He Drove a Gold-Plated Cadillac with Diamond Wipers — Then Lost Every Song He Ever Wrote

You’ve sung Isaac Hayes songs your whole life and he didn’t make a dime off most of them. He wrote “Soul Man,” “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” and the “Theme from Shaft,” records the whole country still plays. For almost thirty years, until the day he died, that music made money for everybody but him.

The car was peacock blue, and the windshield wipers were plated in twenty-four-carat gold.

Isaac Hayes drove it through Memphis in 1972 like a man who had finally arrived, because he had. Inside sat a refrigerated bar, a television, fur on the seats, custom wheels that threw the sunlight back at the city.

Stax Records had it custom-built for him after “Shaft,” a machine worth around twenty-six thousand dollars, which was the price of a house back then.

He would lose it.

He would lose the car and the house and something far heavier than either, but that part comes later. First you have to understand how a poor boy from Covington, Tennessee, ever got behind that wheel.

His mother died when he was barely a year old, and his father was gone soon after. His grandparents took him in, and when he was seven they brought him to Memphis, into a world of tin roofs and cotton rows and shoes that did not last.

“I was born very poor,” Hayes said in 1973. “I didn’t realize when I was a kid just how poor my family was, but as you get older you become aware of it.”

He picked cotton.

He climbed down into sewers to catch roaches he could sell as fishing bait.

At Manassas High School a counselor talked him into a talent show, and the lanky boy walked out, closed his eyes, and sang a Nat King Cole ballad until the girls in the back started screaming his name. That was the night he knew.

Then he quit school anyway, in the ninth grade, because being poor in front of everybody had become unbearable.

“I was ashamed,” he remembered. “I was wearing hand-me-down pants with patches and my shoes had big holes in them.”

A teacher came to his house, found him out, and marched him back to class. He graduated with honors, took a job at a slaughterhouse to support a young family, and kept singing on street corners at night.

The slaughterhouse stayed with him. Blood ran down his back and chest all day, and he woke at night because he could still hear the hogs in his sleep.

He auditioned for Stax Records and got turned away more than once before they finally let him in the door. Once he was inside, he did not leave.

He played piano behind Otis Redding when he was scared half to death.

He slept where he worked.

“Stax was like a family, man,” Hayes said. “Sometimes I would sleep on the floor of the studio or at the piano.”

He teamed with a lyricist named David Porter, a kid he had known since their rival high school days, and the two of them started writing hits for other people. “Hold On, I’m Comin’.” “Soul Man.” Songs the whole country sang.

For a while they did not even realize they were the producers too, doing the work and watching other men collect for it. One night a colleague got drunk and bragged about getting paid for productions that were really theirs, and the next morning Hayes and Porter walked straight into the boss’s office and demanded their due.

It was a small early lesson in a business that would teach him the same thing again and again, much harder, much later.

Somewhere in those climbing years came the day at the Cadillac dealership. Hayes and Porter had a little money now, enough for a car, and they walked onto the showroom floor in dirty jeans and sweaters.

Not one salesman moved toward them. The salesmen took one look and figured them for two broke men who could not afford to buy.

Then one man crossed the entire floor to help them anyway. He treated two badly dressed Black men like customers, because that is what they were.

Hayes never forgot it. He and Porter gave that one salesman all their car business for years, through every raise and every new model.

“I’m sure he was able to send his kids to college from the commissions he made from us,” Hayes said.

Decades later, when that salesman died, a rich and famous man put on a black suit and drove to the funeral of the man who had once crossed a showroom for him. Long before the gold Cadillac, there had been a man who simply walked toward him.

The hits kept coming, and then a different kind of fame arrived.

In 1969 Hayes made “Hot Buttered Soul,” an album that broke every rule about how long a soul song was allowed to be. It became the best-selling record Stax had ever released.

Then “Shaft.” MGM was nearly broke and needed a different kind of movie, and the men behind it had already cast a Black lead and hired a Black director.

“They wanted a Black composer,” Hayes said, “and they picked me.”

He locked himself away with the Bar-Kays and the Memphis horns and strings and built the music in his head, no sheet music at all. When the studio engineer asked to see the charts, Hayes told him there were none.

“We don’t have no charts, just roll the film.”

That wah-wah guitar, that hi-hat ticking like a fuse, that voice narrating like a man who owned the night.

The single went to number one. The soundtrack went platinum.

At the 1972 Academy Awards he walked out in a gold chain-mail vest through clouds of smoke and performed it live, the first composer ever to do that on that stage. Then they handed him the Oscar for Best Original Song.

He was the first Black man to win a music Academy Award, the first Black person to win in any category outside of acting. And he brought the right date.

“I took my grandmother as my date,” he said. “She was so proud.”

This was the peak.

They started calling him Black Moses, and he wore the part, the shaved head, the dark glasses, the robes, and the gold chains stacked across a bare chest.

The gold-plated Cadillac was the contract bonus on top of it all, the chains turned into a car. A poor boy from Covington was driving a gilded automobile down the same streets where he had once walked with holes in his shoes.

And then the floor gave way.

Stax, the family that raised him, was sliding toward collapse, and the checks owed to Hayes stopped coming. To keep going he had borrowed against everything he owned from a Memphis bank.

When the records stopped selling like they used to, the loans came due. On the twenty-second of December, 1976, Isaac Hayes filed for bankruptcy owing more than six million dollars.

The bank took the house. The bank took the personal property.

The gold Cadillac was gone too, repossessed like any ordinary debt.

But that was not the loss that mattered most. The loss that mattered was the music.

As part of the bankruptcy, Hayes signed away the rights to all of it. Every song he had written, every record he had performed, every track he had produced to that point.

“Soul Man” was no longer his. “Hold On, I’m Comin'” was no longer his.

The “Theme from Shaft,” the song that put an Oscar in his hands, belonged to someone else now.

Sit with that for a second.

He was one of the most prolific hit-makers in American music, and for almost thirty years, until the day he died, he was locked out of the profits from his own songs. The whole country kept singing the things he wrote, and he did not earn a dime from most of them.

A man can lose a house and buy another one. A man can lose a car.

But to write the soundtrack of a generation and own none of it, to hear your own voice come out of every radio and know it pays everyone but you, that is a particular kind of quiet that follows a person around.

He kept working because he had to. He acted, he toured, he took radio jobs.

In the late 1990s a cartoon called “South Park” hired him to voice a character named Chef, and the steady paycheck from that role was, in plain terms, money he badly needed. The man who had stood on that stage in a gold vest was grateful for a cartoon gig, because the bank still had his catalog.

He never got bitter about it in public.

When a journalist rode around Memphis with him in 1995, Hayes did not perform grievance. He pointed out the shack he grew up in, laughed with the neighbors, signed scraps of paper bags for kids in a corner store, and drove on.

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. He died in 2008, at sixty-five, found at home near his treadmill, three months before his last film came out.

He never lived to hold the rights to his own music again.

But the story did not end where he left it. When the old Stax building was rebuilt as a museum, that peacock-blue Cadillac was brought back and set on a slowly rotating stage, gold wipers and all, the centerpiece of the whole place.

And his children took up the fight he could not finish. His son has spent years chasing down the copyrights, the misused recordings, the money that should have come home, working to pull the catalog back into the family’s hands one case at a time.

So the car turns under the museum lights in Memphis, the way it once turned heads on those same streets. Children press close to the glass to look at the gold on a car their grandparents may have watched roll by.

The man who drove it picked cotton, smelled like a slaughterhouse, and quit school over the holes in his shoes. He wrote the songs a whole country still hums, and he won the gold, and the gold was taken.

His name is on the placard now, and his family is still working to put his music back beside it.