Philadelphia Soul

You're asking about a studio, not a style. One room on North 12th Street, one house band, two writer-producers and three arrangers made a few hundred records that all share the same furniture: sweet male group harmony out front, a rhythm section pushed hard, and a full orchestra doing the work a guitar does elsewhere.

It's soul music made like film score, and it's the direct ancestor of disco — the beat arrived here before the word did.

Philadelphia, 1967–1979. Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff started with Gamble Records and the Intruders, then Neptune through Chess, then founded Philadelphia International in 1971 on a distribution deal with CBS — a Black-owned label with major-label reach.

Joe Tarsia had opened Sigma Sound at 212 North 12th Street in 1968; almost everything was cut there. Thom Bell worked the parallel track, arranging the Delfonics for Stan Watson's Philly Groove, then the Stylistics and the Spinners.

By 1974 MFSB's "TSOP" was a number one pop single and the theme to Soul Train. A 1975 federal payola investigation hit the label hard.

Outsiders came to buy the room: David Bowie cut Young Americans at Sigma Sound. New York DJs took the long album cuts and built a different music out of them.

Who: Gamble and Huff writing; arrangers Thom Bell, Bobby Martin and Norman Harris; MFSB — Mother Father Sister Brother — as house band, with Earl Young on drums, Ronnie Baker on bass, Vince Montana on vibes, Dexter Wansel later on keys.

What: vocal groups, not solo stars. Ballads that run seven minutes.

Lyrics that go political without raising their voice. Young's open hi-hat on "The Love I Lost" is widely credited as the pattern disco ran with.

How it works: a record gets in if it came out of Sigma with that rhythm section on it — which means session instrumentals and B-sides count as much as the hits.