Sam & Dave: “Soul Man”
From the album: Sam & Dave: Soul Men
Released August 1967
#2 Pop single, #1 R&B single

In many ways, “Soul Man” is the ultimate Stax single.

Sam (Moore) & Dave (Prater) became famous as “soul men” but like soul music itself, they grew up singing church and gospel music and the blues. They met each other in the early 1960s when they were both performing through the rough and tumble soul circuit in the southeast US. They joined forces and released some singles on Roulette Records as a duo. As their reputation for incendiary live performances and the popularity of these Roulette singles continually grew, the pair captured the attention of Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records, who signed Sam & Dave to Atlantic in 1965.

Through Atlantic’s distribution deal with the Memphis label, Wexler was able to direct Sam & Dave to Stax, perhaps one of the most prescient decisions of Wexler’s long and distinguished music industry career. In the main Stax songwriting team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter, the main Stax studio ensemble of Booker T. & the MGs, even the Memphis Horns brass section, Sam & Dave immediately and profoundly connected with kindred musical spirits with whom they shared many influences and experiences.

You unmistakably hear this connection in “Soul Man.” Hayes and Porter crafted a nearly perfect vehicle for Sam & Dave’s powerful call and response vocals, and the band’s fluid yet muscular rhythmic support thumped and bumped their vocal to rocking motion and matched their cocksure vocal swagger. Hayes sat in on sanctified yet funkified piano for Booker T., who couldn’t attend the session because he was away attending college at Indiana University. In response to Moore’s now-famous exhortation to “Play it, Steve!” during a chorus, Steve Cropper peels off a guitar lick that is a monument to economy and exemplifies Stax’s potent, trademark blending of blues, soul and rock into its own singularly distinctive sound.

“Soul Man” remained the #1 R&B single for seven weeks in 1967, reached #2 on the Pop single chart, and crested the duo’s wave of eleven consecutive top twenty R&B singles that stretched from ‘66 - ‘69. The following year, it received the Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group. In 1999, the single “Soul Man” was enshrined in the Grammy Hall of Fame.

The recent Stax/Concord reissue of “The Queen Alone,” the fourth album by the daughter of RufusThomas was an unwitting reminder that, while its’ closest ‘60s musical ‘rival’ Motown Records had a veritable stable of female recording artists (try Mary Wells, Tammi Terrell, Kim Weston and Brenda Holloway, not to mention the plethora of girl groups from The Supremes to The Velvelettes), Stax only had one best-selling soul sister. Carla Thomas ruled the roost when it came to female singers at Stax: while others, notably Mable John and Judy Clay (on loan from Atlantic), both recently blogged here, elicited some degree of airplay and sales, Carla was indeed the queen alone.

The album’s title was a play on words: Carla had teamed with the label’s premier male hitmaker Otis Redding in 1966 to record “King & Queen” and as a result had experienced a new level of mainstream popularity. The now-classic LP, released in the spring of ’67, was a major best-seller in the R&B market while far surpassing any pop attention that her previous albums (“Gee Whiz,” actually released on Atlantic after the title track was issued by that label in 1961; and her pair of 1966 LPs, “Carla” and “Comfort Me”) had gained. “The Queen Alone” hit the streets in July of ’67 just three months after the Otis-Carla LP made its own chart entry.

Other than “Something Good (Is Going To Happen To You),” a sexy groove piece penned and produced by Isaac Hayes and David Porter (achieving momentum at the time with the likes of Sam & Dave) which made a dent on the R&B charts in early ’67 and “I’ll Always Have Faith In You,” a gorgeous ballad co-penned by Eddie Floyd, the LP was no chart-filled blockbuster. It was an interesting set that in many ways demonstrated the creative dilemma that Carla – and Stax – faced with her recording career.

Her self-penned “Gee Whiz” had been a massive hit, jumpstarting her career while she was still in college; a series of subsequent singles had gotten nowhere near the same response, the closest being an ‘answer’ song to Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me,” entitled – surprise, surprise, “I’ll Bring It On Home To You”! That Carla’s sweet-sounding voice was more ‘suited’ to pop-oriented material was clear but Stax was a tough R&B label whose offerings were initially well-received by black, mostly Southern music buyers.

That said, Carla made some truly soulful cuts in the mid-‘60s – check “I’ve Got No Time To Lose” and “Stop! Look What You’re Doing,” two emotive recordings filled with passion and plenty o’soul but largely ignored and sadly overlooked by record buyers in ’64 and ’65 respectively. In search of hit singles, Stax execs thus retreated from giving Carla material that showed her ability to express herself with an intensity expected from singers like Ruby Johnson, playing up instead her soft’n’sexy sound – hence “Let Me Be Good To You,” her 1966 Top 20 R&B hit and its follow-up, the gold single “B-A-B-Y,” ultimately her second biggest pop hit when released in the fall of ’66.

“The Queen Alone” is a study in contrasts, ranging from the Bacharach-penned “Any Day Now” through a cover of a Dusty Springfield British hit, “All I See Is You” with some moments of exquisite soul power delivered via Deanie Parker’s “Give Me Enough (To Keep Me Going)” and Homer Banks’ co-penned “Lie To Keep From Crying.” Sadly, the LP didn’t take Carla to a new level of success, chartwise, and other than a momentary blip with the 1969 overtly-sexual (but by today’s standards almost saccharine) “I Like What You’re Doing To Me,” her recording career never achieved the status befitting her role as the ‘First Lady Of Stax.’

Worth noting, as writer and reissue producer Rob Bowman points out in his essay for the reissue of “The Queen Alone” that the bonus material on this new release is certainly of high enough quality that one wonders why it never came out when first recorded…

David Nathan
A/k/a “The British Ambassador Of Soul”
Owner, www.soulmusic.com

Booker T. & the MGs served as the Stax rhythm section for most of their early 1960s hits. But sometime during the ’60s, someone must have realized that if the MGs were in the studio cutting the next Stax hit record, they could not also be on the road selling tickets to performances in support of other Stax hit records. Two reliable rhythm ensembles would be better for Stax music, and for Stax business, than one.

Enter the Bar-Kays: Carl Cunningham (drums), James Alexander (bass), Ronnie Caldwell (organ), Jimmy King (guitar), Phalon Jones (saxophone) and Ben Cauley (trumpet). Patterned after the Mar-Keys and the MGs, and specializing in the same type of instrumental soul and funk, this new local group tore up the Memphis music scene until Stax / Volt brought them onboard in 1967.  The Bar-Kays were simultaneously groomed to serve as that second ensemble, upon which the label could rely to keep that Stax machine humming while Booker T. & The MGs were otherwise occupied, and to record their own material.

The Bar-Kays’ debut Stax single “Soul Finger” advanced a new sound for instrumental R&B, a melody led by synthesizer doubled up by Cauley’s trumpet. “Soul Finger” made it to #3 in the R&B charts and cracked the Pop top twenty (#17). Just as important, the Bar-Kays so impressed Otis Redding that in the summer of ‘67 he made them his regular backup band.

Most of the Bar-Kays perished when the plane carrying Otis Redding and entourage crashed en route to a Wisconsin performance on December 10, 1967. Trumpeter Cauley somehow survived the crash; bassist Alexander was not on the flight.

Together, Alexander and Cauley began rebuilding the Bar-Kays. By 1969, the reformed group included Michael Toles (guitar), Roy Cunningham and Willie Hall (drums), Ronnie Gordon (keyboards) and Harvey Henderson (saxophone). Whatever chart momentum “Soul Finger” might have gathered two years earlier was mostly gone. The Bar-Kays nurtured their own music while also working on other Stax productions.

This turned out to be a true blessing when the rhythmic and instrumental support of these reconstituted Bar-Kays helped turned several late 1960s - ’70s Stax releases into major musical milestones. Trapped within Alexander’s deep bass undertow, they throbbed and moaned underneath Albert King’s stinging electric blues in the guitarist’s 1972 blues-funk masterwork I’ll Play the Blues for You. And on three of Isaac Hayes’ best solo recordings - Hot Buttered Soul, …To Be Continued and the landmark Shaft: Music from the Motion Picture - the Bar-Kays’ complex swirling instrumental passages often stole the show from the baddest soul music mojo-maker of his day, no small feat.

On Hot Buttered Soul, the Bar-Kays helped to break one more R&B / soul music model: Consisting of four extended songs with not even a nod toward a “three minute radio single,” Hot Buttered Soul sold over one million copies as one of the first genuine R&B albums, and not a collection of singles filled out with other tracks, and significantly changed the industry landscape.

Five Bar-Kays albums were released on Stax. The hit single provided the title track to the album Soul Finger, released in the summer of ‘67. 1969’s Gotta Groove moved the band closer to the psychedelic pop culture of the time, bowing with “Don’t Stop Dancing (to the Music)” toward R&B / rock crossover sensations Sly & The Family Stone, a rock-soul crossover direction which 1971’s Black Rock continued.

Do You See What I See? (1972) redeployed the familiar Stax formula of instrumental and vocal covers of songs with proven longevity, including Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her” and “Your Good Thing (Is About to End),” written six years earlier by Hayes and David Porter for Stax vocalist Mable John. (I am the proud owner of a mono copy with the funky old lightning bolt label on that thick Volt vinyl that feels like it weighs about seven pounds.) Coldblooded closed out the Bar-Kays’ chapter on Stax in 1974, and they signed with Mercury Records in 1976.

Stax
Museum and Stax Music Academy Honor Rufus Thomas on the day that would have been his 90^th Birthday 

Today, on what would have been Stax legend Rufus Thomas’ 90^th birthday, students of Soulsville’s Stax Music Academy and Soulsville Charter
School were treated to a history lesson on Thomas. A special exhibit was created and is in the lobby of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music (in addition to permanent exhibits honoring him), and he will be remembered tonight the museum’s Last Mondays in Studio A concert with The Temprees and The Mad Lads. 

Known affectionately by millions as the “oldest teenager in the world,” Rufus Thomas was born on March 26, 1917 in the rural community of Cayce, Mississippi. His long, illustrious, and colorful career began at the age of 6, when he played a frog in a school theatrical production.  In 1936 he joined the world of Vaudeville and toured the South with a group named the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. After that, while working at a textile factory for 22 years, he became one of the most influential disc jockeys in the South on country’s first all African-American staffed radio station, WDIA and is credited with discovering B.B. King in that role.   

In 1953 he began his recording career with an “answer record” to Big Mama Thornton’s hit, “Hound Dog” called “Bear Cat” and released on Sun Records, the label’s first hit. After being released from Sun, Thomas paid a visit to Jim Stewart’s fledgling Satellite Records (later named Stax), and, along with his daughter Carla, recorded that label’s first hit, “Cause I Love You.” 

An integral part of the success of Stax Records, Thomas had a number of hits in the late 1960s and early 1970s on the label, including that were tied to a then-current dance craze: “Do the Funky Chicken,” “(Do the) Push and Pull,” “The Breakdown” and “Do the Penguin”. He performed at Wattstax in 1972, leading a crowd of 40,000 in the “Funky Chicken.” His smash Stax hit “Walking the Dog” has been covered by The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith, among others. 

He was the father of soul singers Carla and Vaneese Thomas and keyboard player Marvell Thomas.  

Late in his career, for years, Rufus performed at the Poretta Festival in
Italy. In 1996 Rufus and William Bell headlined at the Olympics in
Atlanta. Highlights of his career included calming an unruly crowd at the 1972 Wattstax Festival, performing with James Brown’s band, and the knowledge that, along with James Brown and a handful of others, he was a key to the emergence of funk. He was a charismatic stage presence, telling jokes and dancing, and wearing capes and brightly colored hot pants. Rufus Thomas died in 2001 at St. Francis Hospital in
Memphis.