That two year gap, the two years when William Bell was mostly out of the music game and in the Army picking up cigarette butts for sergeants who didn’t recognize him as the up-and-coming soul singer he was, inform The Soul Of A Bell, Bell’s 1967 debut LP. Because of this gap between debut single and debut LP—and because the musical landscape of soul and R&B had changed so drastically in between, not to mention Stax itself becoming a powerhouse while Bell was away—The Soul Of A Bell is an important, if underrated, album in the Stax story, and the story of ’60s R&B. You can trace the rapid development R&B music went through from 1961 to 1967 over the course of a single 33-minute LP.