The Soulful Strings were an amazing outfit of players from the Chicago Symphony wedded to the soulful/jazzy rhythm section of the house band at legendary Chess Records' Ter Mar Studio. Richard Evans and later Charles Stepney were the arrangers of most of the ensemble's material which included a lot of hip hits of the day covers and some originals. Interestingly, this assemblage did do concerts - one of their Lps was actually a live album. I don't know the names of most of the string players, unfortunately, but the great Dorothy Ashby was their harpist for sure, and also recorded a few solo albums for Chess as well (including the well-known Afro Harping, plus Dorothy's Harp and The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby). As I understand it, due to contractual issues, their material has yet to be reissued on CD properly...

However, a similar group made up of players from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra - the folks who literally moonlighted at Motown's Hitsville Studio on all the golden era soul-pop classics - recorded an album under Concertmaster Gordon Staples billed as The String Thing that is being issued on CD  August 18th by the company Reel Music. The album is called Strung Out and was produced, arranged and primarily composed by the great Paul Riser. I had the honor of scribing the liner notes for this project and highly recommend you check it out. The link below will assist you.

..http://www.myreelmusic.com/catalog.html..

Respect,

A. Scott Galloway
 

Mr. Galloway!!  THANK YOU!!!  We are, of course, very familiar with the DSO and Paul Riser's work, too.  Thank you for the info--we'll check out the link, too.

 

Also, Dorothy and John Ashby were good friends with our bandleader, Michelle May's parents.  Dorothy played at Michelle's parent's wedding in 1960 and John was her father, Leon May's best man.  Dorothy was a wonderful musician and human being.