At the time of its greatest appeal to a mass audience (the ten years that followed the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.), soul music felt like the musical equivalent of truth. A commodified, secularized version of an African-American ecstatic tradition (gospel music), it signified a genuine outpouring of passionate feeling.
In the mid-1960s, after Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, and James Brown had delineated its form, soul music became, in effect, a tale of two cities: Memphis and Detroit. Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton (founders of Memphis's Stax/Volt) and Berry Gordy Jr. (founder of Detroit's Motown) were true beneficiaries of civil-rights era America. They understood or, better, they intuited that rising black pride and an increasing white fascination with blackness--which took the twin form of envy and remorse--implied not only a change in consciousness, but an emerging market.
Stax/Volt and Motown capitalized on this market. Both companies, using vastly different strategies, sought to deliver musical goods that consumers would regard as authentic: effects of passion and conviction, not of calculation and commerce. Stax/Volt followed an agricultural model and produced rough-hewn music that sounded fresh and organic. (It is no accident that Otis Redding, Stax's greatest star, was also the most countrified of all major soul singers.) As a company, it was organized like a cooperative farm (or, perhaps more generously, like an independent film company). By all accounts, Redding, Issac Hayes, Dave Porter, Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Carla and Rufus Thomas, William Bell, and other laborers understood (1) that they had specific roles to play in the making of musical products but (2) that these roles were open-ended and fluid. On the other hand, Motown followed an industrial model predicated on strict divisions of labor. Patterned after an automobile assembly line (Gordy had once worked at Ford) and, thus recalling the Hollywood studio system, it produced reliable, quality products. It was a "hit factory," providing the pop audience with pop tunes sung by non pop voices. It became the most successful black-owned business in U.S. history (Early 35).