Soul Man

"Soul Man" was released on Stax Records, a legendary soul label where Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Isaac Hayes recorded. It was written and produced by Hayes and David Porter, and the Stax house band of Booker T. & the MG's played the instruments, except for Booker himself who was away at college, which is why Hayes was brought in to Stax.

Isaac Hayes talked about this song in an interview with National Public Radio: "I got the idea from watching on TV the riots in Detroit. It was said that if you put 'soul' on the door of your business establishment, they wouldn't burn it. Then the word 'Soul,' it was a galvanizing kind of thing for African Americans, and it had an effect of unity, it was said with a lot of pride. So I thought, 'Why not write a tune called 'Soul Man.' And all you had to do was write about your personal experiences, because all African Americans in this country at the time had similar experiences. But we realized that in addition to being an African American experience, it was a human experience, and therefore it crossed over and became very commercial."

When this song was written, there was no clear definition of a "Soul Man." After Isaac Hayes came up with the title, David Porter wrote the rest of the lyric based on what he thought a Soul Man would be. To Porter, he was: Rural: "Comin' to ya on a dusty road." Hardscrabble: "Got what I got the hard way." A great lover: "I learned how to love before I could eat." Monogamous: "Give you hope and be your only boyfriend." Describing this guy, Porter said: "He didn't have the fancy big-city slant, but had the emotional thing happening inside of him that made people really love him." Interestingly, Porter's co-writer Isaac Hayes would exemplify a new, funky soul when he wrote the theme to the movie Shaft. This Soul Man is a bad mother...