For decades, Southern Soul has survived underground. SC artists are leading its mainstream revival
By Vincent Harris Special to Free Times
Have you heard the recent viral TikTok hit “Tonight” — “Tonight/I’m loving you all night” — by Matt B?
How about “Keep On Steppin’” — “Keep on steppin’/Don’t you stop now” — by Mike Clark, Jr.? If not those two, perhaps you’ve heard the most viral of them all, 803South’s “Boots On The Ground:” “Boots on the ground/We outside tonight.”
These songs aren’t the forefront of a new genre — you’re listening to Southern Soul.
Sure there are some modern-day bells and whistles. The bass is now subsonic for maximum vibration, and the beats are occasionally programmed rather than played. But the basic chassis of all those viral hits is a familiar genre, Southern Soul. After years spent underground, it’s back with a vengeance. And Columbia is leading the charge.
In fact, all of those artists we listed above are from around the Midlands.
What is Southern Soul?
There is soul music, and then there is Southern soul music. And the difference isn’t just geographical.
Southern Soul is what happens when gospel can’t stay in church, when the blues feels joyful, when country gets funky and when everyday life — everyday messy, funny, painful, intimate life — demands to be sung about in plain language.
“It’s blues and a little bit of country and a little bit of R&B,” Matt B, a Columbia native, told Free Times. “It’s all three of those genres in one. And you’re expressing your lifestyle, country living. It’s about where you’re from.”
In fact, Matt B first heard Southern Soul at a spot that’s about as Southern as sweet tea.
“I heard it at the cookouts,” he said with a laugh. “I also heard it called ‘Cookout Music’ and ‘Two Steppin’ Music.’ Being around the older folks, they didn’t really want to hear that rap and stuff, they wanted to put on that old music. Which was hard to understand as a kid, but now we’re loving it. It’s fun.”
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Southern Soul was born in studios that felt like back rooms and in trial-by-fire juke joints found in Deep South cities like Memphis, Tenn., Muscle Shoals, Ala., and Jackson, Miss.
As with many musical genres, you can trace Southern Soul back to the great Ray Charles. When Charles fused sacred intensity with secular themes in the 1950s, he didn’t just blur a line — he helped create a whole new emotional vocabulary upon which Southern artists would spend decades expanding. By the ‘60s, labels like Stax Records and Hi Records built on that vocabulary, emphasizing feel rather than polish. You hear tight rhythm sections, punchy horns and singers pushed right to the edge of their voices.
You hear it in Otis Redding, whose delivery could turn a simple phrase into a full-body plea, or in Al Green, who made restraint sound just as intense as release.
803Fresh — COVER CHOICE #1
803Fresh is a South Carolina musician whose Southern Soul song “Boots on the Ground” is a megahit.
Trey Jennings/Provided
Down in Alabama, the famed Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section created a looser, swampier groove that let singers stretch out, testify and sometimes just talk their way through a song. You can hear those funky, real, and real funky foundations on 803Fresh’s Grammy-award-nominated “Boots On The Ground,” easily the biggest hit in the recent Southern Soul revival.
The song has been streamed more than 14 million times since its late 2024 release, and the video has been viewed 26 million times. The beat is tight, but there’s a looseness in 803Fresh’s gritty delivery. The song is danceable as hell, but only a bit faster than midtempo, as good for hanging with friends as it is for cutting a rug. The song never rushes. It stays sunny and delivers the chorus with an easy, but not complacent, confidence.
“It really started with ‘Boots On The Ground,’” Matt B said. “That song took off two years ago and pointed people towards everybody else’s Southern Soul songs, like King George. So those artists have helped that genre come up to today.”
And as odd as it might seem for a genre with its roots in the 1950s to become a viral TikTok sensation, the music is actually perfect for video-driven social media, like Hopkins’ native King George’s “Keep On Rollin.’”
Some tracks were created to inspire dance moves, which people are only too happy to provide. The lyrics almost invariably tell interesting short stories that invite further listening.
And perhaps most importantly, neo-Southern Soul artists typically concentrate on putting out a lot of singles, just like Redding and Charles did back in the day, providing a lot of content for the machine. TikTok didn’t change Southern Soul per se; it finally gave its communal, interactive nature the kind of stage it was built for.
“We done picked up on the genre and taken it to another level,” Matt B said. “People are creating dances to these songs, and now they’re creating dances to the old songs as well.”
The Underground Years
So where did Southern Soul go between its late ‘60s-early ‘70s heyday and this new modern version?
It never went away, but for a while it was hard to find.
When Stax Records shuttered its doors and the industry shifted toward disco, then hip-hop and contemporary R&B — the gritty, gospel-soaked sound that defined artists like Redding — lost its footing in the mainstream.
What had once been a dominant Southern export became something more regional and fragmented — less visible, but no less alive.
It retreated into the spaces that had always sustained it: small clubs, community centers, late-night radio and a lot of touring.
Artists like Bobby Rush kept working, kept recording, kept showing up for audiences who never stopped wanting that blend of testimony and groove.
For a while, the music was passed hand to hand, sold out of trunks, living person-to-person rather than on charts. By the time a new generation of voices began to emerge, the foundation didn’t need rebuilding. It was waiting to be heard again.
Soul Revival
You can trace the Southern Soul revival to the mid-2010s when independent Southern artists started getting real traction again outside traditional radio.
Platforms like Facebook and YouTube began functioning like regional radio stations, letting songs circulate through dances, cookouts and club footage instead of label promotion pipelines.
By the time TikTok fully surged in the 2020s, the infrastructure was already in place — the audience, the performance culture and the demand for music that felt direct, adult and rooted in everyday Southern life.
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Steve Ray Ladson performs at Jam Room music festival on Nov. 15.
James Kiefer/Staff
A lot of Columbia artists jumped into the gap.
That’s because the city is immersed in multiple musical cultures, from real-deal country to deep blues to Carolina-style dance music. Artists tied to South Carolina, including Matt B and “America’s Got Talent” finalist Steve Ray Ladson, aren’t outliers in that environment — they’re operating in a place where this kind of music still feels native.
“You can be sitting around not doing anything,” Matt B said, “and as soon as you hear those instruments playing on that beat, you have no choice but to nod your head or get up and dance. It’s music that will make your body move.”
Between modern production, viral TikTok dance routines and quickly-emerging artists, Matt B doesn’t see Southern Soul fading into the background quietly this time around.
“It’s definitely a great genre,” he said, “and I can see it going places in the future and being on bigger platforms.”
