(then we can dig it)<\/p>\n
Years of watching \u201970s Black sitcoms prepared me for the righteous hood lingo (\u201cRight on!\u201d \u201cCan you dig it?\u201d) Hayes lays on the listener. As a middle-schooler who was beginning to embrace rap music, all this jive-talk jargon felt dated to me. But the older I\u2019d get and the more I kept seeing it continuously<\/a> mentioned<\/a> on TV<\/a>, I began to realize that Hayes\u2019 ode to this cocky, lethal loverman, however silly and simple it sounded, was a catchy, funky earworm for those who longed to be as sexy, smooth, and stylish as Shaft\u2014or Hayes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Shaft, based on co-writer Ernest Tidyman\u2019s 1970 detective novel, starts off as swaggerific as the theme. Hayes\u2019 backing band The Bar-Kays lay on one instrument after another\u2014a hi-hat to start off, then a wocka-wocka guitar groove that would become synonymous with Blaxploitation scores, with horns and strings collectively later working up a frenzy\u2014as the camera follows around our leather coat-wearing hero (Richard Roundtree) walking confidently around New York.\u00a0<\/p>\n He gives cars who almost hit him the finger, flashes his PI badge to a street hustler who approaches him (the hustler amusingly scurries away when he sees it), and basically walks around like a confident soul brotha\u2014an image Black America just wasn\u2019t seeing on the big screen at the time.<\/p>\n What I didn\u2019t know as a kid was that Hayes had a history of orchestrating music into an ever-building tizzy before he got into his vocals. His 1969 career-launching second album Hot Buttered Soul included lengthy, elaborate covers like the 12-minute \u201cWalk On By.\u201d (The four-and-a-half-minute single version would later be used<\/a> in the 1995 Hughes Brothers flick Dead Presidents). Hayes turns Burt Bacharach and Hal David\u2019s bossa nova-ish ballad\u2014originally sung by Dionne Warwick\u2014into a psychedelic soul epic complete with fuzzy guitar work (from Funkadelic guitarist Harold Beane) that\u2019s said to be inspired by Ennio Morricone\u2019s \u201cDuello Finale\u201d<\/a> piece in Sergio Leone\u2019s Once Upon A Time In The West.<\/p>\n Much like what Morricone did with Clint Eastwood\u2019s Man With No Name in Leone\u2019s Dollars trilogy<\/a>, Hayes came up with bold, dominant traveling music for his bold, dominant antihero. When Shaft gets hired by a Harlem kingpin (Moses Gunn) to track down his kidnapped daughter, we get a montage of Shaft in shoe-leather investigating mode, questioning locals who might have some leads (including the movie\u2019s director, photographer-filmmaker Gordon Parks, in a brief cameo), all to the sounds of Hayes\u2019 \u201cSoulsville.\u201d<\/p>\n Named after the headquarters of Stax Records, the legendary, Memphis-based soul label that released the soundtrack (and where Hayes was its biggest star), \u201cSoulsville\u201d is a melancholy number of ghetto struggle, released just a few months before Marvin Gaye would give us \u201cInner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)\u201d on his immortal What\u2019s Going On. In a feature on the 2002 Criterion Collection release<\/a> of Shaft, music scholar Shana L. Redmond mentions how Hayes had to have been inspired by the bluesy, Southern soul that Aretha Franklin, producer Jerry Wexler, and a bunch of Muscle Shoals session musicians created on her breakthrough I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You album in 1967.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Hayes recorded the score at MGM Studios, he sought out to prove he could provide background music for any onscreen situation, whether it\u2019s starting off a bar scene<\/a> with the rousing\/arousing horns of his slippery dance single \u201cDo Your Thing\u201d (no shade to Hayes, but I\u2019ve always preferred James Brown prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Lyn Collins\u2019 hellacious cover<\/a>) or the samba-ish jazz fusion<\/a> that plays during a slur-filled cafe scene<\/a> where Shaft meets up with a mob crony. It also set the template for all the Blaxploitation scores that would come after 1971, giving us such oft-used music cues as the loungy, easy-listening \u201clove theme\u201d<\/a> that appears whenever the male lead is blowing a girl\u2019s back out. (Shaft does this to his main squeeze in an erotically over-the-top scene.) He also gives Blaxploitation audiences that nail-biting standby: the percussion-heavy riff that gets going whenever some action is about to go down.\u00a0<\/p>\n The bongos go crazy in the shoot-\u2019em-up climax, as Shaft and a crew of militant brothas sneak into a hotel to rescue the kingpin\u2019s daughter from Mafia hoods. It\u2019s a triumphant finale, with the brothas lighting up the hideout and escaping with the daughter, fleeing in waiting cabs before the cops show up, and Shaft coolly walking away into the night like an Afro-ed white knight\u2014to the sounds of his own end theme, of course.<\/p>\n As the half-a-million-budgeted Shaft became a runaway, revolutionary hit\u2014grossing $13 million, single-handedly saving its studio from bankruptcy, and leaving the door wide open for more films starring modern-day Black crimefighters\u2014the soundtrack (re-recorded at Stax Studios and released as a double album) was also a successful groundbreaker. The score hit the top of Billboard 200, as well as the Black and jazz charts, and won a Grammy for Best Original Score. Hayes also won two Grammys and a Best Original Song Oscar for \u201cTheme From Shaft,\u201d a tune that former film critic Elvis Mitchell once wrote<\/a> \u201chas survived the evolution from groundbreaker to cultural laugh line to signature standard.\u201d<\/p>\n Unfortunately, Hayes wouldn\u2019t score the Shaft sequels; Parks himself did the tunes for Shaft\u2019s Big Score in 1972, while Super Fly<\/a> arranger Johnny Pate handled Shaft In Africa in 1973. (Hayes would actually go on to star in and score the 1974 actioner Truck Turner<\/a>, where he played a Shaft-like skip tracer.) Thankfully, his Shaft soundtrack laid the groundwork for future R&B stars to get their Henry Mancini on and compose Black-ass music for Black-ass movies and their Black-ass audiences throughout the following decade.<\/p>\n Next time: Meet the Los Angeles version of Shaft\u2014and the Motown legend who provided his theme music.<\/p>\n