THE SINGER Mayer Hawthorne was born almost 13 years after the Supremes’ Motown classic “You Can’t Hurry Love” first lit up radio waves and dance floors. He was a toddler when the song’s bass line, maybe the most famous in the history of pop-and-soul music, was amplified and repackaged as the basis of Daryl Hall and John Oates’s No. 1 hit “Maneater”; it was also suited up and sent back into action by the likes of the Clash, Katrina and the Waves and even other Motown artists. Something about those repeated eight notes — originally played by the Motown house bassist James Jamerson in 1966 as if small shocks were being delivered to his index finger — continued to evoke, across a span of decades, the tachycardic rush of new love or lust.

By the time Hawthorne caught up to those eight notes in “Your Easy Lovin’ Ain’t Pleasin’ Nothin’,” a song from his album, “A Strange Arrangement,” though, they seemed to be just that: notes. They weren’t jacked up, minced, diced, reassembled, reduced, infused, technofied, processed, irony-dredged or in any other way commented upon. It was as if the last 20 or 30 or 40 years of pop music hadn’t happened. The by-now overfamiliar rhythm was simply attached to a catchy but somewhat routine song, on an album that seemed full of soul boilerplate, including even a song title (“I Wish It Would Rain”) used first by the Temptations. There have been plenty of singular soul sensations in recent years — John Legend, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Amy Winehouse, Ryan Shaw, Raphael Saadiq, Cee Lo Green; but they all added something to their references, even if it was the equivalent of a musical condiment. Hawthorne seemed to be more of a soul literalist. And to judge from the cover of his album, on which the buttoned-up Hawthorne peers out from behind severely dorky horn-rimmed glasses, it seemed possible that he might also be a soul parodist.

But then the album started being praised on soul blogs and played on soul radio, alongside tracks by soul’s old masters. The rapper Snoop Dogg liked the album so much that he invited Hawthorne to appear in one of his videos, and Kanye West praised it in a Twitter post. And suddenly Hawthorne found himself at the head of a cadre of young soul artists, most around 30 years old, many of them nerdy white guys, who were sidestepping or in some cases abandoning the most dominant music of the last 20 years, hip-hop, in favor of basic, traditional soul — pinpoint harmony, sophisticated songcraft, serious vocal or playing chops — and creating the equivalent of a farm-to-turntable groove. What was even more notable was that these artists — Hawthorne, Eli (Paperboy) Reed, Kings Go Forth, Aloe Blacc, Jamie Lidell, Fitz and the Tantrums, Soul Track Mind, among others — were claiming this music as their own and their own generation’s. And raising the questions, Is this a real movement, or just another extended retro moment? And, Where was all this new old soul, and the young old souls who make it, coming from?