Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings / Joan Osborne / Jill Scott / Alice Smith/ Angie Stone

Wilson Pickett liked to tell his audiences about the time a white journalist asked him: “What is ‘soul’?”

“You know what I told him?” Pickett would preach. “I said, ‘So-oh-oh-ul. Soul! Ain’t nothin’…but a feelin’!”

No need to dispute such a generous, arms-open-wide definition. Still, we can pin it down a tad more specifically. In the musical sense of which Pickett was speaking — the Wicked One shared the story to introduce “Sweet Soul Music” — soul is not just a feeling but a very particular feeling, expressed in a particular way.

First of all, this soul feeling involves a clear-eyed sense of just how thrilling and how painful it is to be alive, and of how those conditions are inevitable and inseparable. And the greatest soul singers — Aretha Franklin, say, or Ray Charles or James Brown, or Pickett — convey all of that complexity at once. They sing in a voice that is at once playfully ironic and deathly in earnest; they understand themselves both as an utterly alone individual and as belonging to a beloved community.

This way of singing was born in the black church and is most concretely realized in its call-and-response performance style; in the intense, improvised melismas of its vocalists; and in its house-rocking, body-and-spirit-propelling rhythms. More than rock ‘n’ roll, even more than the blues, the feelings and sounds of the soul tradition have provided the foundation of American popular music for half a century. It is difficult, not to mention depressing, to imagine what future might sound like without it.

At least for the moment, however, we’re enjoying a soul revival that crosses genres. We’ve seen welcome second acts for legends such as Al Green, Mavis Staples and Solomon Burke as well as legends-in-the-making Candi Staton and Bettye LaVette (all of whom, save Green, have produced work that can stand next to the best of their careers). We’ve seen continued if varying levels of interest in British soul imports Joss Stone, James Hunter, Corinne Bailey Rae and Amy Winehouse. Hip-hop artists continue to search old soul records to find the ornamentation and the superstructure for their own recordings. Even some rock acts — Reigning Sound, the Detroit Cobras, JJ Grey — are playing a kind of soul music, as rock ‘n’ soul torch bearers such as the Rolling Stones, the Rascals, the Sonics, the Detroit Wheels and countless others did before them.

And then there are the survivors of soul’s last notable resurgence. The “neo-soul” movement of the mid-90s proved a marketing tag only slightly more enticing to the masses than “alternative country.” Erykah Badu, Maxwell, Musiq and other neo-soul acts seek to update the soul tradition for the hip-hop generation. But, as R&B acts from Mary J. Blige to Justin Timberlake have been steadily achieving that goal just fine, neo-soul too often comes off as a modernization movement focused more upon what and whom it’s against — the mainstream competition and its working-class fans (again, the alt-country comparison is apropos) — than what it is for.

To approach this class bias from the other direction, neo-soul has valued presumably more sophisticated endeavors such as spoken-word poetry, lite jazz, and so-called conscious rap, all to the exclusion of soul’s street-level roots in the black church. As a whole, neo-soul is too much Quiet Storm, Minnie Riperton, and The Secret Life Of Plants, with not enough Soul Train, Gladys Knight, and Talking Book.

Like all genres, though, neo-soul has memorable moments. A disproportionate number of these have come from Angie Stone and Jill Scott. Both singers have strong new albums, each of which rehearses neo-soul’s limitations, then regularly transcends them.