That the career of Isaac Hayes could be neatly packaged into generationally specific references like Shaft, the Comedy Central animated series South Park and Scientology says volumes about the man’s longevity. The timeless soundtrack that Hayes produced in support of Gordon Parks’ groundbreaking Blaxploitation film, the character of Chef (a hammer-like nod to that same film) and the controversy surrounding Hayes’s Scientology related departure from South Park, provide little context for the genius of a man. At his peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hayes’ music and image embodied the potency and vibrancy of “Blackness” during one of the most tumultuous eras in American history.
Born in Covington, Tennessee in 1942, Hayes was just out of high school, when Stax, a local recording label in Memphis began to draw attention to itself. With acts like Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas and Booker T. & MG’s, Stax was poised to become one of the most important producers of Soul music by the end of the 1960s. With the shadow of Stax all over Memphis, Hayes did the struggling musician thing by performing for a time in the group Sir Isaac & the Doo-Dads and putting in time on Sunday mornings at the Pleasant Green Baptist Church.
A piano player by trade, Hayes began to hang out at the Stax studios. When the label’s house pianist Booker T. Jones (of Booker T. and the MGs) went off to college, Hayes began to do session work for the label. That work eventually led to a relationship with another local musician David Porter, who Hayes began to write songs with. When the Atlantic label, which distributed Stax’s music, brought their act Sam & Dave down to Memphis to work with the Stax musicians, it was Hayes and Porter’s songs that they recorded. With Sam & Dave topping the Soul charts with tracks like “Hold On I’m Coming”, “Soul Man” and “When Something is Wrong with My Baby” Hayes and Porter became in demand songwriters and producers. But Isaac Hayes wanted more for himself.
After the tragic death of Otis Redding in December of 1967, Stax found itself at a crossroads. The terms of the label’s distribution deal transferred ownership of all of Stax’s recording masters to Atlantic. In 1968, Stax was a label that had no back catalogue and was mourning the death of its biggest star. In response to the crisis label head Al Bell called for a “Soul Explosion” where Stax would flood the market with product, putting out 27-albums in a short period of time. As Hayes told the Washington Post in 1995, “[Bell] needed catalogue” and in exchange for his assistance on those 27-albums, Bell agreed to let Hayes record his own album. That album was Hot Buttered Soul (1969), and it almost single-handedly changed the sound of Soul Music.
Year after its release, Hayes remarked, “I didn’t give a damn if Hot Buttered Soul didn’t sell, because there were 26 other LPs to carry the load. I just wanted to do something artistic, with total freedom.” That freedom can be heard on virtually every track on Hot Buttered Soul, as Hayes transformed well-known pop songs like Dionne Warwick’s “Walk on By” and Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” into lengthy excursions into Soul; “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” clocks in at more than 18-minutes, including the nearly 9-minute spoken introduction.
Whereas Rock groups like The Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin flipped pop music conventions in the late 1960s with long-playing singles, Hayes introduced that same sensibility into Soul music. Hayes’s subsequent recordings like The Isaac Hayes Movement (1970), …To Be Continued (1970) and the double-album Black Moses (1971) marked Soul music as something that was vital, personal, yet expansive. The resonances of Hayes’ innovation is heard in the music of Motown (“Papa was a Rolling Stone”), the fledgling Philadelphia International Records (“Back Stabbers”) and Barry White, whose use of strings and spoken words intros borrowed respectfully from the Isaac Hayes musical playbook.
A signature feature of Hayes’s music in this era was his “raps” — spoken introductions to some of his more personal tracks. As he told the New York Times back in 1972, “There’s nothing fictional in my raps…I might elongate or extend an idea or something like that, but the basic thing that comes through is from experience that I’ve had.”
Nowhere was this more the case than on Black Moses. Hayes covered tracks like Jerry Butler’s “Need to Belong” and “Never Gonna Give You Up,” “Going in Circles” by The Friends of Distinction and Dionne Warwick’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and in each instance offered up something that was unmistakably Isaac Hayes. The highlight of the recording is Hayes’s 9-minute version of The Carpenter’s “white bread” pop hit “(They Long to Be) Close to You” which likely inspired Luther Vandross to tackle the same group’s “Superstar” a decade later. Had Hayes never recorded another note at this point, his place as one of the true architects of Soul and Funk would have been intact, but Shaft, released months before Black Moses, took Hayes to another realm.
There is perhaps no more enduring idea of the early 1970s in Black America than of the image of a clean-shaven, sun-glass-wearing, gold-chain vested Isaac Hayes with the “Theme from Shaft” playing in the background. It is an image of Hayes that has been dutifully caricatured. In those days, Hayes was simply referred to as “Black Moses” — a name given to him by a Stax recording label staff member — in reference to the larger-than-life figure he cut within Black America.
In an era that was largely defined by Black male Superheroes like Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Isaac Hayes and his bald head was a marketer’s dream, and the Stax label took every opportunity to take advantage of Hayes’s appeal. As label-mate Booker T. Jones recalled in the documentary Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, “Isaac’s position to me was more of a social position than a musical position at Stax. Isaac became something of a symbol that was missing in African American society.”
It was the soundtrack to the film Shaft — featuring “the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks” — that took Hayes beyond the Chitlin’ Circuit. As Hayes recalled to NPR a few years ago, “They wanted a Black leading man [Richard Roundtree], a Black director [Gordon Parks, Sr.], and a Black composer. So, since I was Stax’s number one artist at the time they chose me.” The film Shaft helped establish the genre of Blaxploitation film and crossed Hayes over to the mainstream.
The influence of the Shaft soundtrack can be easily detected in that rash of soundtracks that came in its wake including Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly (directed by Gordon Parks, Jr.), Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man and The Mack which featured the music of Motown artist Willie Hutch. The opening of Saturday Night Fever where John Travolta struts to the Bee Gee’s “Staying Alive” is indebted to Parks’ use of the “Theme from Shaft” at the opening of Shaft. The soundtrack earned Hayes an Academy Award in 1972, making him the first African American to earn the award for a recording.
In many ways Shaft was the apex of Hayes’s career. Hayes’s fortune mirrored closely those of Stax, the label that he left in 1974. By the end of the 1970s both had filed bankruptcy and represented a music style and politics that were decidedly out of favor in mainstream America and quite a few African American households.
The best measure of Hayes’s importance though occurred during that same watershed year of 1972. Under Al Bell’s direction, the artists at Stax traveled to the Los Angeles Coliseum to perform a day-long concert called “WattStax.” Modeled on Woodstock and the Harlem Cultural Festival, WattStax provided the Stax an opportunity to give back to the Black community. In the aftermath of the 1965 riots, Watts became a symbol of Black communities under siege.
WattStax, which included a concert film and soundtrack album, was also a springboard for a young Reverend Jesse Jackson and his campaign — Operation Breadbasket — to expound the virtues of Black politics and Black business. But it was clear that the most important person to hit the stage that day was Black Moses, who served as the closing act that day.
Writing about WattStax in his book In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era, late political scientist Richard Iton observes, “Toward the end of the concert as Jackson passed the microphone to Hayes after introducing him, there was an exchange of words between the two. It was unclear what was said, but what was apparent was that Hayes, the show’s headliner, had the power, and Jackson looked a bit resentful that that was the case.”
Iton’s comments are just a simple reminder of how important Hayes was to Black America. Hayes was never comfortable being referred to as “Black Moses” calling the term sacrilegious, but at least on that day in 1972, it was not only true, but it was also the Gospel.
Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. The author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities and Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, both from NYU Press. His next book Save a Seat for Me: Meditations on Black Masculinity and Fatherhood will be published by Simon & Schuster.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Mark Anthony Neal's work on Medium.
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