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The first biography of soul pioneer Isaac Hayes, whose groundbreaking music provided the foundation for hip-hop and a new racial paradigm.

This new musical and cultural coda delivered Hayes the first Oscar ever won by a Black musician, as well as the Grammy for Best Song. Yet, few know Hayes’s remarkable achievements. In this compelling buffet of sight and sound, acclaimed music biographer Mark Ribowsky— who has authored illuminating portraits of such luminaries as Stevie Wonder, Little Richard, and Otis Redding—gallops through the many stages of Hayes’s daring and daunting life, starting with Hayes’s difficult childhood in which his mother died young and his father abandoned him.

Ribowsky then takes readers through Hayes’s rise at Memphis’s legendary soul factory, Stax Records, first as a piano player on Otis Redding sessions then as a songwriter and producer teamed with David Porter. Hayes’s subsequent career as a solo artist featured studio methods and out-of-the-box ideas that paved the way for soul to occupy the top of the album charts alongside white rock albums. But his prime years ended prematurely, both as a consequence of f Stax’s red ink and his own self-destructive tendencies.