In the year-long series Sounds Of Blaxploitation, Craig D. Lindsey plays the hits that defined a genre, drawing connections between the music of the moment and the films that gave it a platform.
It’s hard to remember what came first: Catching the 1971 detective story Shaft one late night on a UHF station, or listening to my mother’s snap-crackle-pop vinyl copy of the soundtrack in my room. But the thing I remember the most about meeting John Shaft for the first time is that I wasn’t that impressed with the theme.
As a young lad who watched way too much damn television in his formative years, I kept seeing this “Theme From Shaft” being mentioned from time to time on sketch shows and in stand-up routines. I got the sense the song was a badass anthem that only cool people could sing. When I finally heard it, I was surprised to learn that there wasn’t much singing at all.
The bulk of the song is instrumental, leading up to a spoken-word rap by its songwriter-producer-performer Isaac Hayes, who I mostly knew as that bald Black dude from the John Carpenter movie Escape From New York. The call-and-response lyrics are brief and kinda laughable: “Who’s the Black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?” He coos this before his backup singers collectively answer with the titular detective, prompting Hayes to add approvingly, “You damn right.”
And, of course, there’s its most famous exchange:
They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother–
(shut your mouth)
I’m talkin’ ’bout Shaft
(then we can dig it)
Years of watching ’70s Black sitcoms prepared me for the righteous hood lingo (“Right on!” “Can you dig it?”) 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’d get and the more I kept seeing it continuouslymentioned on TV, I began to realize that Hayes’ 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—or Hayes.
Shaft, based on co-writer Ernest Tidyman’s 1970 detective novel, starts off as swaggerific as the theme. Hayes’ backing band The Bar-Kays lay on one instrument after another—a 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—as the camera follows around our leather coat-wearing hero (Richard Roundtree) walking confidently around New York.
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—an image Black America just wasn’t seeing on the big screen at the time.
What I didn’t 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 “Walk On By.” (The four-and-a-half-minute single version would later be used in the 1995 Hughes Brothers flick Dead Presidents). Hayes turns Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s bossa nova-ish ballad—originally sung by Dionne Warwick—into a psychedelic soul epic complete with fuzzy guitar work (from Funkadelic guitarist Harold Beane) that’s said to be inspired by Ennio Morricone’s “Duello Finale” piece in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West.
Much like what Morricone did with Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name in Leone’s Dollars trilogy, 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’s director, photographer-filmmaker Gordon Parks, in a brief cameo), all to the sounds of Hayes’ “Soulsville.”
Named after the headquarters of Stax Records, the legendary, Memphis-based soul label that released the soundtrack (and where Hayes was its biggest star), “Soulsville” is a melancholy number of ghetto struggle, released just a few months before Marvin Gaye would give us “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” on his immortal What’s Going On. In a feature on the 2002 Criterion Collection release 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.
As Hayes recorded the score at MGM Studios, he sought out to prove he could provide background music for any onscreen situation, whether it’s starting off a bar scene with the rousing/arousing horns of his slippery dance single “Do Your Thing” (no shade to Hayes, but I’ve always preferred James Brown protégé Lyn Collins’ hellacious cover) or the samba-ish jazz fusion that plays during a slur-filled cafe scene 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 “love theme” that appears whenever the male lead is blowing a girl’s 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.
The bongos go crazy in the shoot-’em-up climax, as Shaft and a crew of militant brothas sneak into a hotel to rescue the kingpin’s daughter from Mafia hoods. It’s 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—to the sounds of his own end theme, of course.
As the half-a-million-budgeted Shaft became a runaway, revolutionary hit—grossing $13 million, single-handedly saving its studio from bankruptcy, and leaving the door wide open for more films starring modern-day Black crimefighters—the 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 “Theme From Shaft,” a tune that former film critic Elvis Mitchell once wrote “has survived the evolution from groundbreaker to cultural laugh line to signature standard.”
Unfortunately, Hayes wouldn’t score the Shaft sequels; Parks himself did the tunes for Shaft’s Big Score in 1972, while Super Flyarranger Johnny Pate handled Shaft In Africa in 1973. (Hayes would actually go on to star in and score the 1974 actioner Truck Turner, 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.
Next time: Meet the Los Angeles version of Shaft—and the Motown legend who provided his theme music.
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