Isaac Lee Hayes Jr. (August 20, 1942 – August 10, 2008) was an American singer, songwriter, composer, and actor. He was one of the creative forces behind the Southern soul music label Stax Records in the 1960s, serving as an in-house songwriter with his partner David Porter,
as well as a session musician and record producer. Hayes and Porter were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005 in recognition of writing scores of songs for themselves, the duo Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, and others. In 2002, Hayes was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
During the late 1960s, Hayes also began a career as a recording artist. He released several successful soul albums such as Hot Buttered Soul (1969) and Black Moses (1971). In addition to his work in popular music, Hayes worked as a film composer.
Hayes wrote the musical score for the film Shaft (1971). For the "Theme from Shaft", he was awarded the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1972, making him the third black person, after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier, to win an Academy Award in any competitive field covered by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Hayes also won two Grammy Awards that same year. Later, he won his third Grammy for his album Black Moses.
In 1992, Hayes was crowned honorary king of the Ada region of Ghana in recognition of his humanitarian work there. He acted in films and television, such as in the movies Truck Turner (1974), Escape from New York (1981) and I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988), and as Gandolf "Gandy" Fitch in the TV series The Rockford Files (1974–1980). Hayes also voiced the character Chef in the Comedy Central animated series South Park from its debut in 1997 until his controversial departure in 2006.
On August 5, 2003, Hayes was honored as a BMI Icon at the 2003 BMI Urban Awards for his enduring influence on generations of musicians. Throughout his songwriting career, Hayes received five BMI R&B Awards, two BMI Pop Awards, two BMI Urban Awards and six Million-Air citations.
Isaac Lee Hayes Jr. was born on August 20, 1942, in Covington, Tennessee, the second child of Eula (née Wade) and Isaac Hayes Sr. After his mother died young and his father abandoned his family, Hayes was raised by his maternal grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Willie Wade Sr. The child of a sharecropper family, Hayes grew up working on farms in the Tennessee counties of Shelby and Tipton. At age five, Hayes began singing at his local church and he taught himself to play the piano, Hammond organ, flute, and saxophone.
Hayes dropped out of high school, but his former teachers at Manassas High School in Memphis encouraged him to complete his diploma, which he did at the age of 21. After graduating from high school, Hayes was offered several music scholarships from colleges and universities. He turned down all of them to provide for his immediate family, working at a meat-packing plant in Memphis by day and playing nightclubs and juke joints several evenings a week in Memphis and nearby northern Mississippi. Hayes's first professional gigs, in the late 1950s, were as a singer at Curry's Club in North Memphis, backed by Ben Branch's houseband.
1963–1974: Stax Records and Shaft
Hayes began his recording career in the early 1960s, as a session musician for acts recorded by the Memphis-based Stax Records. He later wrote a string of hit songs with songwriting partner David Porter, including "You Don't Know Like I Know", "Soul Man", "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby" and "Hold On, I'm Comin'" for Sam & Dave. Hayes, Porter and Stax studio band Booker T. & the M.G.'s were also the producers for Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas and other Stax artists during the mid-1960s. One of the first Stax records Hayes played on was "Winter Snow" by Booker T. and The M.G.s (Stax 45–236), which indicates "Introducing Isaac Hayes on piano" on the label.
Hayes-Porter contributed to the Stax sound of this period, and Sam & Dave credited Hayes for helping develop both their sound and style. In 1968, Hayes released his debut album, Presenting Isaac Hayes, a jazzy, largely improvised effort that was commercially unsuccessful.
Stax then went through a major upheaval, losing its biggest star when Otis Redding died in a plane crash in December 1967, and then losing its back catalog to Atlantic Records in May 1968. As a result, Stax executive vice president Al Bell called for 27 new albums to be completed in mid-1969; Hayes's second album, Hot Buttered Soul was the most successful of these releases.
On Hot Buttered Soul, Hayes reinterpreted "Walk On By" (previously recorded by Dionne Warwick) into a 12-minute exploration. "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" starts with an eight-minute-long monologue before breaking into song, and the lone original number, the funky "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" runs nearly ten minutes, a significant break from the standard three-minute soul/pop songs. "Walk On By" would be the first of many times Hayes would take a Burt Bacharach standard, generally known as three-minute pop songs by Dionne Warwick or Dusty Springfield, and transform it into a soulful, lengthy and almost gospel number.
In 1970, Hayes released two albums, The Isaac Hayes Movement and ...To Be Continued. The former stuck to the four-song template of his previous album. Jerry Butler's "I Stand Accused" begins with a trademark spoken word monologue, and Bacharach's "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" is re-worked. The latter album included "The Look of Love", another Bacharach song transformed into an 11-minute epic of lush orchestral rhythm (mid-way it breaks into a rhythm guitar jam for a couple of minutes before suddenly resuming the slow love song). An edited three-minute version was issued as a single. The album featured the instrumental "Ike's Mood", which segues into a version of "You've Lost That Loving Feeling". Hayes released a Christmas single, "The Mistletoe and Me" (with "Winter Snow" as a B-side).
In early 1971, Hayes composed music for the soundtrack of the blaxploitation film Shaft (he appeared in a cameo role as a bartender). The title theme, with its wah-wah guitar and multi-layered symphonic arrangement, would become a worldwide hit single, and spent two weeks at number one in the Billboard Hot 100 in November. The remainder of the album was mostly instrumentals covering big beat jazz, bluesy funk, and hard Stax-styled soul. The other two vocal songs, the social commentary "Soulsville" and the 19-minute jam "Do Your Thing", would be edited down to hit singles. He won an "Academy Award for Best Original Song" for the "Theme from Shaft", and in addition was nominated for Best Original Dramatic Score. Later in the year, Hayes released a double album, Black Moses, that expanded on his earlier sounds and featured The Jackson 5's song "Never Can Say Goodbye". Another single, "I Can't Help It", was not featured on the album.
In 1972, Hayes would record the theme tune for the television series The Men and release a hit single (with "Type Thang" as a B-side). He released a couple of other non-album singles during the year, such as "If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don't Want to Be Right)" and "Rolling Down a Mountainside". Atlantic would re-release Hayes's debut album this year with the new title In The Beginning.
Hayes was back in 1973 with an acclaimed live double album, Live at the Sahara Tahoe, and followed it up with the album Joy. He moved away from cover songs with this album. An edited version of the title track would be a hit single.
In 1974, Hayes was featured in the blaxploitation films Three Tough Guys and Truck Turner, and he recorded soundtracks for both. Tough Guys was almost devoid of vocals and Truck Turner yielded a single with the title theme. The soundtrack score of Truck Turner was eventually used by filmmaker Quentin Tarantino in the Kill Bill film series, and has been used for over 30 years as the opening score of Brazilian radio show Jornal de Esportes on the Jovem Pan station.