50 Years of Soul Power

Posted February 20, 2013 by J Matthew Cobb in Features

Isaac Hayes
Hot Buttered Soul
(Stax; 1969)

For an album only bearing four tracks, Hot Buttered Soul stands out like a soul man’s opera. His reinterpretation of Bacharach/David’s “Walk on By” puts a haunting string section in the front seat and the underrated Bar-Kays in motion. With Hayes’s emotive vocals, all twelve minutes of “Walk on By” painfully displays the fragility of a man’s broken heart in a way that Dionne Warwick’s version couldn’t. Hayes, who at the time was going through his own marital problems, continues to put the spotlight on the melancholic cloud hovering over his life with the adulterous “One Woman” and the 20-minute half-sermonette, half soul ballad selection of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”