"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, who grew up on a farm in Tennessee, would exemplify a new, funky soul when he wrote the theme to the 1971 movie Shaft. This Soul Man is a bad mother...
Isaac Hayes wanted the record to have rhythmic elements similar to Bo Diddley's song "Bo Diddley," and Porter asked singer Sam Moore to give him "the Bobby Bland squall."
The Soul Man was "educated at Woodstock" (sometimes misheard as "educated from good stock"). This was two years before the famous festival; David Porter chose the name "Woodstock" to envision a school out in the sticks. "The word denoted a school that was out in the forest somewhere and they couldn't come up with the name for the school," he said. "Trees were cut down the school was made, and they called it Woodstock."
Sam & Dave were Sam Moore and Dave Prater. Moore, the tenor, was in The Melionaires gospel group; Prater, the baritone, was a solo artist before they met in 1961. They were signed by Roulette in 1962 and switched to Atlantic in 1965 before recording for Stax. In addition to "Soul Man," they had hits with "Hold On, I'm Comin'" and "I Thank You."
Speaking about coming up with the famous guitar intro, Steve Cropper said: "Isaac Hayes came to me the night before the session. It was in the late afternoon and they had been back in their office, writing all day long. He came out and he said, 'David Porter and I have got this great idea. I really think this song is a hit, but I just can't come up with anything for the intro on this thing.' He asked me if I would go down to the piano with him for a minute and fool around, which I did. He was always coming up with these changes - he was such a good jazz musician, and he could come up with these different sets of changes, and sometimes leave it to me to put some sort of lick or something on top of those changes, and that's how the intro of 'Soul Man' was born." From: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/sam-dave/soul-man
