The writing and production partnership of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff started in the mid 1960s, and the musical empire that they built under the name Philadelphia International Records managed to survive through the mid 80s. But there are few labels that significantly defined the specific musical and social developments of the 70s quite like PIR.
Arising from a cultural tradition that forged its own regional R&B sound through a hybrid of soul, gospel, jazz, and orchestral arrangements, the Philadelphia Sound was ornate long before it broke internationally. And Gamble and Huff boasted a long string of notable singles in the late 60s with which to hone their sound– particularly Jerry Butler’s 1968 hit “Only the Strong Survive.”” What started as the signature sound of two producer/songwriters became the signature sound of a label, then a city, then a genre, and finally, of a distinct era in R&B.
To understand the impact of Philadelphia International, it helps to think about crossover– both between demographics and between genres. Philadelphia’s tradition of raising versatile session musicians who were just as handy sitting in on a jazz combo as they were backing up a teen-pop hit meant that players had a lot of not-so-disparate elements to draw from. And when PIR assembled their house band, MFSB, they had something in the neighborhood of three dozen musicians who were professional enough to play whatever was asked of them but varied enough to integrate a host of different influences.
Meanwhile, Gamble and Huff’s advanced recording techniques were geared towards a living-room/dance-club setting rather than the car-speaker/jukebox high-end of other R&B labels, anticipating the fidelity of FM radio and the popularization of an increasingly middle-class hi-fi listenership. By plugging instruments directly into soundboards rather than running them through amps, they could get cleanly isolated sounds that had more resonance and less interference. And by taking advantage of the up-to-date 24-track recorder technology of their preferred home base, Sigma Sound Studios, Gamble and Huff could use that clean, orchestral, crossover-friendly sound to scrub all the rough edges off of R&B and present its most refined side yet.
And yet a lot of the label’s classic voices– from Eddie Levert to Teddy Pendergrass to the Three Degrees– aren’t so genteel. The big kick to the greatest Philadelphia International hits was the way Gamble and Huff deliberately left that most crucial element– the voice– as raw and impassioned and from-the-pulpit as the situation demanded. And all those strings and vibraphones and pianos were there to serve the rhythm, not vice versa; if any element in a composition could credibly bolster the beat, it was put to that very use.
It was in this way that PIR, implicitly and explicitly, used the tension between traditional gospel-rooted soul and forward-looking pop to redefine the idea of R&B music for a post-civil rights era. It was the ideal soundtrack for a time when the hope of finally becoming self-sufficient and free of institutionalized discrimination made the potential strength of a black middle class look within reach for more and more people.
By the middle of the 70s, that particular strain of soul had spread out to a wider America looking for some form of cathartic euphoria to wash away the memories of Vietnam and Watergate. And even when the recession days dragged at peoples’ heels, the Philadelphia Sound’s emergence as the sound of the times drove the 4/4 pulse of a wounded nation back into motion in nightclubs and discos across the country.