Earliest Use Of 'Soul' To Describe A Style of Popular Music

[Satchmo Distel]

The term “soulful” was used in a press release by Atlantic (about a new, yet to be named, vocal group) published in Billboard on 27 Sep 52, p.40.

https://worldradiohistory.com/Archiv...1952-09-27.pdf

I'm wondering if there's an earlier usage than this?

[Felicity, I guess so]

I suspect there is. W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folks 50 years earlier suggesting a likely connection between black cultural practices and the word soul, somewhere

[Satchmo Distel]

That's an excellent point. Gospel was going to enter secular black popular music at some point and it was just a question of when and how. It was already happening with the blues to a degree (Armstrong, Ellington) but vocal harmony groups were restrained (Bill Kenny perhaps excepted) until the Orioles took the leap in 1948 then Ray Charles went a giant one further with "I've Got A Woman".

[Bruno]

I suspect there is. W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folks 50 years earlier suggesting a likely connection between black cultural practices and the word soul, somewhere

You can trace it back further to slave songs. Here's Frederick Douglass:

"I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meanings of those rude, and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle, so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones, loud, long and deep, breathing the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirits, and filled my heart with ineffable sadness. The mere recurrence, even now, afflicts my spirit, and while I am writing these lines, my tears are falling. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conceptions of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with a sense of the soul-killing power of slavery, let him go to Col. Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance day, place himself in the deep, pine woods, and there let him, in silence, thoughtfully analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul. and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because 'there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.'"