Isaac Hayes

Soulsville Isaac Hayes was born in the rural poverty of a sharecropper's family on August 20, 1942, in Covington, Tennessee, about thirty miles south of Memphis. Orphaned in infancy, he and his sister Willette were raised up by their maternal grandparents, Willie and Rushia Addie-Mae Wade. They instilled love in Hayes for the simple pleasures of country life. "We raised our own foods," he says, "we raised most of our crops, we had cattle, we had pork. Our corn was ground at the grist mill and we had molasses at the sorghum mill. A sack of flour would last several months. My grandmother did a lot of canning, preparing food and putting it up in the winter. My grandfather would go hunting and bring in a bunch of rabbits, so we were good. When we came to the city of Memphis, we didn't have anything to compare it to." Memphis was supposed to represent new opportunity, and it did for awhile, as the 7-year old saw his first supermarket and enjoyed his first Popsicle, and grandfather found work at a tomato factory. But soon his health failed, he became disabled, and when Hayes was 11, his grandfather died. "That's when we really fell on hard times," Hayes remembers, "when I started doing the agricultural work like picking cotton." Ironically, his stately home today in East Memphis looks out on those same fields where cotton grew for nearly two centuries. As a youngster he ran errands, cut lawns, delivered groceries and wood to homes for fuel, cleaned bricks for two cents apiece, and shined shoes on Beale Street. Hayes sang in church since age five, but stopped when his voice cracked in adolescence. Years later, "when I started back singing, my voice was in the basement." He was persuaded by his high school guidance counselor to enter a talent show, singing "Looking Back," Nat King Cole's 1958 hit. "When I finished, the house was on its feet, man, and I was a hit." Overnight the girls, even those a couple of grades ahead, were sending lunch invitations. "Career change! So I started pursuing music big time." He joined the school band and learned to play saxophone from Lucian Coleman (brother of hard-bopper George Coleman). Hayes sang gospel with a group called the Morning Stars, doo-wop with Sir Isaac & the Doo-Dads, the Teen Tones, and the Ambassadors, even some jazz with the Ben Branch house band at Curry's Club Tropicana out in north Memphis. He started playing sax and singing blues with Calvin Valentine and The Swing Cats, and doing prom dates with The Missiles. He took a crash course learning piano by literally faking it for the first time on a New Year's Eve R&B job at the Southern Club with Jeb Stuart, "because I needed the money." Stax Hayes was finally graduated at age 21 from Manassas, Class of 1962. It was the year after the first releases began to trickle out of a new label called Stax Records, part of the Satellite Records company and Satellite Record Store that started back in '58, housed in the old Capitol Theatre on the corner of College & McLemore. Hayes had won seven college scholarships for vocal music that he chose not to pursue. Instead, he became adept enough at the piano to land a job with baritone saxophonist bandleader Floyd Newman at the Plantation Inn across the river in West Arkansas. Newman was also the staff baritone musician on Stax recording sessions and was up for a date himself with his own working group in late 1963: "Frog Stomp," the only solo single ever cut by Newman, was co-written by and features Hayes (on piano), the first major notch in his discography at Stax Records. "During the time that I was there," Hayes recalls of the session, " Jim Stewart, the proprietor of Stax looked at me and said, 'Look, Booker T is off in Indiana U., from Booker T & the MG's, and I need a keyboard player so you want the job?' 'Yeaaa!' I jumped at it." His first paid sessions were with Otis Redding in early 1964, and Hayes was soon a ubiquitous presence at Stax. Not long after, co-writer and producer David Porter suggested to Hayes that they collaborate as songwriters. After a few modest starts for Porter ("Can't See You When I Want To"), Carla Thomas "How Do You Quit [Someone You Love]"), and Sam & Dave ("I Take What I Want"), "everything just blew up big time," Hayes says. As writers (under the name 'Soul Children'), arrangers and producers, the Hayes-Porter duo became Stax's hottest commodity starting in 1966-67. Sam & Dave's "You Don't Know Like I Know," "Hold On! I'm Comin'," "Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody," "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby," "I Thank You," "Wrap It Up," and the R&B Grammy award-winning "Soul Man" were among some 200 Hayes-Porter compositions that became standards. For Carla Thomas there was "Let Me Be Good To You," "B-A-B-Y" and "Something Good (Is Going To Happen To You)." Johnnie Taylor scored with "I Had a Dream" and "I Got To Love Somebody's Baby." Mable John's one and only hit was Hayes-Porter's "Your Good Thing (Is About To End)." Presenting Isaac Hayes, his debut solo LP was recorded as a trio (with MG's bassist Duck Dunn and drummer Al Jackson) in the wee hours after an all-night Stax party. The intimate, sensual jazz-flavored jam session approach (including three 9-minute versions of standards) did not reach the charts, but served as a blueprint for future LPs. Hayes' work with Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, Booker T & the MG's, the Mar-Keys, the Bar-Kays, Rufus & Carla Thomas, and virtually the entire Stax roster created what was known as the Memphis Sound. It transformed popular music, was absorbed by everyone from Elvis Presley and Ray Charles to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. History notes that, with the exception of Booker T & the MG's, Isaac Hayes worked on more Stax sessions and tracks than any other musician. On April 4, 1968, as Stax Records was finalizing its sale to Gulf & Western Corporation, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated at the Lorraine Hotel in downtown Memphis. Hayes, who had marched for Civil Rights with King, was scheduled to meet with him that very day. "It affected me for a whole year," Hayes told Rob Bowman in Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story Of Stax Records. "I could not create properly. I was so bitter and so angry. I thought, What can I do? Well, I can't do a thing about it so let me become successful and powerful enough where I can have a voice to make a difference. So I went back to work and started writing again." Enterprise He emerged in the summer 1969 with the landmark Hot Buttered Soul, and the career of Isaac Hayes would never be the same again. The LP was uniquely composed of four lush, sensual arrangements, framed by the opening 12-minute version of "Walk On By" and the closing 18-minute take on "By the Time I Get To Phoenix." Both were edited into a double-A sided single, and both sides became top 40/R&B crossover hits. #1 on the Billboard R&B chart for 10 weeks, the LP stayed on the Pop chart for an amazing 81 weeks. It forced the music industry, for the first time, to conceive of Soul music as an album art form. In a new emerging age of Afro-centrism and Black Power, devoting the entire LP cover to Hayes' shaven head was a revolutionary statement. Hot Buttered Soul was issued on the new Stax subsidiary label Enterprise (yes, named for the "Star Trek" spaceship) for whom Hayes would record for the next five years, and deliver a record-setting seven #1 R&B albums - more #1's than any artist of the period. In fact, Hayes charted a phenomenal 20 albums on the R&B and Pop charts between 1969 and '80 - not a week went by in the early '70s without two Isaac Hayes albums on the charts, and sometimes three. There can be no overstating his impact on popular music, reflected in his first ballot vote into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. A pair of albums in 1970 reprised the format of the tightly-arranged extended versions of original material and reworked standards - The Isaac Hayes Movement (7 weeks at #1, with "I Stand Accused") and ...To Be Continued (11 weeks at #1, with the original version of "Ike's Rap," a decade before Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight"!) By now, the silky smooth romantic rap soliloquies had become a Hayes trademark. The arrival of the Shaft movie, soundtrack double-LP, and theme-song single in the summer 1971 was a career-defining event - the image of Isaac Hayes loomed at least as large as the film's star Richard Roundtree or director Gordon Parks, and all three embodied a new era of Black empowerment. Shaft was the first album in history by a solo black artist to hit #1 on both the Pop and R&B chart (14 weeks, making it the #3 R&B album of the entire decade of the '70s). At the Academy Awards the following year, Hayes became the first African-American composer to win the Oscar for Best Musical Score. In addition to generating three Grammy awards, the music from Shaft won a Golden Globe award, the NAACP Image Award, and the prestigious Edison award, Europe's highest music honor. Again, Hayes had set a high musical standard whose gritty, staccato voicings would echo in movie and television soundtracks for decades to come. He was quickly assigned to score the 1972 television series "The Men" (starring Robert Conrad), whose theme became a Pop/R&B hit. The summer 1974 would see the release of his next two movie soundtrack albums, Tough Guys (from the movie Three Tough Guys, Hayes' first co-starring movie role as a macho character), and Truck Turner (in which Hayes starred in the title role of a tough guy again). A third film role offered a comedy turn in 1975, It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time (with John Candy). Meanwhile, Shaft's success (it charted for 16 months) earned Hayes a second double-LP in 1971: Black Moses (#1 for 7 weeks, with "Never Can Say Goodbye"), whose nickname reluctantly stuck with him for years afterward. A long spell of touring throughout Europe and the U.S. in 1972 (including the WattStax Festival in August) introduced many audiences to Hayes for the first time, an imposing figure in his shades and gold chains. It was Isaac Hayes who turned chains - once symbols of slavery and degradation - into ornaments, a decade before Mr. T. and decades before the arrival of bling-bling. The live show was captured on his third consecutive double-LP, which arrived in '73: Live At the Sahara Tahoe (#1 for 2 weeks). Later that year came the album Joy; aside from its title tune, an R&B/Pop crossover hit, it included "I Love You That's All," which became a sampler's delight for everyone from TLC and Massive Attack, to Eric B. & Rakim and Big Daddy Kane. In the last decade or so, Hayes' work has gone on to be sampled nearly 200 times (officially, that is), on recordings by (among others) Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, DJ Quik, Ice Cube, Destiny's Child, Tricky, Mase. Portishead, Yo-To, and the late TuPac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.