Collecting guides

The Best Soul Albums… 10 Records Worth Owning

Published 13 October 2026

Ten of the best soul albums, from Otis Blue to Songs in the Key of Life, chosen so the same players recur, and what to check on each copy before you buy.

You turn over a copy of Otis Blue in a shop and read the small print on the back. Drums: Al Jackson Jr. Eight years later, on the back of Al Green’s Call Me, made across town for a different label, there he is again. Two years before that, on Bill Withers’s first album, recorded in Hollywood: the same name.

Classic soul is sold on the voice, and rightly. But the records were made by a small number of players who moved between labels, studios and cities, and once you start hearing them, the singer stops being the only way in. The credits on the back of the sleeve are the map to your next record.

Any list of the best soul albums is an argument, not a verdict. These ten run from 1965 to 1976, in the order they came out, and they leave out whole traditions: Philadelphia, Chicago’s vocal groups, most of what came after. They were chosen because they talk to each other: the same bassist, the same horn players, the same producer, under very different voices. For each there is a way in if soul is new to you, the facts that matter, and one thing to check on the copy in front of you. A record from 2000 closes the list.

1. Otis Redding — Otis Blue (1965)

If you start anywhere, start here. Otis Redding made most of it in two days, mixing his own songs with other people’s hits, and critics have long regarded it as his best work; one called it the definitive album of the soul era. Three of its eleven songs are his; three are by Sam Cooke, who had died a few months before.

It came out on Volt, a Stax label, on 15 September 1965. Most of it was recorded at Stax in Memphis on 9 and 10 July, in two sessions within about 24 hours, with a break between them so the house band could go and play local gigs.

That house band was Booker T. & the M.G.’s: Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn and Al Jackson Jr. Isaac Hayes plays keyboards too, and the horns include Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love, who later went out on their own as the Memphis Horns. Keep those names. Most of them come back.

Besides the Cooke songs there is the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”, and “Respect”, Redding’s own song, before Aretha Franklin made it hers.

Check: it was issued in mono and in stereo. Rhino’s 2008 collector’s edition carries both. Know which one you’re buying.

2. Aretha Franklin — Lady Soul (1968)

This is the album that holds “Chain of Fools” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”. It spent sixteen weeks at number one on Billboard’s R&B album chart and reached number two on the pop chart. If you know those songs from the radio, here they are with the band and the backing singers around them.

It came out on Atlantic on 22 January 1968, produced by Jerry Wexler, with Tom Dowd engineering.

Read past Franklin’s name. The backing voices include the Sweet Inspirations, with Cissy Houston, and Aretha’s sister Carolyn Franklin. Tommy Cogbill plays bass, Roger Hawkins drums and Spooner Oldham keyboards. King Curtis is on tenor saxophone, and Eric Clapton, then in Cream, plays guitar on one track.

Check: the US Atlantic catalogue number is SD 8176. A copy with a different number is a different release, and that is where identifying the pressing starts: sleeve, label and catalogue number, compared against each other.

3. Dusty Springfield — Dusty in Memphis (1969)

Dusty Springfield was a British pop star and an outspoken champion of American soul, Wexler’s Atlantic records above all, and for this album she signed with Atlantic in the US. The album holds “Son of a Preacher Man”. It sold poorly at first, reaching only number 99 in the United States, and its reputation grew from there.

Wexler again, with Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin, at American Sound Studio in Memphis in 1968. One name in the band should be familiar by now: Tommy Cogbill, on bass, from the Lady Soul credits. The Sweet Inspirations sing behind her here too.

The Memphis sessions were hard on her, and her final vocals were recorded later, in New York. So the album that says “Memphis” on the cover was finished somewhere else.

Check: it came out on Atlantic in the US and on Philips elsewhere, so two label families carry the “original”. Rhino’s 1999 Deluxe Edition adds fourteen bonus tracks; decide whether you want those or the album as it was.

4. Isaac Hayes — Hot Buttered Soul (1969)

Four songs, two of which take up most of the record. Isaac Hayes, the keyboard player from Otis Blue, took other writers’ songs, by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and by Jimmy Webb, and stretched them over strings and horns until “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” ran close to nineteen minutes. In 1969 that length was the radical part.

The album exists because of a business problem. When Stax split from Atlantic in 1968 it lost its entire back catalogue, and its executive Al Bell decided to build a new one almost at once, with dozens of new albums and singles in a few months. Hayes, whose first solo album had sold poorly, demanded complete creative control for the next one. He got it.

It came out on Enterprise, a Stax label, in 1969. The tracking band is the Bar-Kays, recorded at Ardent in Memphis; the album was finished and mixed in Detroit.

Check: the running times. “Walk On By” runs about twelve minutes and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” more than eighteen and a half. Both were also cut down for a single. Make sure the album programme carries the full versions; some reissues, Stax’s 2009 CD among them, add the single edits at the end as bonus tracks.

5. Bill Withers — Just as I Am (1971)

On the cover of his first album, Bill Withers stands outside a brick building holding a lunchbox: reportedly the factory where he still worked, installing toilets in aeroplanes. The album contains “Ain’t No Sunshine”, which lasts barely two minutes.

It came out on Sussex in May 1971, recorded in Hollywood. The producer and arranger is Booker T. Jones. On drums, alongside Jim Keltner: Al Jackson Jr. On bass, alongside Chris Ethridge: Duck Dunn. That is three of the four M.G.’s from Otis Blue, six years later and in another city, behind a songwriter with an acoustic guitar. Stephen Stills plays guitar too.

Put this record next to Otis Blue and listen to the drums rather than the singer. That is the exercise this whole shelf is for.

Check: the album has twelve songs and ends with “Better Off Dead”. The 2005 DualDisc keeps those twelve on its CD side and puts live performances on the DVD side.

6. Marvin Gaye — What’s Going On (1971)

Marvin Gaye produced this one himself and wrote about war, poverty and the environment instead of love. The songs run into one another, so a side plays almost as one piece. Our guide to the best albums to own on vinyl covers which copy to buy; here, the story is the mix.

It came out on Tamla, a Motown label, on 21 May 1971. David Van De Pitte arranged the album and conducted the orchestra, and James Jamerson plays bass. It was the first Gaye album to credit Motown’s session players, the Funk Brothers. The title track was begun in Detroit in June 1970; the rest was recorded early in 1971, mostly in Detroit.

Then it moved. The Detroit mix is dated 5 April 1971; Gaye cancelled it at the last minute and had the album remixed in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles mix is the album people know. The Detroit mix stayed unreleased until the 2001 Deluxe Edition.

Check: if the edition in front of you is a deluxe one, find out which mix is the main programme and which is the extra. They are different balances of the same songs, and the difference is exactly what original, reissue or remaster sorts out: a remix is a different record, not a cleaner copy.

7. Curtis Mayfield — Super Fly (1972)

A film soundtrack that sold better than the film. Curtis Mayfield thought the film made the drug trade look attractive, and he wrote songs that said otherwise; two of them, “Freddie’s Dead” and the title song, became Top 10 hits.

It came out on Curtom, the label Mayfield had co-founded, in 1972, a month before the film. Sessions began at the end of 1971 at Bell Sound in New York, and Mayfield wrote most of it at home in Chicago. He produced it; Johnny Pate arranged it. It went to number one on the Billboard 200.

It belongs here as the counterweight. The records so far lean on Memphis players, Atlantic producers or Motown’s session band. This one comes from an artist who ran his own label, and from a different school.

Check: Rhino’s 1997 anniversary set adds a disc of demos, alternate and instrumental versions, radio spots and an interview. Its first disc adds the single mixes of “Freddie’s Dead” and “Superfly” after the album. The album itself ends with “Superfly”; anything after that is extra.

8. Al Green — Call Me (1973)

Call Me is widely regarded as Al Green’s best album. It had three Top 10 singles, and it reaches into country music, with songs by Willie Nelson and Hank Williams.

It came out on Hi Records in 1973, recorded at Royal Studios in Memphis with Willie Mitchell producing and engineering. The band is the Hodges brothers, Charles on organ and piano, Leroy on bass and Teenie on guitar, with Howard Grimes and Al Jackson Jr. sharing the drums. The horns include Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love, eight years on from Otis Blue.

It is a good place to practise listening underneath a voice: the organ, the bass line, where the drummer leaves space.

Check: the label name alone won’t date a copy. The catalogue number and the runout, the smooth band between the last track and the label, are what separate an early copy from a later one; the guide to matrix numbers shows how to read them.

9. Ann Peebles — I Can’t Stand the Rain (1974)

Ann Peebles’s title song is better known than her album: it was her biggest hit, and other singers have taken it up since. John Lennon called it the best song ever.

Same studio, same producer, largely the same band: Royal, Willie Mitchell, the Hodges brothers, Howard Grimes, the Memphis Horns. It came out on Hi in 1974, recorded in 1973, and was written largely by Peebles and Don Bryant, her partner and later her husband. The title song, by Bryant, Peebles and a Memphis DJ, Bernie Miller, peaked at number 38 on the US pop chart.

The album itself got no higher than 155 on the Billboard 200. Play it after Call Me and listen to how the same musicians accompany a different singer.

Check: the title song appears on countless compilations. Make sure you’re holding the album, with its ten tracks, if the album is what you came for.

10. Stevie Wonder — Songs in the Key of Life (1976)

Twenty-one songs across two records and a bonus EP, among them “Sir Duke” and “Isn’t She Lovely”. Stevie Wonder wrote most of it and produced all of it. The album went straight in at number one, and it won the Grammy for Album of the Year.

It came out on Tamla on 28 September 1976, recorded over about two and a half years, mostly at Crystal Sound in Hollywood, with sessions at the Record Plant in Los Angeles and Sausalito and at the Hit Factory in New York. More than 120 musicians are credited on it, Herbie Hancock and George Benson among them.

That is the reason it closes the list. After nine records where the band is half the story, this is one musician’s vision carried by a crowd.

Check: it shipped as two LPs plus a seven-inch EP of four more songs, A Something’s Extra. On CD, the 1984 Tamla edition (TCD06115TD-2) split those four songs across the two discs; the 2000 reissue puts them together at the end of disc two, as in 1976. And on 28 September 2026, fifty years to the day, Wonder released four unheard songs from the same sessions as a new EP under the album’s name. It is a separate release, not A Something’s Extra: on a used LP, ask for the original seven-inch by name.

Bonus: D’Angelo — Voodoo (2000)

Everything above is about fifty years old, so here is a record made by people who had studied it. D’Angelo, who died in 2025, made Voodoo in New York in 1998 and 1999, and it is one of the records people mean by neo soul: loose, slow grooves played by a band, made in the hip-hop era.

It came out on Virgin on 25 January 2000, recorded at Electric Lady Studios, where Stevie Wonder had made Talking Book. D’Angelo, the drummer Questlove and the engineer Russell Elevado spent hours studying the records and concerts of Curtis Mayfield, James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, and then played. The bass is mostly D’Angelo’s own or Pino Palladino’s. It went to number one, and the Grammys named it Best R&B Album.

Check: thirteen tracks and 78:54, which nearly fills a CD. On vinyl it has to be spread over more sides, so the breaks fall in places the CD doesn’t have.

Buying the copy

You don’t need a first pressing of any of these. The real question for each is which version you’re buying: which tracks, which mix, which running order, on a copy clean enough to stay out of the way.

Several of these albums exist in more than one mix, so check which one you are buying. Then count what should be there: tracks, running times, and any extra disc the album shipped with. An expanded edition that has swapped the mix, a compilation dressed as an album, a CD missing the songs the original carried: all of them show up in the track list and the credits before they show up on your turntable or player. If you’re buying on CD, checking a used CD before you commit covers the disc, the booklet and the edition.

Where it goes next

The next record is already printed on the ones you have. If the drums on Just as I Am hold you, follow Al Jackson Jr. back through Stax. If Call Me and I Can’t Stand the Rain sound like one room, try more from Royal. If it’s the horns, the Memphis Horns went on to record far beyond Memphis. A producer works as well: Jerry Wexler links two of these ten, Willie Mitchell another two. Follow a drummer, a studio or a producer from the record you replay most. The same method works for the best jazz albums, where the names sit on the back of the sleeve in the same small print.

Note the players you’re following against the copies themselves in Record by Record, so the thread stays attached to the records it came from.