‘Soul Food’ became popular in the 1950s

“Soul food” is a term that became popular in the 1950s before the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Ray Charles were eager to return jazz to its roots in the black churches of the rural South. They started calling their retrospective style “funky” and “soul.” These musical buzzwords caught on and began being applied to all aspects of African American culture. Before the advent of the term “soul food,” traditional African American foods were called “southern cooking” or “down home cooking.”