Michael Sembello, who left home at age 17 to tour with Stevie Wonder, wrote and performed on numerous blue-eyed soul hits for Wonder, Brian McKnight, David Sanborn, Bill Champlin, and Bobby Caldwell. Delaney and Bonnie (Bramlett) produced the blue-eyed soul album Home on Stax in 1969. In 1967, Jerry Lee Lewis, whose latter days at Sun Records (1961–63) had been characterized by R&B covers, recorded an album for Smash entitled Soul My Way. Some British rock groups of the 1960s-such as the Spencer Davis Group, the Animals, the Rolling Stones (" My Girl"), and the Who (" Heat Wave") -covered Motown and rhythm and blues tracks. In 1969, Kiki Dee became the first British artist to sign and record with Motown. Blonde, blue-eyed soul singer Chris Clark became the first white singer to have an R&B hit with "Love's Gone Bad" with Motown Records in 1966. Other notable UK exponents of blue-eyed soul included The Spencer Davis Group (featuring Steve Winwood), Van Morrison, and archetypal mod band The Small Faces, whose sound was heavily influenced by the Stax label's house band Booker T. By the mid-1960s, British singers Dusty Springfield, Eric Burdon, and Tom Jones had become leading vocal stars of the emerging style. Groups such as The Rascals had soul-tinged pop songs, but it was the soulful vocals of Felix Cavaliere that gave them the blue-eyed soul sound. Lonnie Mack's 1963 gospel-infused vocals earned him widespread critical acclaim as a blue-eyed soul singer. Steve Winwood performing with Traffic, 1969 For instance, in the early 1960s, one of the rare female blue-eyed soul singers was Timi Yuro, whose vocal delivery and repertoire were influenced by African American singers such as Dinah Washington. White musicians playing R&B music, however, began before the term blue-eyed soul was coined. The term blue-eyed soul was then applied to such artists as Sonny & Cher, Tom Jones, Barry McGuire, and Roy Head. The popularity of The Righteous Brothers who had a hit with " You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" is thought to have started the trend of R&B radio stations to play songs by white artists in the mid-1960s, a more integrative approach that was then popular with their audience. According to Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers, R&B radio stations who played their songs were surprised to find them to be white when they turned up for interviews, and one DJ in Philadelphia (unnamed by Medley but probably Georgie Woods) started saying "Here's my blue-eyed soul brothers", and it became a code to signal to the audience that they were white singers. The Righteous Brothers in turn named their 1964 LP Some Blue-Eyed Soul. Georgie Woods, a Philadelphia radio DJ, is thought to have coined the term "blue-eyed soul" in 1964, initially to describe The Righteous Brothers, then white artists in general who received airplay on rhythm and blues radio stations. The Righteous Brothers, one of the early artists most closely associated with blue-eyed soul
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