The Full Biography
Isaac Hayes. Singer. Composer. The Covington kid who made a soul album sound like a film score, then spent a second life as a shaved-head climate, a cartoon chef, and a man who left a show over a joke about a church he had joined.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a bald head, gold chains, the Shaft wah-wah, or an animated cook who loved the word “chocolate.” What the still cannot show is Isaac Lee Hayes Jr. of Covington, Tennessee, a Stax songwriter who had already written for Sam and Dave before he took the microphone, a bankruptcy, Scientology, and a death in 2008 that the theme had already outlived as a parade song.
He was born on August 20, 1942, in Covington, in sharecropper weather, raised by grandparents after his mother died and his father left. The kitchen was thin. Church was the first orchestra. He moved into Memphis as a teenager, sang, played piano and saxophone, and learned that a session man who could also write was worth more than a session man who could only wait. Stax Records, on East McLemore, was the door. He arrived in the mid-1960s as a keyboard player and arranger in a room that already had Booker T. & the M.G.’s as its spine. The work was not a spotlight. The work was making other people’s records hold.
With David Porter he built the back of the label. “Soul Man.” “Hold On, I’m Comin’.” “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby.” “I Thank You.” “Wrap It Up.” “B-A-B-Y.” Sam and Dave took the shouts; Hayes and Porter took the architecture — the stop-time, the spoken setup, the way a bridge could feel like a second sermon. Those records still walk into a room and rearrange it. A complete Hayes life has to hold that fact before the chains. He was a writer first. The bald climate came after the credits.
His first album under his own name, Presenting Isaac Hayes (1968), did not take. Jazz trio, standards, a man still finding the size of the voice. Then Hot Buttered Soul (1969) changed what a soul album was allowed to occupy. Four tracks. Twelve minutes of “Walk On By.” Eighteen minutes of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” with a spoken preface that treated a pop song like a case file. Orchestration. A baritone that did not hurry. Radio had no slot for it. The album went gold anyway. It is the first monument under his own name, and it is still the one musicians name when they talk about what he invented: time, space, a room for the song to live in.
The Isaac Hayes Movement (1970) and To Be Continued (1970) kept the long form. He was no longer a Stax employee who also sang. He was a brand the label needed. The shaved head, the chains, the sunglasses, the vest that left the chest bare — costume as authorship. He called the persona Black Moses, and in 1971 he put that title on a double album of covers and originals that treated Burt Bacharach and soul ballads as the same liturgy. The look was a joke and a crown. Both readings are true.
The Isaac Hayes Movement and To Be Continued had already proved the 1969 idea was a method, not a stunt. Then Gordon Parks asked him to score Shaft (1971). The wah-wah on the theme — Charles “Skip” Pitts on guitar, the hi-hat, the spoken question about the man who would risk his neck — became the sound of a private eye and of a year. The single went to No. 1. In 1972 the Academy Award for Best Original Song followed. He was a Black composer, a studio picture, a category the town had not often opened. Two Grammys sat on the same work. The soundtrack album was not a souvenir. It was a hit that taught film producers what a soul orchestra could do in a chase. Parks had already directed the picture. Hayes gave it a pulse the trailers still steal. Black Moses, the same year, is the double album that treated the look as a liturgy: Bacharach covers, soul ballads, a gatefold of a man in robes. The nickname stuck. He had not asked a publicist for it. The public had already decided.
Wattstax, in August 1972, put him on a Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum stage in the chains, arriving like a civic weather. Live at the Sahara Tahoe and the concert films of those years show a man who had become a production: dancers, a band the size of a small town, a voice that could still stop the production and just talk. He acted when the phone rang — Wattstax as himself, then bits that treated the look as a character. The 1970s spent the money as fast as the look earned it. Stax collapsed into bankruptcy in 1975. Hayes’s own filing came in 1976. The chains did not protect the books. The catalog, tied up in a failing company, did not pay the way a parade song should pay. He kept recording — Polydor years, quieter albums, a man who still knew how to arrange a room after the room had changed landlords.
He took film work that used the face. Escape from New York (1981), as The Duke of New York, is the best of those jobs: a few scenes, a presence John Carpenter needed, no wah-wah required. I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (1988) let him laugh at the private-eye costume he had helped invent. He toured. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, a sentence that had to wait while the 1970s and 1980s filed him as a theme and a look. In 1992 he was crowned an honorary king in Ghana, a civic honor he treated as real work, not as a costume change. The public man of 1969 and 1971 was already written. The remaining decades were how to keep eating off a monument without becoming only the monument. The Polydor albums of the late 1970s are the unfashionable proof he still knew how to arrange a room after the landlord changed.
I didn’t just want to sing the song. I wanted the song to have a room to live in.Isaac Hayes, on the long cuts
The turn is Hot Buttered Soul and then the cartoon. A lot of Stax writers stay in the credits. He became a face. That face joined a church a great deal of the culture likes to mock. He paid for that membership in a job he liked. Hayes is a man who had already given the century a theme and then had to decide what a joke about his church was worth. He decided. The show decided. Both decisions are in the record.
Six things most people never knew
- He was a writer before he was a bald climate. Porter, Stax, Sam and Dave. The Oscar sits on other people’s hits he built.
- Covington and grandparents are the first house. A mother dead, a father gone. The sermon-songs have that kitchen under them.
- Hot Buttered Soul is the first monument, not Shaft. 1969. Eighteen minutes. A preface. A new idea of what a soul album could occupy.
- The Shaft Oscar is a Black composer’s first in that category in the way the lists mean. 1972 ceremony. A parade. A private eye Parks had already directed.
- Bankruptcy is the 1970s plot. The chains did not protect the books. The cartoon was, among other things, work.
- He left South Park over Scientology in 2006 and died of a stroke in 2008. The argument about the leaving sits next to a body that was already changing.
His children have had to share a father who is a theme and a chef. Friends from Stax describe a man who could arrange a room and fill it. Hayes in Memphis was a local fact as well as a cartoon. The church is in the record. The wah-wah is in the parade. Both should run.
The later years
Home, after the Oscar, was not a quiet farmhouse. It was Memphis and then the road, a man who had been a label’s architect trying to remain a going concern after the label died. He recorded when a company would still fund an orchestra. He took the acting bits. He did not pretend the 1980s were 1971. The look stayed — bald head, gold — because the look was still a job. The voice, on the records of those years, is a man who still knows how to talk a song into a room even when the budget for strings has shrunk.
In 1997 Trey Parker and Matt Stone hired the voice. Chef, on South Park, was a lunch-lady baritone who dispensed sexual advice to children as if it were a hymn. Hayes loved the part. He said so. The paycheck arrived when the chains had become a memory and the Stax catalog was still a legal thicket. “Chocolate Salty Balls” charted in Britain as a Christmas novelty, a second life for a first-rate studio singer who was willing to be a joke if the joke had music in it. For nine seasons he was a weekly climate in houses that had never owned Hot Buttered Soul. The cartoon did not erase the Oscar. It kept the voice employed.
He had joined the Church of Scientology in the 1990s and spoke for it in public. In 2006 the show aired “Trapped in the Closet,” an episode that mocked the church by name. Hayes left the series. The public argument — whether he walked, whether a stroke in January 2006 had already changed his speech and his handlers, whether the church spoke through him — is still a file people pick up when they want a fight. A complete life holds the argument without settling it in a paragraph. He had a job he liked. He had a church he had chosen. The show made those two facts collide. He chose the church. The show recast the cook. Both decisions cost something.
The body was already changing. Friends in Memphis describe a man who still came home to the city that had made the songs, who still knew every Stax hallway, who could be generous and distant in the same afternoon. He kept honorary titles and local appearances. He did not become a full-time nostalgia act, though the wah-wah would have let him. On August 10, 2008, he was found at home in Memphis, beside a treadmill, dead of a stroke. He was sixty-five. The funeral was a Memphis event. The theme did not notice. It was already a parade song, a ballpark song, a movie trailer’s idea of 1971. That is what a monument does when the man who built it leaves the room.
He kept local rooms in Memphis. Friends describe a man who still knew every Stax hallway, who could be generous with a young arranger and distant in the same afternoon, who still treated a horn section as a sentence that had to parse. The Rock Hall night in 2002 was a civic object. The Ghana crown in 1992 was a civic object he had taken seriously enough to return to. Neither object paid the way a weekly cartoon paid. He took the cartoon. He took the church. He took the leaving. He took the stroke. The wah-wah, by then, belonged to ballparks and trailers. The man still had to find a Tuesday.
What those last years actually were, if you refuse the cartoon-only version, is a working musician who had already written the public man in 1969 and 1971 and then spent three decades finding paid rooms for the voice: scores, cameos, a Ghana crown, a Hall of Fame night, a nine-year cartoon, a church, a leaving, a stroke. He did not get a long, curated elder-statesman lap. He got work, and then a death in the city that had taught him how to arrange a band. The children inherited a theme, a chef, and a catalog still tangled in old contracts. Memphis inherited the body. The parade inherited the rest.
After he was gone
Every soul auteur still pays the long-cut tax. Every cop-show needle drop still steals the wah-wah. Chef is a folk object that some rooms now handle carefully. Porter is the correction. Covington is the first house. The Oscar clip still plays when a broadcast needs a Black composer on a stage the town had not often opened. Hot Buttered Soul still teaches producers what happens if you give a baritone eighteen minutes and do not blink.
He came out of Covington, wrote for Sam and Dave, gave a pop song a room, scored a private eye, went broke, cooked in a cartoon, left over a church, and died of a stroke in Memphis. If you only remember Shaft, you have the parade. If you remember Porter, the eighteen minutes, and 2006, you have him.
Portrait: John Mathew Smith (www.celebrity-photos.com) · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons