Southern Soul Top 100 Charts

In the late nineties, when I first began to visualize a charting of Southern Soul music, my overriding motive was to correct what I perceived to be a grievous wrong. When I searched the Internet for information on the great musicians I heard on radio stations on my trips through the South, I could find nothing about them. I was able to find loads of information on blues and soul artists up to about the 1980’s, but anything more contemporary was still a dark continent. It was as if a cultural curtain had dropped and any information about contemporary southern soul and blues strictly forbidden. Even “southern soul” was a suspect and tentative term, used mainly as an adjective to describe older artists geographically tied to the Deep South.

To help right that wrong, I went about constructing a Top 100 chart of the best Southern Soul artists from the 90’s to the present (at that time, early 00’s), and I profiled those performers in “artist guides.” Johnnie Taylor was the #1 artist on the chart for the bulk of those years, although Peggy Scott-Adams, Ronnie Lovejoy and Tyrone Davis enjoyed brief stints.

Then, in 2010, I began publishing a new chart to reflect the new artists and new realities of southern soul music: 21st Century Southern Soul. Sir Charles Jones, aka “the king of southern soul,” dominated the #1 spot exclusively throughout the decade.

Now in 2020 it’s time, once again, to catch up with the new songs and artists in southern soul music with a chart called The New Generation.