Calling Hall and Oates's pop music "blue-eyed soul" may be making a claim of African-American roots that aren't any deeper in their case than in any other American pop music.
Calling Hall and Oates’s pop music “blue-eyed soul” is also kind of silly.
THIS is blue-eyed soul: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bld_-7gzJ-o
Look at all the great British acts who loved black blues and incorporated it into their sound—the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton. These guys didn’t just take the sound. They used their status to bring their influences into the light for a mass audience. Eric Clapton, like he is known to do, gave a stage to a lot of these guys like Freddie King, Albert King, Buddy Guy, etc. It’s obscene how this current generation now uses this kind of thing to drive a wedge where those guys were building bridges.
I tried watching a BBC documentary about British soul music (and many of the music docs are good, especially the one on Northern Soul) but the one on British Soul played up the “struggles” and tried to equate being of Caribbean origin or even an African immigrant as somehow linked to the black experience in America in the 1960s. Tom Jones even played up the Irish know what being black is like angle.
The Northen Soul doc is much more satisfying about Northern England DJs (true record collectors) digging for “new” sounds to bring to the public who literally made those songs their own without record label push, without radio support, without music press coverage. They still got those songs on top sales charts 5+ years after they’d been released and forgotten by the labels.
Here are the web links
Soul Britannia. Episode 1: I Feel Good
(nagging on Thatcherism should be a tipoff it’ll suck)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL0qe8gtygQ
Northern Soul Living for the Weekend BBC Documentary 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jHx4AoCk4k
Didn’t car for this one either
Blues Britannia - Can Blue Men Sing The Whites (2009)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILdoW-0S7wo