly a decade after its 2013 sequel. The album's reception was broadly favorable: [Paste Ma
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'Blackbirds' (2020) collected iconic songs from female artists who had been overlooked or underpaid, from Nina Simone to Sinead O'Connor, and reimagined them through LaVette's sixty years of lived experience. The album's late recognition in 2022 raised questions about what the industry owes its elders.
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Yola earned multiple Grammy nominations including Best Americana Album for 'Stand for Myself,' a British soul artist making the most Americana-inflected record of her career in 2021-22. What her trajectory said about the genre's international reach and its domestic blind spots.
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The phrase "chitlin circuit" has a history that is both older than most music writing acknowledges and more alive than most coverage suggests. The original circuit, a network of Black-owned and Black-operated venues stretching across the Am
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Jazmine Sullivan had not released an album in seven years when *Heaux Tales* arrived in January 2021. That gap was long enough that her return operated less as a continuation of a commercial career and more as a statement about what she had
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The Black Pumas' debut album did something unusual in 2019: it appeared, almost without announcement, and refused to go away. The Austin duo of vocalist Eric Burton and guitarist-producer Adrian Quesada released a self-titled album on their
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Nobody announced the band was over. They just stopped, and Brittany Howard used the time to make the most personal record of her career.
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Marcus King grew up in a guitar household. His grandfather and father both played the instrument professionally in South Carolina, and King was performing publicly before he was a teenager. By the time he formed the Marcus King Band and beg
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Two of the most interesting producers working in soul and R&B built an album with Michael Kiwanuka that sounded like it had arrived from a parallel timeline where 1972 never ended.
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The Alabama Shakes hiatus gave their frontwoman room to make the most personal record of her career. She named it after the sister she lost and built it entirely on her own terms.
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Twelve musicians on one bus going to amphitheaters all summer was a different kind of math than most independent touring economics assumed. Tedeschi Trucks made it work.
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He followed his most commercially successful album with a quiet letter of appreciation to the music that taught him. It was the right call.
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He put his Austin blues rock through the filter of his specific experience as a Black man in Texas and made an album that demanded to be heard as something more than guitar showmanship.
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Dan Auerbach brought a Bristol-born soul singer to Easy Eye Sound in Nashville and helped her make the debut album she had been building toward for a decade.
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She had spent a decade learning how to hold a room. Avondale Drive was the record that proved she could do it without a band name in front of hers.
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They were young, they were from Memphis, and they were playing the kind of blues soul that Stax built its legacy on. Keep On was evidence that the tradition was not finished.
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Carey Bell had been one of Chicago's great harmonica players. His son Lurrie honored that by making the kind of record that would have mattered to his father.
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His debut made him the most celebrated neo-soul artist in a decade. His second album made some of those fans very unhappy. Both responses were predictable.
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Thirty-five years after he put blues guitar on mainstream radio, Robert Cray was still doing the work. The audience had not forgotten, and neither had he.
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They recorded it for essentially nothing in a college dorm basement. Then they put it on streaming and the soul revival conversation had a new reference point.
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The debut got them on every festival lineup in America. The second album had to explain why they deserved to be there again.
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Foster had been making the kind of music that changed how people felt about the room they were in for twenty years. Promise of a Brand New Day was more of the same, which was everything.
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Bell had written 'You Don't Miss Your Water' in 1961. Fifty-five years later, he was still writing at the highest level and the Grammy Academy finally told him so.
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Bradley had waited decades for his moment. When it arrived, he used it to make music that felt earned in every note.
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Houston had been a soul city since Bobby Blue Bland and Don Robey's Duke/Peacock Records. The Suffers were the latest argument that the tradition never actually left.
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Ty Taylor's voice and the band's commitment to performing every show as if it were the last one they would ever play was a combination that converted casual concert-goers into true believers.
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The Delta had been producing guitar prodigies since before most people could name one. Ingram was the most compelling evidence in years that the tradition was still alive in its birthplace.
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With a sound that referenced Sam Cooke and Otis Redding without imitating them, Bridges arrived as one of the year's most complete new artists.
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Brittany Howard's voice had announced something significant on the debut. Sound and Color revealed exactly how large that something was.
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Clark made the electric guitar sound like it had been recently invented and that no one else had figured out what it could do yet, which is the oldest trick in the blues tradition.
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Batiste was playing the music of Thelonious Monk and James Brown on New York City subway platforms and in hospital waiting rooms before most people knew his name, and he was right about what the music was for.
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Brittany Howard's voice arrived fully formed on Alabama Shakes' debut, and in 2012 there was essentially nothing else on American radio that sounded like it.
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Michael Kiwanuka came out of London with a sound rooted in Bill Withers and Bill Frisell, and his 2012 debut asked whether soul and folk were ever really separate in the first place.
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Ana Popovic grew up in Belgrade studying blues guitar and made American stages her home, asking questions the genre had not fully answered about who the blues belonged to.
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Charlie Parr played a diddley bow and homemade instruments in Duluth bars and made records that sounded like they came from a different century. He was exactly what the folk revival needed at its edges.
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John Stephens had been working as a session musician and developing his songwriting for years before he met Kanye West in 2001. The relationship that followed and the GOOD Music home that West provided for Stephens under the stage name John
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Amy Winehouse was nineteen years old when *Frank* was released in October 2003. The album was produced primarily by Salaam Remi who brought a hip hop and jazz production framework to Winehouse's vocal and lyric approach. The combination pro
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Erykah Badu released *Worldwide Underground* in September 2003 with a specific framing: it was not a traditional album but an "EP-album" or a mixtape-adjacent project released on her own Motown deal with the creative latitude that framing i
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Derek Trucks was twenty-four years old when *Joyful Noise* was released in 2003 but he had been performing professionally since he was nine had joined the Allman Brothers Band at age seventeen and had spent his adolescent and early adult ye
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Bonnie Raitt released *Silver Lining* on Capitol Records in April 2002 her fourteenth studio album and a record that arrived at an interesting moment in her career arc. She had experienced commercial revival with *Nick of Time* in 1989 won,
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If you were following mainstream music media in 2002 you might not have known that a significant and economically robust R&B and soul ecosystem was operating across the American South largely outside the coverage of Billboard Rolling Stone,
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India.Arie released *Acoustic Soul* on Motown Records in June 2001 and the music industry's response was immediate: the album received seven Grammy nominations an extraordinary recognition for a debut including Album of the Year and Best Ne
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*Songs in A Minor* was released on June 5-2001 and sold 236-000 copies in its first week then an extraordinary debut figure for an R&B artist without prior commercial exposure. By the end of its commercial run it had sold more than ten mill
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Robert Cray had made his commercial breakthrough with *Strong Persuader* in 1986 the record that brought him a mainstream audience and established the clean-toned soul-inflected blues guitar approach that would define his work for the follo
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The title of Musiq Soulchild's debut album was a phonetic transcription of "I just want to sing " which was as direct a statement of artistic purpose as a debut album title could make. Talib Johnson performing as Musiq Soulchild was not try
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*Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1* was released July 18-2000 on Hidden Beach Records a small independent soul label. It was Scott's debut album and it arrived into a neo soul landscape that D'Angelo Erykah Badu Lauryn Hill and oth
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When Taj Mahal and Toumani Diabate released *Kulanjan* in 2000 on Hannibal Records they were doing something that musicologists had discussed for decades but that few musicians had attempted as a full recording project: documenting through,
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*Voodoo* took nearly four years to make. D'Angelo had released *Brown Sugar* in 1995 and its commercial success along with the neo soul movement it helped define created expectations for the follow-up that were specific and difficult. The a
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The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was released on August 25-1998. By the end of that year it had sold over five million copies in the United States. By the time the 1999 Grammy ceremony concluded it had won five awards including Album of the,
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Erykah Badu arrived in February 1997 with a debut album a distinctive visual identity and a set of aesthetic and spiritual values that she had no intention of adjusting for commercial convenience. The headwraps the spoken-word poetry the Af
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R.L. Burnside had been playing the blues in the hills of northern Mississippi for most of his life before the music industry discovered him. He was born in 1926 grew up in the Hill Country tradition associated with Fred McDowell and R.L.'s,
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When Maxwell released his debut album on April 2-1996 he described it as a suite and the distinction was intentional. A collection of songs is experienced as separate items in sequence. A suite is a unified artistic statement where each par
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In the early 1990s mainstream R&B was built on sequenced drum machines synthesized bass lines heavily processed vocals and a production aesthetic that prioritized sonic cleanliness over organic warmth. The tradition of James Brown Stevie Wo
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Kevin Moore grew up in South Central Los Angeles the son of a father who played guitar and kept albums by Lightnin' Hopkins and Big Bill Broonzy alongside the contemporary R&B and soul records that surrounded him. He absorbed the blues trad
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Meshell Ndegeocello released *Plantation Lullabies* on November 9-1993 through Maverick Records Madonna's newly formed label. The album was her debut and it was immediately recognized as something unusual in the R&B and soul landscape: a re
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Cassandra Wilson had been recording jazz albums since the early 1980s developing her vocal identity through the M-Base collective and other New York jazz contexts. By 1992 she had signed with Blue Note Records and begun working on the album
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The Neville Brothers had been recording together in various configurations since the early 1970s but their roots in the New Orleans musical scene went back much further. Aaron Neville had been recording since 1960 Art Neville had led the Me
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*Living with the Law* appeared in March 1991 produced by Daniel Lanois and Malcolm Burn and introduced Chris Whitley as one of the most fully formed debut artists in the roots blues and folk tradition of that era. The album's central instru
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Robert Cray accomplished something that most blues guitarists of his generation did not: he broke through the blues genre's commercial ceiling and established a presence in mainstream rock and pop markets without diluting the fundamental bl
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On February 21-1990 Bonnie Raitt won four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year and Record of the Year at a single ceremony. She was 39 years old. She had been recording since 1971. Her previous albums had generated critical praise devo
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Mixing notes from sessions that got it right.
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Five records you'll keep coming back to.
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A short list, updated quarterly.
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What the touring playbook looks like in 2025.
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On phrasing, restraint, and what gospel taught the format.
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A short study session.
From the archive Read the full article →R&B / Blues / Soul writers tend to also read these other corners of From The Stem. We try to make the connections explicit.