Isaac Hayes turned three-minute pop songs into twelve-minute soul sermons
In 1969 a struggling Stax Records ordered 27 albums in a hurry. The biggest hit among them came from its in-house songwriter, who took Walk On By, a tidy Dionne Warwick single, and stretched it to twelve minutes. Two years later Isaac Hayes wrote Theme from Shaft and won an Academy Award.
Hayes was born on August 20, 1942, in Covington, Tennessee. His mother died young and his father left, so his grandparents raised him in a sharecropping family, working farms in Shelby and Tipton counties. He sang in church from age five and taught himself piano, Hammond organ, flute and saxophone. He finished high school at 21, then turned down several music scholarships to support his family, packing meat in Memphis by day and playing clubs and juke joints at night.
At Stax he started as a session player and then, with partner David Porter, wrote hits for Sam & Dave including Soul Man and Hold On, I'm Comin', also producing for Carla Thomas and others. His 1968 solo debut, a jazzy improvised set, flopped. Then Stax lost Otis Redding in a December 1967 plane crash and its back catalogue to Atlantic in May 1968, and executive Al Bell demanded a flood of new releases. Hayes's Hot Buttered Soul opened By the Time I Get to Phoenix with an eight-minute spoken monologue, a trademark he returned to repeatedly with Burt Bacharach songs.
For the 1971 film Shaft, in which he also appears briefly as a bartender, he built a theme on wah-wah guitar and layered orchestration. It spent two weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and won Best Original Song, making Hayes the third black winner of a competitive Oscar after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier. Two Grammys came the same year, and a third for the double album Black Moses.
His later life ranged widely. He acted in Truck Turner, Escape from New York and The Rockford Files, voiced Chef on South Park from 1997 until leaving in 2006, and in 1992 was crowned an honorary king in Ghana's Ada region for humanitarian work. Rock and roll's hall of fame honoured him in 2002, and three years later he and Porter were welcomed into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He died on August 10, 2008.
Source: Isaac Hayes
