Bermuda Music Festival - Page 3

Then, as a solo artist Hayes stretched the boundaries of soul adding strings and social themes; with Sly Stone, Gamble and Huff, Curtis Mayfield and Norman Whitfield, he helped move black music from a singles to an album format. On albums like Hot Buttered Soul, The Isaac Hayes Movement, To Be Continued, Black Moses, and especially the Oscar and Grammy-winning Shaft, Hayes took his brand of elegant but funky soul to a huge new audience.

Isaac Hayes was born August 20, 1942 in Covington, Tennessee. He lived on a farm until he was 7, then moved with his maternal grandparents (who raised him) to Memphis. The family was musical and active in the church, school and community. Hayes' first public performance was a duet with his sister at church when he was 3. Already the musical perfectionist, Hayes halted his sister mid-performance when she made a mistake.

In high school Hayes won a singing contest, noted the attention his performance generated, and said "Hmm, this is what I want to do." He took a year of band (tuba then sax) and began singing with a variety of combos: rock 'n' roll, doo wop, blues, gospel, jazz.

"I loved it all - this adventure into music - I was sucking up everything like a sponge," he says.

"With the blues band we played the juke joints of Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas. We didn't make much money: it was all the corn liquor you could drink and enough money to get back home. If the owner didn't feel like paying you, he didn't pay you and you didn't argue because he had a .38 pistol on his hip," he laughs darkly. "With gospel it was all the food you could eat, and then maybe a collection was taken up for expenses."

Eventually he "learned enough piano to get along," and wound up on the staff at Memphis' Stax Records by around '63, having been turned down three times by the label as an artist. An old friend from his doo wop days, David Porter, was already with the label and said to Hayes, "You play music and I write lyrics, let's team up and start writing and producing like Holland-Dozier-Holland up at Motown."

"When we started writing," Hayes remembers, "guys around the city would tease us: 'Hey hit men, how many hits did you write today?' But we kept our noses to the grindstone and we finally clicked with Carla Thomas' 'How Do You Quit' in '65.

Then they chose David and I to write and produce for Sam and Dave, and after we had a big hit with them, more people around town wanted to write songs. We organized a writer's workshop and everything," recalls Hayes. Their writing for Sam & Dave was typical of their approach. "We would come up with a good subject or a good hook. For the meat of the song you have to ask yourselves some questions: If you want this girl, why do you want her? If you get her, what would you do? People have to able to get what you’re trying to get across. As far as music is concerned, you've got to come up with a groove with changes and things that keep the emotional content in it.

Article Author: Eric Olsen

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