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Isaac Hayes — Walk On By

Name: Walk On By
Description: Hot Buttered Soul contained only four songs across an entire album — the shortest running just under five minutes, the longest over eighteen. Isaac Hayes stretched Burt Bacharach's Walk On By from two and a half minutes to twelve by improvising spoken monologues about love and pain over a slow rolling groove. It sold over a million copies and changed how soul music could be structured.

Hot Buttered Soul · 1969

Label: Enterprise/Stax · Genre: Soul / Soul · Country: USA · From: Memphis, TN, North America

Hot Buttered Soul contained only four songs across an entire album — the shortest running just under five minutes, the longest over eighteen. Isaac Hayes stretched Burt Bacharach's Walk On By from two and a half minutes to twelve by improvising spoken monologues about love and pain over a slow rolling groove. It sold over a million copies and changed how soul music could be structured.

Did you know: Hayes recorded it in a single late-night session with virtually no preparation. The extended improvisation was genuinely spontaneous — he'd never performed it that way before.

Listen / buy: Juno · Spotify · YouTube

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