Isaac Hayes

Isaac Lee Hayes Jr. was born in Covington, Tennessee, the second child of Eula (née Wade) and Isaac Hayes Sr. After his mother died young and his father abandoned his family, Hayes was raised by his maternal grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Willie Wade Sr. The child of a sharecropper family, Hayes grew up working on farms in the Tennessee counties of Shelby and Tipton. At age five, Hayes began singing at his local church and he taught himself to play the piano, Hammond organ, flute, and saxophone.

Hayes dropped out of high school, but his former teachers at Manassas High School in Memphis encouraged him to complete his diploma, which he did at the age of 21. After graduating from high school, Hayes was offered several music scholarships from colleges and universities. He turned down all of them to provide for his immediate family, working at a meat-packing plant in Memphis by day and playing nightclubs and juke joints several evenings a week in Memphis and nearby northern Mississippi. Hayes's first professional gigs, in the late 1950s, were as a singer at Curry's Club in North Memphis, backed by Ben Branch's houseband.