My virtual rolodex is full of ghosts. My dad, both my uncles, my cousin Virginia who died too young in her sleep. The very archetypes of American music: Mack Rebennack aka Dr. John the Night Tripper, Ike Turner, Teenie Hodges, Poppa Willie Mitchell, Dave Bartholomew, Allen Toussaint. The elusive soul singer Wendy Rene, and her vibrant counterpart, Dr. Mable John, who always had insights about 1960s Detroit and Memphis. When I scroll through my contacts, my finger hovers over their names. Jim Dickinson, Arthur Lee, Wardell Quezergue, Skip Pitts. Roy Head, who lived so loudly it’s hard to believe his energy has been reduced to dust. Deleting their names and numbers would be like erasing the memories themselves. So in my iPhone, at least, they live on.
These contacts exist because, at some point, I stepped into their lives for an interview, and a story was published somewhere. Stories I want to revisit here. Stories I’m calling "Ghost Stories" because their details continue to swirl in my brain long after the magazine pages have faded and yellowed.
Isaac Hayes is one such ghost story. On lazy Sundays, I still play the vinyl copy of Hot Buttered Soul I bought in my early twenties. Hayes digs deep—on the album, he has total artistic freedom, which he wields in expansive versions of pop classics like Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk On By,” which, at fourteen minutes, is four times as long as Dionne Warwick’s hit version. On side two, Hayes spends a leisurely eighteen minutes and 42 seconds covering Jimmy Webb’s standard “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” a song that Glen Campbell sang in under three minutes. As writer Emily Lordi noted in her brilliant posthumous profile of Hayes, published in the New Yorker, the artist also literally expanded his musical presence, creating gatefold album covers like 1971’s Black Moses, which unfolded vertically and horizontally to reveal Hayes, full-length, with his arms stretched wide. “Hayes took up time and space as if it were owed him, and listeners responded,” Lordi wrote.
I remember running into Hayes in the aisles of Memphis’ alternative grocery stores, his cart filled with organic vegetables. It was like seeing Christ himself weighing a bag of beets. I wept during Hayes’ eulogy at Rufus Thomas’ funeral. He hovered over the casket and crooned a beautifully maudlin version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which Judy Garland introduced to the world in the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis. It ranks among the greatest moments in Memphis music history that I have personally witnessed.
I remember Hayes’ athletic frame, typically dressed in dashikis or athletic wear. His passion when he spoke about participating in Civil Rights efforts with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or alongside barber Warren Lewis in the militant Black Knights, who caught the FBI’s attention in late 1968. The last time I saw Hayes was backstage at the 50 Years of Stax concert, which was seventeen years ago this week. The Black Moses was unusually quiet that night, reclining on a chaise lounge in matching sweats and wraparound sunglasses. He’d recently had a minor stroke. We talked briefly, then I moved on. The next time I laid eyes on him was at his funeral a year later. When he died, the Guardian asked me for a story, which I am revisiting here.
As the legend goes, if you plant your pocket change on the silty banks of the lower Mississippi River, copper and silver trees will spring up overnight. Maybe that's not entirely true—but what Memphis, Tennessee lacks in monetary riches has, in musical wealth, been harvested a hundredfold. Beginning in the early 20th century and lasting until the mid-1970s, Memphis was the birthing ground for pop music in its truest form. Popular music—purveyed, initially, by groups such as the Memphis Jug Band and the Mississippi Sheiks (who were the U2 and Radiohead of their day)—then transmogrified into guttural, guitar-based blues; raucous, early rock'n'roll; and sweet southern soul. The hits flowed, initially midwifed by a trio of unlikely doulas: the intense, godlike Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, Hi Records/Royal Studio's cerebrally cool Poppa Willie Mitchell, and Stax head Jim Stewart, a bank teller-turned-soul music maven. They set the standard, and then dozens more would-be producers scrambled to catch up, turning garages, hotel rooms and even YMCA hallways into makeshift studios.
Howlin' Wolf, BB King, Ike Turner, Bobby "Blue" Bland and Finas Newborn's family band. Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Charlie Feathers, Charlie Rich. OV Wright and Al Green; Elvis Presley and Otis Redding. Even their names serve as onomatopoeic clues to the sonic mysteries that sprang into America's consciousness overnight.
Some were born within the city limits; others who were ripe for reinvention migrated here from outlying specks on the map. Some stopped here for a short layover, on their way to bigger and better things; others put down Memphis roots and remained, no matter how rich or successful they became.
Isaac Hayes was one of those who came from the country.
Born—literally, in a tin-roofed shack—to a family of sharecroppers in rural Covington, Tennessee, in 1942, Isaac Lee Hayes, Jr. was orphaned at an early age and handed over to his grandmother, Rushia Wade. As a child, Hayes toiled in the cotton fields and found solace at church. He moved, with his grandparents and sister Willette Hayes, to Memphis in June 1949. They found a home on the north side of town, but by the time Hayes graduated from high school, he'd already found his way to an inner-city southside neighborhood that lay between Sun Studio and Graceland.
If Memphis is the birthplace of blues and rock'n'roll music, Soulsville, USA, as it was eventually called—is recognized as ground zero. Aretha Franklin took her first breath here, on Lucy Street; blues pianist Memphis Slim and R&B singer Johnny Ace hung their hats in houses just a few blocks away in either direction. Two gospel powerhouses, the diminutive Lucie Campbell and her larger-than-life counterpart, Rev Herbert Brewster, saved souls, while Slim Jenkins' Place and the Four-Way Grill addressed the neighborhood’s more earthly needs. In the 1950s, an abandoned Soulsville cinema, the Royal, was resurrected as Hi Records' recording studio. A decade later, Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton transformed the Capitol Theatre, located at 926 E. McLemore Avenue, into a studio called Stax.
Long before Hayes walked through the doors at Stax, a plethora of neighborhood kids—including would-be songwriter David Porter, who bagged groceries across the street, and organist Booker T. Jones—had already made it across the threshold, hanging out in the tiny Satellite Record Shop and availing themselves whenever opportunity struck. Hayes, dubbed "the Smooth Crooner" by his classmates, tried to gain entry twice and failed, first with a doo-wop group, the Ambassadors, and then with a blues band called Calvin and the Swing Cats. He slipped past Stewart's watchful eye in 1964, as the pianist on a Floyd Newman instrumental called “Frog Stomp.”
Hayes’ childhood was tough. Like so many Black matriarchs in the Jim Crow south, Rushia Wade fought to overcome abject poverty. Due to the draconian laws enacted to keep Black families poor, she often fell short. She and her grandchildren bounced from a one-room flat above a storefront church to less habitable places where they had to break down the wooden outhouse and burn it for kindling, or trundle buckets of water from the neighbors' apartments in order to cook and wash up. Unconsciously emulating Clarksdale, Mississippi-born Ike Turner and Rosemark, Tennessee native Bobby "Blue" Bland, Hayes responded the only way he knew how: mastering the street corner hustle. Turner's method was raising chickens and masquerading as a beggar; Bland preferred parking White folks' cars and transporting moonshine across the county line. Hayes adapted to city life by delivering groceries, shining shoes and passing out fliers for shows at the Savoy Theater, a segregated venue at 1268 Thomas Street.
Hayes dropped out of school once, but, encouraged by his grandmother, stuck it out, attaining his degree from Manassas High School when he was 20 years old and married. With a baby on the way, Hayes got a job at a meat packing plant, and in his spare time started hanging out at American Sound Studios, run by the great White, blue-eyed soul songwriter and producer Chips Moman. By 1961, Hayes was singing three nights a week at Curry's Club Tropicana; he picked up piano by bluffing his way into a gig at the Plantation Inn; and, when Booker T. went off to college, he began sitting in on various Stax sessions. From there he became a songwriter, writing hit after hit for Stax with his partner David Porter. in 1968, with the release of the expansive, shape-shifting Presenting Isaac Hayes, he catapulted into stardom. By the time Hayes’ second album, Hot Buttered Soul, was released a year later, he had transformed into one of the dominating figures in the second decade of Memphis's reign as, arguably, the most important city in the history of popular music.
The number of hit singles that flew out of Memphis recording studios and onto the Billboard charts from 1954-1974 is still mind-boggling. Starting with Elvis's Sun debut, “That's All Right Mama,” Memphis hit its stride with Hayes and Porter's contributions to the Stax catalog, which included “Hold On (I’m Comin’),” “You Got Me Hummin',” “When Something is Wrong with My Baby,” “Soul Man,” “Wrap It Up,” and “I Thank You,” all written for Sam & Dave; “Your Good Thing (Is About to End),” penned for Mable John; and “B-A-B-Y” and “Something Good (Is Going to Happen to You),” written for Carla Thomas. Hayes and Porter-credited hits for Johnnie Taylor, Rufus Thomas, and the Soul Children followed. Stax’s lengthy run was hampered by the death of Otis Redding, the loss of its back catalog to Atlantic Records, and a series of faulty distribution deals that followed. Up next: a string of Chips Moman-engineered hits—122 songs, to be exact, including Sandy Posey's “Born a Woman,” Dusty Springfield's “Son of a Preacher Man,” Neil Diamond's “Sweet Caroline” and Elvis's “Suspicious Minds”—cut at American Sound Studios, which was echoed by Al Green and Ann Peebles' no-less-astonishing Hi oeuvre.
Recounting a list of hits is easy. It's much more difficult to decipher the why. Ask anyone with any amount of interest in Memphis music, and they'll point to the humidity, the aftereffects of segregation, and that fertile Mississippi silt. The truth is, no one quite understands just what happened here time and time again.
Race relations were certainly a factor. Like many great art movements, much of Memphis's musical legacy was borne on an unsettling malaise that hung over the city like a fog. Sun Studio, in which Phillips harnessed what he described as "a raw, Black sound," lay just a stone's throw from the second gravesite of the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan, who was eventually disinterred and relocated in 2021. Brought to town to galvanize striking sanitation workers, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where many Stax staffers, Black and White, gathered to eat barbecue, swim and work on songs. Talented Black creatives who tried their luck in the music biz toed a delicate line, as crooner Billy Eckstine discovered when he sat down for a meal at a Memphis restaurant and was served a steak dinner topped with finely ground glass.
Religion—amplified by the sharp contrast between the devil-may-care attitudes that prevailed on Saturday night and the humble prayers for eternal salvation on Sunday morning—was another factor. Some musicians, such as Jerry Lee Lewis, struggled to choose between the club scene and the church. Others, including Elvis, who in his early years often snuck out the back door of the all-white Assembly of God Church to take in services at Reverend Brewster's East Trigg Baptist Church, capitalized on the dynamics of religious fanaticism and hedonistic fervor.
Poverty was the most motivating factor of all. It gnawed at empty stomachs, and spurred countless dreamers into action. Even Elvis started out as poor folk. His father, a one-time check forger, did time on Parchman Farm; upon his release in 1948, the Presleys loaded everything they owned into their 1937 Plymouth and moved from Tupelo, Mississippi, to Memphis's Lauderdale Courts housing project in a desperate bid to start life fresh. Elvis's dogged determination put the family on an upward trajectory that rocketed them, in less than a decade, from public housing to the Graceland mansion.
At Stax, Hayes embraced all of it. Teamed with fellow songwriter Porter, he mined his gospel background for material written for the bulk of the Stax roster. As a solo star in the 1970s, he drew on early experiences of racism and poverty as he transformed into Black Moses, an avatar for the Black consciousness movement replete with an outfit made of chains and lush stringed accompaniment. And, thanks to his Oscar-winning composition “(Theme From) Shaft,” he was landing $300,000 a year, running his own recording studio, called Hot Buttered Soul, and living part-time in Beverly Hills.
The confident, sharply dressed bald-headed figure who strode down McLemore Avenue bore little resemblance to the resolute young man in patched, outgrown clothes who once loitered outside under the Stax marquee. With the delivery of a 1972 Cadillac El Dorado custom-trimmed in white fur and solid gold, a red and gray Rolls Royce, part ownership of the American Basketball Association team the Memphis Tams, and three homes, including a fourteen-room East Memphis mansion, the metamorphosis from cotton picker to megastar was complete. Importantly, Hayes's material excess showed that he had achieved the financial empowerment that Civil Rights leaders deemed essential for racial equality. Along with the musical space he took up, Hayes’ excessive wealth became a key part of his hyper-masculine identity.
Notably, Hayes was also deeply dedicated to philanthropy. In 1971, at the age of 28, he bought new apartments for 200 senior citizens who had been displaced by a fire. In the Virgin Islands, he funded a housing project at a cost of $8 million. He founded the Hayes Foundation to “alleviate suffering wherever and whenever possible,” declaring to Chester Higgins in Ebony that “I’m doing this so I can share my good fortune” with “people who are shunted aside, ignored by society, and forced to live under conditions of purposeless despair.” Unbeknownst to Hayes, his good thing was about to end.
Here in west Tennessee, it's perceived as a matter of fact: the success of many Memphis musicians is often eclipsed by a spectacular downfall. Bo Carter, who as the frontman for the Mississippi Sheiks was once one of the south's biggest recording stars, died blind and destitute in Memphis in September 1964. Johnny Cash, who never quite recovered from the guilt he felt after the death of his brother Jack, wrestled with drug addiction for years. O.V. Wright, another drug casualty, died of a heart attack at 41 and was given a pauper's burial in an unmarked grave. Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays were killed when their plane crashed into icy Lake Monona in December 1967. Presley died, alone and on the toilet, in August 1977. Al Green barely survived an attack from a spurned lover, who tossed a pot of boiling grits on his bare skin. Ike Turner survived a prison stint and accusations of wife-beating, only to die of a cocaine overdose at the age of 76.
An aside: after Justin Timberlake’s arrest in Sag Harbor, New York, for drunk driving just last Tuesday, the Memphis-born Mouseketeer turned pop star has been the subject of three excoriating New York Times articles, which lambasted Timberlake as a “weak” has-been who has neither taken ownership of his previous behavior towards Britney Spears and Janet Jackson, nor faced any penalties for his privilege. The NYT also called Timberlake to task for appropriating Black culture while appearing tone-deaf to Black causes, echoing a point first made in the pages of Cosmopolitan, of all places, eight years ago.
In a fiery NYT op-ed published last weekend, novelist Jennifer Weiner wrote, “That Justin Timberlake—the one who has emerged over the last few years—looked less like a pop Prince Charming, more a serial exploiter of women and of Black music and culture, a man who has enjoyed unearned privilege and undeserved successes, who has been served that long-awaited slice of humble pie. Which is why plenty of people were so eager to view his arrest this week as a kind of deferred-karma comeuppance. I was, I confess, one of those people. Some part of me wants to believe that if the ultimate Teflon-coated rich white dude is no longer so able to charm his way out of trouble, a larger cultural sea change might be underway.”
Ouch. Karma is a bitch.
But karma had nothing to do with Hayes’ downfall. Rather, Hayes was viewed as an outsized symbol of Black success that Memphis’ White establishment couldn’t, and wouldn’t, tolerate. He was forced into bankruptcy brought on by Stax Records' own financial problems, which cost him royalties from everything he'd written, produced or recorded at Stax. A sacrificial lamb for White supremacy, he endured a humiliating public auction, where greedy Memphians pawed over his lavish wardrobe, his jewelry, and other personal effects. Eventually, he built back his wealth, but he never reclaimed the stardom he was due.
The Memphis music establishment fared less well. When the once-mighty Stax and American Sound Studios closed their doors in the mid-1970s, a creative diaspora took place, flinging singers and session players far and wide. Those who could packed their bags and moved out of town, following the paths of relatives who fled the South in the great migration of the 1940s. With a few exceptions, such as Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” which was recorded at Royal Studios in 2014, the number of hits recorded here in the last four decades are faint blips on the Billboard charts. On the flipside, despite the lack of supporting infrastructure, real capital, or the buy-in from the Recording Academy, national journalists, or other king-makers, the independent music scene in Memphis is thriving. See Unapologetic, Goner Records, the legacy of the underground rap scene, the events happening at Memphis Listening Lab, and much of the music played on WYXR 91.7 Memphis for proof.
Epilogue:
Hayes was just 65 years old when he died on August 10, 2008, just a few days before the 31st anniversary of Elvis's passing, a hoopla locals call "Death Week." It capped off a sad couple of weeks. On July 16, 73-year-old Dee Atlas Henderson—known as longtime volunteer blues DJ "Cap'n Pete"—was murdered. Henderson, like Hayes, was the son of sharecroppers who came to Memphis in search of a better life. To the horror of friends and family, his grandson, Cortez Thomas, confessed within hours to shooting Henderson in the back as he tended to his garden. Five days later, WDIA disc jockey Steve Ladd was felled by a brain aneurysm. Hayes’ death was reported less than a day after the untimely passing of Chicago-born comedian Bernie Mac, four months after the two filmed the movie Soul Men in Memphis. The movie was originally intended as a Sam and Dave tribute. Now it memorializes Mac and Hayes' last work.