The beloved Isaac Hayes came from some pretty meager beginnings. As a young boy he dreamed of sleeping in a warm bed, and having a nice square meal, with decent clothes to wear. At the tender age of 11, he even had to get special permission from his school principal to take off days in order to go out to work to help his family in a line of work that was very interesting.
The interesting thing in this is that Isaac Hayes had a job picking cotton…yep, you read that correctly, before he became THE Isaac Hayes, ‘the hot buttered soul God’ by way of Memphis, he was a cotton picker. Now of course many of us can relate to having ancestors who picked cotton, so in that respect it wasn’t odd, but the reason it’s a lil’ odd in Hayes’ case is because in the era he was picking cotton for a living, it was no longer the most common job to have.
Hayes worked in the cotton fields because he had, but he was never really focused on picking cotton. He revealed, in a past interview, several interesting things about his cotton picking days including that he would daydream on the job about this one girl he was crushin’ on, who also happened to be the daughter of the family he was picking cotton for. He said she didn’t really pay him much attention until AFTER she found out he could sing. But check out how Hayes said he handled the “girl of his dreams” after he started gaining a lil’ singing popularity around his way…
