Isaac Hayes was a seminal figure in the development of modern black American music. An architect of the Memphis soul sound, he wrote and played on many of the biggest hits on the Stax label, whose recordings in the 1960s rivalled Motown as the dominant sound of black pop. He then went on to enjoy a highly successful career as a solo performer, making a series of groundbreaking records that can now be seen as the precursors of both disco and rap.

He reached his commercial zenith in 1971 when he wrote and recorded the soundtrack of the film Shaft, which won him an Academy Award. He was the first black composer to win an Oscar for best score and the theme from the film also gave him a million-selling No 1 single.

With his shaven head, ever present dark glasses and penchant for bling, he cut a striking figure perfectly tailored for playing villainous characters on the big screen and in the 1980s he dropped out of music for an acting career. Yet his best-known role was a speaking part, when in the late 1990s he provided the voice for one of the main characters in the animated TV comedy South Park.

The show made Hayes a cult figure to a new generation not born when Shaft had been released, and in 2000 he appeared in a remake of the film alongside Samuel L. Jackson. He also returned to making music, enjoying a big hit with the South Park-related Chocolate Salty Balls. A well-known Scientologist, he left South Park in controversial circumstances in 2006, reportedly in protest at the way that the show satirised religion and Scientology in particular.

Times Archive, 1973: Isaac Hayes at the Rainbow

A giant of a man bared to the waist except for gold chains hanging round his neck and holding up ludicrously unbecoming black tights

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Born Isaac Lee Hayes in Covington, Tennessee, he was orphaned as child and raised by his sharecropping grandparents on a farm.

He began singing in the local Baptist choir and by his teens had taught himself to play piano, organ and saxophone. By then his grandparents had abandoned farming and moved to Memphis, one of the most musically rich cities in America with a long tradition in blues and r&b and made world famous as the birthplace of rock’n’roll by Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips’s Sun studio. Yet the city had one more dramatic contribution to make to the development of American popular music and Hayes was to find himself at the centre of it.

After cutting his teeth performing in local clubs with a series of short-lived groups that included Sir Isaac and the Doo-Dads, the Teen Tones and Sir Calvin and His Swinging Cats, he made his first recording, Laura We’re on our Last Go Round for the local Youngstown label in 1962.

The record made little impact and he continued to work by day as a meat packer. However, playing in local clubs by night was getting him noticed in the right places and in 1964 he began playing sax with the Mar-Keys, an instrumental combo signed to the Memphis-based Stax Records. His playing caught the ear of the label’s boss, Jim Stewart, who asked him to join the Stax house band, His first job as a session musician for the label came backing the mighty Otis Redding.

Stewart also teamed him with David Porter, an insurance salesman with songwriting aspirations, and invited them to see what they could come up with. The results exceeded his wildest expectations. Over the next few years, the Hayes-Porter duo composed some 200 songs, including You Don’t Know Like I Know, Soul Man and Hold On, I’m Comin’ for Sam and Dave, B-A-B-Y for Carla Thomas and a stream of r&b hits for Johnnie Taylor. He also played on many of the label’s most successful releases, helping to fashion the Memphis soul sound, a tougher and funkier style than the sweet soul-pop emerging from Detroit on the Motown label, Stax’s only serious rival as the sound of 1960s black America.

His debut solo album, Presenting Isaac Hayes, appeared in 1968. The result of a post-party late night session with Duck Dunn and Al Jackson, the rhythm section of Booker T and the MG’s, the record sold poorly and Stax had little expectation of his next album, Hot Buttered Soul, released on the same day in 1969 as 26 other albums from the label and considered little more than a makeweight alongside new recordings from Booker T, Eddie Floyd and Johnnie Taylor and others.

The format of Hot Buttered Soul was at first sight unpromising — four songs including such familiar standards as Walk On By and By the Time I Get to Phoenix given extended and personalised versions with intimate pre-rap spoken monologues by Hayes backed by wah-wah guitar, funked-up bass, muscular drums and layers of strings. Yet, after being taken up by late-night radio disc jockeys, the album eventually reached No 8 in the Billboard chart, outselling every other Stax release of the year.

It was followed in 1970 by The Isaac Hayes Movement and To Be Continued in 1971. Both were in similar style to Hot Buttered Soul and repeated its success. But even better was to come when he scored Gordon Parks’s 1971 film Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree as a black New York private detective. Shaft ushered in the era of so-called “blaxpoloitation” films.