ABSTRACT
Trade means friendship and co-operation; and for the Aboriginal the principal object of trade was song. Song, therefore, brought peace. Yet I felt the Songlines were not necessarily an Australian phenomenon, but universal: that they were a means by which man marked out territory, and so organised his social life. (Chatwin 1987: 314)
This chapter explores the relationship between the production of black American Soul music in the 1960s and its place in white working class culture in Britain. It is not intended as an authoritative account of Soul music; that is not the central concern of this book and others have covered this aspect very well.1 The approach draws on Haralambos’s (1974) thesis that society was the primary determinant in the production of Soul to assess the similarities between the consumption of Soul in America and Britain. While that theme runs through this chapter it should not be seen to dominate it: the links are best seen as suggestive.2
