Isaac Hayes was born on August 20, 1942. Hayes was a singer, songwriter, producer, and actor who was among the most important figures in R&B in the 1960s and 1970s.

Hayes began his musical career in the early 1960s, working as a session musician at Stax Records in Memphis. He soon began writing songs for Stax artists, usually in collaboration with David Porter. Hayes’s later career as a performer sometimes overshadows his importance as a songwriter, but even if he’d never made any records of his own, he’d still be remembered as a major figure. During his career, Hayes wrote 30 songs that made the top 40 of the R&B charts for other artists, most of them in partnership with Porter. In fact, if all we knew of Hayes were the songs that he and Porter wrote for Sam & Dave, that would be an impressive legacy; they include R&B classics “Soul Man,” “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” and “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby.”

Hayes released his first album as a performer in 1968. Presenting Isaac Hayes didn’t attract much attention, and Hayes returned to producing and songwriting.

Stax Records went through a turbulent period in the late 1960s. One of the company’s major stars, Otis Redding, died in late 1967. And in 1968, Stax went through a series of complicated legal and financial difficulties with Atlantic Records, the larger label that served as Stax’s distributor. The resolution of those problems hit Stax hard; Atlantic took control of the Stax back catalog, and Sam & Dave became Atlantic recording artists.

Desperate for income, Stax executives called on all of its artists and creative staff to record new albums as quickly as possible, hoping to flood the market with dozens of new albums in 1969. The failure of his first album had left Hayes uninterested in recording again, and he was only willing to do a new album if he was given full creative control.

Stax agreed, and the resulting album, Hot Buttered Soul, made Hayes a star. It topped the R&B and jazz charts, and made the top ten of the pop charts. The album had only four songs, and two of those were cover versions, stretched to extreme length with long spoken monologues and instrumental improvisation. Hayes’ version of “Walk on By” was twelve minutes long, and his “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” lasted for eighteen minutes. Trimmed for radio airplay to five and seven minutes, respectively—still unusually long for singles of that era—both songs were hits.

Hayes repeated that formula—a few very long songs, often covers, shortened for radio—on his next several albums, with moderate success. But the song that would define his performing career was something very different—the “Theme from Shaft.”

When Hayes heard about the movie Shaft, he approached director Gordon Parks hoping to play the title role, not knowing that Richard Roundtree had already been cast. But Parks did offer Hayes the job of writing the movie’s score, and it became one of the most iconic soundtracks of the 1970s. The Shaft soundtrack was a double album, mostly made up on instrumentals. The three vocal tracks were all hit records, and the “Theme from Shaft” was the biggest hit of Hayes’s career, spending two weeks at #1 on the pop charts. The song won the Academy Award for Best Song, making Hayes the first African-American to win an Oscar in a non-acting category.

In 1974, Stax and Hayes were both in financial crisis, both in debt; his finances had gotten tangled with those of the record company. He was eventually released from his contract at Stax, and spent the next several years struggling musically. He had a bit of a comeback in 1979, when his single “Don’t Let Go” was a minor hit, and Dionne Warwick’s “Déjà Vu,” co-written by Hayes, was an even bigger one.

But by the 1980s, Hayes was focusing primarily on acting, with roles in a wide variety of films, including the blaxploitation parody I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, the Mel Brooks comedy Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and the music-business drama Hustle & Flow.

His biggest acting role was as a voice actor on the animated TV series South Park, where Hayes played the elementary-school cafeteria worker Chef for almost a decade. The character played to Hayes’s strengths as a comedian and as a musician; Chef offered advice to the show’s fourth-grade characters, usually in the form of an inappropriately raunchy R&B song. One of those songs, “Chocolate Salty Balls,” became a #1 hit in England in 1998.

Hayes’s job on South Park ended abruptly, and in a somewhat confusing fashion. Late in the show’s ninth season, the episode “Trapped in the Closet” (in which Hayes’s Chef did not appear) set its comic sights on Scientology. Hayes was a Scientologist, and in a January 2006 interview, he said that while he didn’t like the way the show had treated his faith, he defended the show’s controversial style and the creators’ right to make whatever jokes they wanted.

But in March 2006, shortly before the new season of South Park began, a statement was released in Hayes’s name asking to be released from his contract with Comedy Central. It was a surprising about-face, and there were almost immediately reports that Hayes had not written that statement; those reports seemed even more credible with the news that Hayes had recently suffered a stroke. In a 2016 interview, Hayes’s son claimed that the statement was written by Scientologists in Hayes’s entourage, at a time when his health left him vulnerable to outside influence.

After the stroke, it was unlikely Hayes would have been physically able to continue acting on South Park, but the show’s creators made sure that the bridge was completely burned. The new season began with “The Return of Chef," which used sound clips of Hayes’s voice from earlier episodes to tell a story in which Chef was portrayed as having been brainwashed by a cult of child molesters. At the end of the episode, Chef was killed in gruesome fashion, bouncing from one lethal accident to another.

Hayes made only a few public appearances after his stroke, and they were awkward. His speech was halting, and he often appeared confused. Hayes died on August 10, 2008, at his home near Memphis, after suffering another stroke.

Isaac Hayes was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame (with David Porter) in 2005. In addition to the albums linked above, more of Hayes’s music is available for streaming at Hoopla.