Religious Rock Top Ten: Jesus Is a Soul Man (#7)

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I hope everyone in America had a good Thanksgiving. I hope everyone all over the world had a good day. As we head into Black Friday, where Americans go from eating too much to spending too much, I present another hit song with a religious theme to honor the faith-based holidays of the season. Here’s the first one you may not remember. #7: Jesus Is a Soul Man - Lawrence Reynolds If you haven’t heard of it or him, don’t worry. I had never heard his version, either, until I saw that it made the Billboard charts while researching this countdown. The first version I heard of this was by Roy Clark on his gospel album The Magnificent Sanctuary Band, and his version was a lot more upbeat than this rendition. There are a lot of these songs that are more on the implicit side (such as yesterday’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” which you may or may not have know was lyrically straight out of the Bible). There’s no guessing what this song is about. As I mentioned in the preface discussion to this countdown, there was a “Jesus movement” in the late 60s and early 70s, when the hippies discovered God. The apex of this came with the gospel rock operas and the nuns singing “The Lord’s Prayer,” but there were plenty of other songs that were full-on gospel-based. This is one of them. Lawrence Reynolds was from Alabama, and this was his only hit. It made the Billboard top 30 in 1969, which explains the 60s slang (“they say that He’s a square, that Jesus ain’t nowhere”). A buried gem from the 60s gospel-rock era. Jesus Is a Soul Man Written by Lawrence Reynolds and Jack D. Cardwell Recorded by Lawrence Reynolds Released as a single, 1969 He hides me in the cleft of the rock: