For a while, Hayes lived on the streets after his grandfather became ill. Hayes spent one summer sleeping in empty cars in a junkyard, according to the 1972 edition of "Current Biography."
Self-conscious about his shabby clothes, he briefly dropped out of school in ninth grade to earn money to replace them. His teachers tracked him down and persuaded him to return to school.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, August 12, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 41 words Type of Material: Correction
Isaac Hayes obituary: The obituary of singer Isaac Hayes in Monday's Section A said that after the 1975 album "Chocolate Chip," Hayes didn't release new material until "Love Attack" in 1986. In fact, Hayes released several albums in that time period.
A self-taught musician, he began to play piano, organ and saxophone. As a ninth-grader, Hayes won a school talent contest with his rendition of a song by Nat "King" Cole, whom he idolized.
By his late teens, Hayes was married and about to become a father, so he left school again to earn a living. But he earned his high school diploma in 1962 after attending classes at night.
After leaving school, he started appearing with local R&B groups on the Memphis club circuit in a series of short-lived groups with such names as Sir Isaac and the Doo-Dads, the Teen Tones, and Sir Calvin and His Swinging Cats.
One evening, a friend asked him if he could play piano in her brother's band at a New Year's Eve party because he was away in the Air Force.
"I said, 'Sure,' even though the extent of my musical knowledge was 'Chopsticks' and 'Heart and Soul,' " Hayes said in the 1995 Chicago Tribune article. "I felt like I was heading for the Inquisition."
He was told the band sounded "pretty good," a compliment Hayes later attributed to the noisy, drunken clientele who "were gonna dance to anything." But it led to a regular gig that made Hayes confident enough in his piano playing to move on.
In the early 1960s, Stax Records hired Hayes as a session pianist and organist. He teamed up with Porter and began writing songs.
It took them "about a year to get in a groove," Hayes recalled in 2001 in the South Bend, Ind., Tribune.
Once they did, they penned about 200 songs, some of them R&B classics.
"We'd get together the night before a session to write, and we liked to have the artist present -- especially Sam & Dave -- because we fed off them," Hayes told the Chicago Tribune.
Hayes' early method of calling out chord changes to the musicians who were fanned out around him remained central to the way he worked.
"It was record-making at its most casual and rough-hewn, yet it produced hit after hit," Chicago Tribune rock critic Greg Kot wrote.
