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Isaac Hayes, the musician, composer and manufacturer whose innovational sound changed the sHAPE of pop music and whose shaved head, bejeweled outfits and regal deportment embodied African American masculinity in the 1970s, has died. He was 65.
Family members establish Hayes unresponsive Sunday good afternoon next to a tread-wheel in a downstairs sleeping accommodation in his home just now east of Memphis, Tenn., said Steve Shular, a spokesman for the Shelby County Sheriff's Office.
Hayes' wife, Adjowa, told investigators that her married man "had non been in the best of health recently," Shular said. No autopsy is planned.
FOR THE RECORD: Isaac Hayes obit: The necrology of vocalizer Isaac Hayes in Monday's Section A said that after the 1975 album "Chocolate Chip," Hayes didn't release new material until "Love Attack" in 1986. In fact, Hayes released several albums in that time geological period. �
With albums including 1969's "Hot Buttered Soul" and the double-disc, Grammy-winning "Black Moses" in 1971, Hayes laid the groundwork for both disco and hip-hop.
His rich, baritone horn voice backed by gently unfurling, string-laden arrangements showed how R&B could be both funky and ornate. His famous ruminative interludes on such songs as his cover of Jimmy Webb's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" set the stage for rap's aggrandisement of the black male speaking voice.
He was most famous for his 1971 soundtrack for the blaxploitation classic "Shaft," which brought him an Academy Award for topper song as well as two Grammys, but Hayes had a long and storied vocation beyond that Hollywood high point. In 2002, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
His music and his look-alike as a black artist had a titanic great power, especially during the apex of his fame. With his shaven head, ubiquitous sunglasses and equally ever-present gold jewellery, he cut a inviolable, marketable pattern.
In the 1970s, he released a string of albums for Stax Records, a label that offered a grittier counterpoint to the Motown sound. Hayes' recordings expanded the playing field for soul and R&B artists, proving that an album-oriented market existed for his experimental sounds.
"Hayes' story is one of epic proportions," wrote ethnomusicologist Rob Bowman in "Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records" (1997). "In the first-class honours degree few age of the 1970s he single-handedly redefined the sonic possibilities for black music, in the process opening up the album grocery store as a commercially viable medium for black artists such as Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Funkadelic, and Curtis Mayfield."
Before finding his own voice as a solo creative person, Hayes was a primary architect of Southern soul as portion of the Stax Records writing and production team. Stax was home to Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MGs and other hit-makers.
Hayes' collaborations with David Porter, a mate session musician and lyrist at Stax, gave the Memphis-based judge some of its biggest hits, including "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby" for vocal dyad Sam & Dave and "B-A-B-Y" for Carla Thomas. "Soul Man," another of the songwriting duo's compositions for Sam & Dave, was an early argument of black power that later became a immense crossover hit in 1978 for John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as the Blues Brothers.
The fact that Hayes jutting such a powerful sense of African American gravitas, yet too co-wrote a career-defining reach for two white comedians, illustrates the paradoxical stove of his appeal.
Headlining Wattstax in Los Angeles -- the 1972 festival that some called "the Black Woodstock" -- Hayes took the stage in gilded warrior garb. The crowd greeted him as a king. As a performer, Hayes embraced this role of ambassador of Afrocentric cool.
The shaved-head expect that was central to his image developed in 1964 when the style among some African Americans was to straighten their hair. Tired of the effort that took, Hayes told his barber to cut it off.
"People stared and pointed, but I liked the breeze on my head. It felt great," he told the Chicago Tribune in 1995.
After a concert one nox, when the crowd was screaming for him, a former bagger named Dino who was part of his surety team said: "These people love you, man. They'll follow you anywhere. . . . You're like Moses. Black Moses!"
A writer from Jet magazine publisher picked up on the phrase, and Hayes had mixed feelings at first base as Black Moses became his nickname. He came to like the fact that people "didn't order I'm the Black Moses of the black domain, they aforementioned of the music world."
But the music Hayes offered was as eclectic as any crop up artist's. He covered songs by the Carpenters, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and Jimmy Webb, transforming those "vanilla" hits into slow jams that would appeal to black and white listeners alike. Bacharach and David's "Walk on By" got a 12-minute reading from Hayes on "Hot Buttered Soul." Webb's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" ran 18 minutes.
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