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 had a 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, dark glasses and 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 the character of Jerome “Chef” McElroy, in the animated TV comedy South Park and its movie offshoot.

The show made Hayes a cult figure to a new generation, and in 2000 he appeared in a remake of Shaft with Samuel L. Jackson. He also returned to 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 how the show satirised religion and Scientology in particular. South Park’s creators responded with an episode which suggested that his character had been brainwashed by sinister and manipulative forces.

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

• Isaac Hayes: a new black rock music star

Related Internet Links

• Watch Isaac Hayes sing Walk on by

• Watch the opening scene from Shaft

Isaac Lee Hayes was born in Covington, Tennessee, in 1942. His parents died when he was young and he was 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 moved to Memphis and its rich musical tradition in blues and R&B.

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, Hayes made his first recording, Laura We’re on our Last Go Round, in 1962.

The record made little impact and he continued to work by day as a meat packer. However, playing in 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 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.

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 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. Even better was to come when he scored Gordon Parks’s 1971 film Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree as a New York private detective. Shaft ushered in the era of so-called blaxploitation films. More importantly from Hayes’s point of view, it made him the first black composer to win an Oscar for Best Score and gave him a chart-topping album. Its main theme was also a No 1 single, made memorable by its distinctive wah-wah guitar, thrilling staccato brass hooks and deep, minimalist semi-spoken vocal.

With Otis Redding dead and Stevie Wonder’s rise to greatness still to happen, Hayes now rivalled Marvin Gaye as the biggest male star in soul music. His next album, Black Moses (1972), reflected his new status. It came with a sleeve that folded out to form a large cross and featured Hayes attired like a biblical prophet. It was open to charges of pretension but the title track still won him a Grammy for Best Pop instrumental.