The commercial breaks have served up a real feast for Soul Food fans over the last few weeks. On the menu has been not one but two ads each for a couple of black music’s most revered figures, plus a British crossover club hit featuring a sample from a contemporary American artist who sounds like he might just end up in the R&B Hall of Fame himself one day!.

As always it’s ladies first on this page. So we shall start with the late and legendary Etta James who has arguably enjoyed more success – and certainly more critical acclaim - in her later years than she ever did when she was younger.

As a particularly precocious 14 year old, fronting a doo-wop girl group called The Creolettes, Jamesetta Hawkins ’ talents were recognized by band leader and entrepreneur Johnny Otis in 1954. He signed the band to LA’s Modern Records, changed their name to Peaches and hers to Etta James before recording Dance With Me, Henry, an answer record to Hank Ballard’s R&B smash Work With Me, Annie.

But it’s young Etta’s solo follow-up Good Rockin’ Daddy which we’re really looking at here. This is the torrid toe-tapper which underpins that wryly amusing HSBC banking group ad in which a little girl persuades her father to build her an elaborate treehouse. The song was co-written by Modern Records boss Saul Bihari and jobbing writer and backing singer Richard ‘Louie Louie’ Berry and reached Number 6 on Billboard’s R&B charts in 1955.

Unfortunately it took over five years, a move to Chicago and a change of label and producer before Etta James was to hustle the hit parade again. That was with a 1961 album At Last! on Chess’ Argo imprint which proved that, under the auspices of former Moonglow Harvey Fuqua, she was arguably even more at home on big ballads than she was on uptempo floorfillers.

At Last! has subsequently proved extremely popular with the advertising industry too. Alongside the torchy title track (which readers will recall was used in a Sainsbury’s ad in 2011) and the sultry I Just Want To Make Love to You (similarly commandeered by Coca Cola earlier this year) this undoubtedly classic LP also included Trust In Me, Etta’s take on a 1937 ballad originally recorded by jazz swingstress Mildred Bailey, which ITV has harnessed to the trailer for its latest period medical drama Breathless. http://tinyurl.com/pbjmn7p

Which is as good a word as any to described performances by Etta’s direct contemporary, James Brown. Born in South Carolina in 1933, the erstwhile Godfather of Soul moved to Georgia and was promoted from drummer to lead singer with The Famous Flames in 1953 before hitting his first bull’s eye with the epic, gospel inflected, Please Please Please, a million seller for Syd Nathan’s Ohio-based Federal label in 1956.

We should thank Suzuki’s new SX4 spot for reminding us that three years later Brown was back in the R’n’B Top 20 once again with I Want You So Bad. This track is usually overlooked by all but Brown’s staunchest fans since it is essentially a standard issue, 6/8 time piano ballad. But it’s saved from mediocrity by a cleverly de-tuned horn figure with a New Orleans’ flavour and, of course, the passionate yearning in man’s voice.

Although he was clearly stretching the R’n’B envelope from the start, Brown had yet punch his way out of it with the unique and supremely influential funk-fuelled style with which he was to become synonymous in the 1970s. To get there he first had to work through a string of mini-masterpieces such as Night Train, Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag, I Got You (I Feel Good) and the epochal It’s A Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World before making the giant leap forward with Cold Sweat and Say It Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud.

In among those late Sixties protofunk crossover hits was I Got The Feelin’. Recorded in LA and featuring the acclaimed rhythm section of bass player Bernard Odum and drummer Clyde Stubblefield, it peaked at Number 6 on the pop charts in 1968 and cast its shadow as far as Gary, Indiana where the Jackson 5, fronted by a 10 year old kid Michael, filmed themselves performing the song as an audition for Tamla Motown boss Berry Gordy. Courtesy of fashion retailer TK Maxx we can hear it again in their stylish and streetwise A Word To The Wise clip which has been on heavy rotation.

Finally, clubgoers in the house have probably been entranced by What I Might Do, the part drum & bass, part pop track by Manchester DJ Ben Pearce which has been tearing up dancefloors for the best part of a year before shooting into the Top 20 in September thanks to another clothing ad, this time for Tesco’s F&F designer range.

Pearce’s vocal and the stripped back production may suggest that accapella ace Bobby McFerrin served as an inspiration. But the real roots of this record lie in a sample from an unusually downhome R&B offering Cornbread, Fish And Collard Beans by Anthony Hamilton, as lifted from the man’s 2004 Sony album Comin’ From Where I’m From.

Singer-songwriter Hamilton has been around awhile, first surfacing in the mid-1990s signed to leading hip hop label Uptown Records, then as a member of contemporary soul singer D’Angelo’s entourage before the spotlight fell on him in 2002 as the featured vocalist on Nappy Roots’ Grammy-nominated single Po’ Folks. More recently Hamilton enjoyed a US Top 20 hit with Back To Love in 2011 and last year was heard duetting with Elayna Boynton on the soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

So if real old school, swampy soul is to your taste, and any mention of Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield or The Staples Singers is enough to get the old mouth watering, then you really should order in Anthony Hamilton’s Comin’ From Where I’m From without delay. You won’t be disappointed.