City names are regularly deployed as easy, catchall identifiers for soul music subgenres. The labels “Philly Soul,” “Motor City Soul,” and “Memphis Soul,” if fiercely disputed by locals, musicians, fans, and scholars alike, and redefined and remapped in books, record shops, Spotify playlists, and documentaries, are nevertheless identifiable sounds. In Move on Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power, music critic and writer Aaron Cohen argues that Chicago, a city better known for its rhythm and blues, gospel, jazz, and house music, deserves better signage on the great map of American soul music. Cohen's book builds on Robert Pruter's pioneering study of the Windy City's soul credentials (Chicago Soul, 1992), and compliments more recent scholarship that extends the geography of soul music beyond the Philadelphia–Detroit–Memphis triangle, including Stuart Cosgrove's Harlem ’69: The Future of Soul (2018), Charles Hughes's Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (2015), and Emily J. Lordi's The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s (2020). Move on Up also brings a localized, Chicagoan perspective to bear on more familiar discussions about how soul music historically has intersected with the African American struggle for civil rights and self-empowerment in the 1960s and 1970s.

Chapter 1 follows how Jerry Butler and the Impressions, amongst other acts, transitioned from doo-wop to soul to the ever-evolving backdrop of “black Chicago” as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, with a particular focus on media, education, organized religion, and housing. Chapter 2 explores black music entrepreneurship in Chicago, situating the city's “Record Row” economically, politically and spatially alongside other black businesses in the area, such as Johnson Publications (whose offices, Cohen points out, were practically next door to the city's thriving black music industry). In chapter 3, Cohen discusses the roles of black businessmen and educators in crafting a “Chicago sound,” as well as embodying and encouraging “black uplift.” Chapter 4 examines arguably the city's most unique contribution to soul music: the “psychedelic soul” produced by black musicians who came into contact with the folk revival and hippiedom in Chicago's Old Town and through Chess Records’ experimental Cadet imprint. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 move forward in time to assess how Chicago musicians such as Syl Johnson, and Afrocentric organizations in the city, such as the Affro-Arts Theater, responded musically and politically to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the transition from civil rights to black power, and the evolution of soul into funk and disco in the 1970s.

Cohen's book is well balanced between famous figures such as the Chi-Lites and Curtis Mayfield, and lesser-known but influential producers, musicians, and community leaders in Chicago music history. It does not skimp on Chicago's rich musical, religious, and political diversity, including the demographic, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts that define the city's famous South, West and North Sides. The repeated reference to Chicago architecture, including discussion of how budding recording artists learnt to sing within and with the echoey acoustics of their churches, school corridors and community centers (14), is indicative of the ambitious breadth of Cohen's study. On economics, Cohen provides fascinating analysis, for example, of the expansion of small business loans in the late 1960s. His microscopic musicological analysis, meanwhile, takes in everything from Curtis Mayfield's idiosyncratic guitar tunings (29) to the momentary but significant pause after Gene Chandler sings the word “dukedom” in “Duke of Earl” (23). Through perceptive discussions of Terrier Callier's folk stylings, Rotary Connection's progressive psychedelia, and Baby Huey's garage rock leanings, Cohen does some equally important work locating where Chicago soul interacted with other trends in US popular music.

At points, Move on Up lacks the adequate comparative work necessary to illustrate to the reader what makes “Chicago soul” economically, musically, and politically unique. As such, Cohen's findings are perhaps best interpreted alongside a reading of other studies of “soul cities.” Cohen's background as a journalist means that he writes in an readable style that will appeal to teachers, students, and fans of American soul music. Most of the original research in the book comes from Cohen's hundred-odd interviews with Chicago's music makers and shakers. While these oral histories provide some very valuable personal takes on soul music history (testimony from an original Soul Train dancer is particularly fascinating), Cohen rarely questions his informants’ accounts of events, or reflects critically upon the complex dynamics between himself as a white interviewer and his mostly older, retired black interviewees. These issues aside, Move on Up succeeds in bringing Chicago soul music the recognition and analysis it deserves. In the words of the Chi-Lites, “Baby, It's Time.”