Isaac Hayes

Memphis

Isaac Hayes was born in Covington, Tennessee, on 20 August 1942 and was raised by his maternal grandparents. He sang in church from the age of five and taught himself piano, Hammond organ, flute and saxophone. He worked in a Memphis meat-packing plant by day and played clubs and juke joints in the evenings. In the early 1960s he became a session musician at Stax Records, and with his partner David Porter he wrote "Soul Man" and "Hold On, I'm Comin'" for Sam & Dave. Hayes, Porter and Booker T. & the M.G.s also produced Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas and others. His own 1968 debut, Presenting Isaac Hayes, was jazzy, largely improvised and commercially unsuccessful.

Hot Buttered Soul

Stax lost Otis Redding in December 1967 and its back catalog to Atlantic in May 1968, and executive Al Bell called for 27 new albums in 1969. After the failure of his debut, Hayes told Bell he would not record again without complete creative control, and Bell agreed. Hayes later told the author Rob Bowman that he was chasing the artistic side and that what he had to say could not be said in two and a half minutes.

Hot Buttered Soul was made in 1969 at Ardent in Memphis with the Bar-Kays as the band, Hayes playing Hammond organ and singing live while he conducted them. The record holds four tracks: a twelve-minute Walk On By, a nearly nineteen-minute By the Time I Get to Phoenix that opens with a spoken monologue, the single original Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic, and One Woman. It reached number 8 on the Billboard 200 and number 1 on the R&B chart. Edited singles of the two long covers reached 30 and 37 on the Hot 100. The BBC's Daryl Easlea called it "as revolutionary for soul music as anything by Brown, Stone or Clinton". Two more albums followed in 1970, The Isaac Hayes Movement and ...To Be Continued, which reached number 1 on Billboard's Black Albums chart.

Shaft

In 1971 Hayes composed the score for the film Shaft and appeared in it as a bartender. Director Gordon Parks sent him footage, and he wrote three pieces from it before MGM hired him to do the rest. The Bar-Kays recorded the rhythm tracks in one day, the orchestra came the next day and the vocals the day after that. Shaft, a double album on Enterprise, came out on 23 July 1971, peaked at number one on the Billboard 200 and went Platinum within a month. Theme from Shaft reached number one on the Hot 100 in November 1971 and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Pitchfork's Nate Patrin wrote that Hayes changed the musical directions of Hollywood and R&B at the same time, and the Library of Congress National Recording Registry lists Theme from Shaft, with an entry that describes the double album.

Black Moses followed on 1 November 1971, another double album. Its title came from a nickname given to Hayes by the Stax executive Dino Woodward, and its gatefold sleeve unfolded into a poster-sized portrait of him. It went to number one on the R&B album chart in January 1972, and his version of Never Can Say Goodbye reached number 22 on the Hot 100. An edit of Do Your Thing from the Shaft album also made the Top 40.

Later work

Hayes recorded Live at the Sahara Tahoe on 26 November 1972, then made Joy in 1973 and the soundtracks Three Tough Guys and Truck Turner in 1974. In 1977 he signed with Polydor, and his 1979 album Don't Let Go returned him to the Top 40, with the title track reaching number 18 in the United States. In 1995 he released Branded on Virgin. From August 1997 he voiced the character Chef on South Park, and in 1999 "Chocolate Salty Balls (P.S. I Love You)" went to number one on the UK singles chart. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in 2002. He died on 10 August 2008.

His records live on in sampling. Walk On By turns up in work by Compton's Most Wanted, the Notorious B.I.G., Faith Evans, 2Pac, MF Doom and Wu-Tang Clan, and Portishead sampled Ike's Rap II from Black Moses in Glory Box. Jim Farber wrote in the Guardian that the album-length sound Hayes began in 1969 shaped records by Curtis Mayfield, Parliament, Funkadelic and Marvin Gaye.