Isaac Hayes

Musician, composer, and actor

• Born: August 20, 1942
• Birthplace: Covington, Tennessee
• Died: August 10, 2008
• Place of death: Memphis, Tennessee

Hayes, who might be best known as the composer of the theme from the film Shaft, also was an integral part of Stax Records and a singer, songwriter, musician, actor, entrepreneur, and humanitarian. He provided the link between the soul style of music created in Memphis, Tennessee, and the related styles of funk and rhythm and blues.

Early Life

Isaac Lee Hayes, Jr., was born in August of 1942 in Covington, Tennessee, about fifty miles northeast of Memphis. Willie and Rushia Addie-Mae Wade, Hayes’s maternal grandparents, raised him after the early death of his mother, Eula (Isaac Hayes, Sr., left the family when Hayes was an infant). By the time he was seven years old, Hayes had moved to Memphis with his grandparents. After his grandfather died a few years later, he struggled against poverty by doing odd jobs, such as mowing lawns, making deliveries, shining shoes on Beale Street, and working as a dishwasher and short-order cook. Throughout his school years, he was involved in music. He sang in church and played saxophone at Manassas High School, from which he graduated in 1962.

Hayes turned down several college scholarship offers in favor of earning a living in music. One of his first gigs was at the Plantation Inn across the Mississippi River in West Memphis, Arkansas, where many musicians with Memphis connections played. Hayes was hired as pianist for saxophonist Floyd Newman, who happened to work at Stax Records’ studio in Memphis, where Hayes previously had auditioned for work. When Newman cut a record in 1963 at the studio, he took Hayes as part of his performing group. The studio was looking for a session keyboardist to temporarily replace Booker T. Jones, who was away at college, and Hayes was hired.

Life’s Work

By the mid-1960’s, Hayes had become a regular at Stax, even when Jones returned from his studies. He played piano on many of Otis Redding’s recordings, including “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “Try a Little Tenderness,” and “ Love Man.” He played organ on several songs as well. During the same period, Hayes began to cowrite songs with David Porter, producing material for Sam and Dave, Carla Thomas, and Johnnie Taylor.

After the death of Redding in 1967, Hayes played a much larger role at Stax. His first solo album, Presenting Isaac Hayes (1968), featuring Hayes on vocals and piano, Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass guitar, and Al Jackson, Jr., on drums, was an improvisatory effort that did poorly by commercial standards. Hayes insisted on complete artistic control of his second album, Hot Buttered Soul, released in 1969. Soul contained only four tracks, ranging from five minutes to just under nineteen minutes long. After two more albums in 1970, Hayes released Shaft (1971), which served as the score for the film of the same name. The music won several awards (an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy) and established Hayes as a major international musical figure. Later the same year, he released the Grammy Award-winning Black Moses, a double album containing covers of songs by the Jackson Five, the Carpenters, Dionne Warwick, and others, but with Hayes’s distinctive personal style. He made nineteen more albums over the next thirty-two years.

In 1971, Hayes had a cameo in the film Shaft. That appearance led to a number of acting roles in films and television shows. From 1997 to 2006, he supplied the voice of the character Chef in the animated television series South Park. He hosted radio shows in were chosen and Memphis, opened a restaurant, co-owned a professional basketball team, and built a school in Ghana. He was married four times and had eleven children. Hayes died of a stroke only ten days before his sixty-sixth birthday.

Significance

Hayes was a major figure—along with Redding, Thomas, and others—in the development of the “Memphis Sound” that was shepherded by Stax Records. For some four decades, Hayes explored new dimensions of soul music and built an acting career. He also established a foundation, based in New York, to promote literacy, music education, and other humanitarian programs throughout the world. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

Bibliography

Bowman, Rob. “The Stax Sound: A Musicological Analysis.” Popular Music 14, no. 3 (October, 1995): 285-320. Presents a thorough analysis of the musical aspects of Stax Records with attention to why its artistic endeavors worked so well, covering instrumentation, repertoire, structure, and harmonic construction.

DeMain, Bill. “Isaac Hayes.” In In Their Own Words: Songwriters Talk About the Creative Process. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Brief biography and interview in which Hayes discusses his inspiration, his years at Stax Records, and the genesis of many of his hit songs.

Guralnick, Peter. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. New York: HarperCollins, 1986. Rev. ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999. Offers an insider view of the Stax milieu, with ample attention paid to Hayes’s role.

Hayes, Isaac. Foreward to Souls of My Brothers: Black Men Break Their Silence, Tell Their Truths, and Heal Their Spirits, by Dawn Marie Daniels and Candace Sandy. New York: Plume, 2003. In this candid, autobiographical foreword, Hayes discusses experiencing racism as a youth, participating in the Civil Rights movement, his reaction to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, and his travels to Africa.