Hall & Oates

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• Genre: Blue-Eyed Soul
• Hometown: Philadelphia
• Hall & Oates Website

About

There was a time in the early 1980s when the breezy pop of Hall and Oates was inescapable. Next to The Righteous Brothers, the duo is probably the most famous Blue-Eyed Soul group in the world. They hold the record for most Top-40 hits as a duo with twenty-nine -- as many as the number of years the group has been around. The band started in the late 1960s in Philadelphia with a sound that drew from folk and rock, but especially from Soul, particularly from the sounds of Gamble and Huff's Philly International Records. Based around Daryl Hall's sweet expressive tenor and John Oates' backup vocals and guitar work, their early hits "She's Gone" and "Sarah Smile" didn't give any real indication of the chart dominance the band would have begin in 1980 when their album Voices started a string of hits that didn't diminish for another five years.

- Tom Heyman