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Isaac Hayes has died.


I have no clue about music, but I did like that of Isaac Hayes. One of my memories of Chicago is casting some aspersion or other on Mitt Romney--there's someone not usually mentioned alongside the author of Shaft--because of his religion and getting an automatic and very American response from the woman that I was talking to that 'that was his religion and his personal belief'.

It was a reminder of how the first amendment protects freedom of religion, not from it. I should have known better than to inadvertently challenge that freedom with my European catholic prejudices, even if we were getting off our faces in O'Briens on Wells at the time.

Hayes, by all accounts a decent man, was important in the progress of his cult towards sufferance, or even respectability. That's all incidental however. His music is very human, and apparently grew of a very intimate knowledge of how music is made.

Here's a link to someone who really knows what they are talking about to make the point clear. I won't, for obvious reasons, attach my usual prayer for those who have passed on, but life was made a little better by Hayes' works.

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