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.