Isaac Hayes
Isaac Hayes created what the world knows as symphonic soul, fusing gritty guitars, drums, and bass with string, horn, and woodwind arrangements. His breakout album, Hot Buttered Soul, spent over a year on the R&B chart, topped it for ten weeks, and sold over a million copies. His “Theme From Shaft” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1972, making him the first Black recipient of an Oscar in a non-acting category, and his music for Shaft won two Grammy Awards that year. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, and in 2020 the Recording Academy honored him with a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award. He remains one of the most sampled artists of all time.
Hayes’s career began behind the scenes at Stax Records, where in the mid-1960s the 1942-born musician worked as an in-house songwriter, session musician, and record producer. There he formed a writing partnership with David Porter that produced some of the era’s biggest R&B hits, among them “Soul Man” and “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” which he co-wrote and produced for Sam & Dave, “B-A-B-Y” for Carla Thomas, and “I Got to Love Somebody’s Baby” for Johnnie Taylor. “Soul Man” was a gold single by November 1967 and was later selected for the National Recording Registry.
In the late 1960s he launched his solo career. Hot Buttered Soul, released in the summer of 1969, held just four tracks: it opened with a 12-minute version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk on By” and closed with a 19-minute reworking of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” The album peaked at number 8 on the Billboard 200, crossed over onto the jazz charts, and turned gold in December 1969. The Isaac Hayes Movement (1970) followed, then Black Moses (1971), which won a Grammy, and the Shaft soundtrack (1971), which, with its theme single, gained gold certification in 1996; Live at the Sahara Tahoe and Joy both carry gold certifications from 1973. In 1997 he joined the founding cast of Comedy Central’s South Park as the voice of Chef, the elementary-school lunchroom cook, a role he played through the end of the show’s ninth season in 2006, and “Chocolate Salty Balls (P.S. I Love You),” a song he performed as Chef, received international radio airplay in 1999 and reached number one on the UK and Irish singles charts.
On August 10, 2008, Hayes died. He won three Grammy Awards in all, and in 2014 the Library of Congress selected his Shaft soundtrack album for the National Recording Registry. He was named a BMI Icon in 2004 and inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005. Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2020) places Hot Buttered Soul at number 373, and its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time (2021) puts his “Walk on By” at 312.
Primary Wave Music became his estate’s partner in October 2023, administering various publishing interests of the estate and marketing his name, image, and likeness.
