About

A TAV Essential Listening Album.

Isaac Hayes’ first album, Presenting Isaac Hayes, was a low-budget, jazz-imbued affair recorded on the spur of the moment with only bass and drums accompanying his piano and voice. This, his second, offered something altogether different: a husky, very masculine baritone rapping and crooning against a massive backdrop of strings and brass from the Memphis Symphony and the solid grooves of the Bar-Kays.

With this 1969 release, made up of four long tracks, Hayes revolutionized African-American popular music by leading it out of the era of the three-minute single and into concept album territory. A double-sided single of edited versions of “Walk on By” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” sold fairly well, but fans clamored for the full-length treatments and turned Hot Buttered Soul into a smash, the first-ever gold album for Stax Records. – Press Release

“Released at the tail end of the '60s, Hot Buttered Soul set the precedent for how soul would evolve in the early '70s, simultaneously establishing Isaac Hayes and the Bar-Kays as major forces within black music. Though not quite as definitive as Black Moses or as well-known as Shaft, Hot Buttered Soul remains an undeniably seminal record; it stretched its songs far beyond the traditional three-to-four-minute industry norm, featured long instrumental stretches where the Bar-Kays stole the spotlight, and it introduced a new, iconic persona for soul with Hayes' tough yet sensual image...The first, "Walk on By," is an epic 12-minute moment of true perfection, its trademark string-laden intro just dripping with syrupy sentiment, and the thumping mid-tempo drum beat and accompanying bassline instilling a complementary sense of nasty funk to the song; if that isn't enough to make it an amazing song, Hayes' almost painful performance brings yet more feeling to the song, with the guitar's heavy vibrato and the female background singers taking the song to even further heights.” – Allmusic

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