The 1960s File Feature
Who's Making Love
Who's Making Love — Johnnie Taylor: History Johnnie Taylor arrived at his commercial breakthrough by an unusual route. He had spent years in gospel music, ha…
01 The Story
Who's Making Love — Johnnie Taylor: History
Johnnie Taylor arrived at his commercial breakthrough by an unusual route. He had spent years in gospel music, had sung with the Soul Stirrers alongside Sam Cooke, and had made tentative steps toward secular recordings before finding his footing as a soul singer on Stax Records in Memphis. By 1968 he was established enough at Stax to be given material with some commercial ambition, but he had not yet broken through to the mainstream in the way that the label's biggest stars, Otis Redding and Sam and Dave, had managed. "Who's Making Love" changed all of that with a speed and completeness that surprised even the people closest to Taylor's career.
Released in 1968 on the Stax label, "Who's Making Love" was built around a premise that was direct to the point of audacity for its era. The song asked what was happening at home while its protagonist was out pursuing infidelity. The question was rhetorical on its surface but pointed directly at the double standard that governed expectations around male and female fidelity. The lyrical treatment was not preachy but sardonic, and Taylor delivered it with a kind of knowing worldliness that made the message land as entertainment rather than lecture.
The production came from Don Davis, working in conjunction with the Stax house band. The arrangement drove hard on the rhythm section, with a guitar riff that became one of the most recognizable hooks in late-1960s soul. The Memphis horns, a staple of Stax productions, punctuated the arrangement with the kind of sharp, declarative brass interjections that had become the label's sonic signature. The track had an urgency that matched its lyrical content, propulsive and slightly dangerous in its feel.
The single reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and performed even more strongly on the rhythm and blues charts, where it climbed to the very top. The crossover performance was significant. Stax had built its reputation primarily on the rhythm and blues market, and the ability of "Who's Making Love" to penetrate mainstream pop radio demonstrated both the strength of the recording and the broader commercial appeal of the Stax sound during this period. Taylor was suddenly not just a soul singer but a pop star of genuine magnitude.
The record sold more than a million copies, earning gold certification and establishing Taylor as one of the most commercially significant artists in the Stax catalog. This was a remarkable achievement for a singer who had been releasing records for years without breaking through at this level. The success of "Who's Making Love" demonstrated that the combination of Taylor's gospel-rooted vocal power, the sardonic lyrical angle, and the tight Memphis production could produce something with very broad popular appeal.
The timing of the record's release placed it within a particularly fertile period for Southern soul music. 1968 was the year in which Stax was navigating the aftermath of Otis Redding's death and the broader challenges facing the label after the sale to Gulf and Western. In this context, "Who's Making Love" provided both a commercial lifeline and a demonstration that Stax's talent roster extended well beyond its most famous names. Taylor stepped into a larger role at the label precisely because the record was so undeniably successful.
Radio programmers responded to the record's taut three-minute construction. It wasted no time establishing its groove, building its hook, and delivering its lyrical payload within a format that translated easily across the range of radio stations that constituted the AM landscape of 1968. The record got significant airplay in both Black and white radio markets, which was by no means guaranteed for a Stax release during this period. Taylor's vocal performance, grounded in the gospel tradition but entirely at home in the secular subject matter, bridged the divide effectively.
The success of "Who's Making Love" launched the most commercially productive phase of Taylor's long career. He would continue recording for Stax through the early 1970s and would later achieve further major success on other labels, but the breakthrough moment on this recording established the creative and commercial template that he would work from for the remainder of his career. The record remains the defining artifact of his Stax period and one of the essential Southern soul recordings of 1968.
02 Song Meaning
Who's Making Love — Johnnie Taylor: Meaning
"Who's Making Love" operates on a premise that is both comic and pointed: the man who is out seeking pleasure elsewhere has given no thought to what his partner might be doing in his absence. The song turns this oversight into its central joke and its central critique simultaneously. The narrator poses the question, and the question itself contains the answer. If infidelity is available to one partner, it is available to the other, and the song plants that logical symmetry at the very center of its lyrical architecture.
Johnnie Taylor's vocal delivery is essential to the song's meaning. He brings a gospel singer's authority to the material, which gives the sardonic premise a weight it might not carry in the hands of a more conventionally secular performer. The tone is knowing rather than wounded, the performance of a man who understands exactly what kind of world he is describing and finds dark humor in its contradictions. This is not a song of naivety confronted but of wisdom deployed, and Taylor's voice makes that distinction clear from the opening bars.
The song's thematic territory was not without precedent in rhythm and blues, where frank treatment of infidelity, desire, and the complexity of male-female relationships had a long tradition. What distinguished "Who's Making Love" was the specific direction of its scrutiny. Rather than simply celebrating or lamenting infidelity from a male perspective, it turned the lens around and asked what consequences male infidelity might create at home. The reversal was sharp enough to be funny and pointed enough to carry real critical content about the double standards built into mid-century American ideas about fidelity.
For Taylor as an artist, the song revealed something important about his artistic range. His gospel background gave him access to a kind of moral seriousness that inflected even his most entertaining secular material with weight. "Who's Making Love" is, on one level, a groove record designed to make people dance and grin. On another level, it is a fairly astute observation about the self-defeating logic of male infidelity. Taylor could hold both registers at once, which is what made the record so effective at reaching such a broad audience.
The Southern soul production context at Stax added another layer of meaning. Stax's recordings in this period were deeply rooted in a Black Southern musical tradition that valued emotional honesty and a kind of pragmatic wisdom about human behavior. The label's aesthetic was distinct from both the polished uplift of Motown and the psychedelic experimentation happening in rock music simultaneously. "Who's Making Love" fits squarely within that aesthetic, a record that takes human weakness as its subject without either condemning it or romanticizing it.
The song's lasting appeal reflects the durability of its central question. The specific social arrangements of 1968 have changed considerably in the decades since the record's release, but the basic dynamic it describes, the person who cheats without considering that their partner might have equivalent freedom of action, remains immediately legible to contemporary listeners. This universality, grounded in the specific sound and style of late-1960s Southern soul, is what has kept the recording in rotation on oldies and soul radio stations across the years and what has made it a standard reference point in any serious accounting of Johnnie Taylor's contribution to American popular music.
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