Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Hollywood Joins Memphis for a Farewell to Isaac Hayes


(Matthew Craig/Commercial Appeal, via Associated Press)
The Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis paid tribute to Isaac Hayes. A funeral was held on Monday in nearby Cordova.

By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: August 18, 2008

CORDOVA, Tenn. — It was easy to tell the Hollywood Scientologists from the Memphis music people as they passed the gantlet of television cameras and entered the suburban Memphis megachurch to pay tribute to Isaac Hayes. They were on the whole paler and skinnier and showed rather more cleavage than is considered properly funereal here in the South.

The Memphians, on the other hand, tended toward vintage dresses and dark three-piece suits with expertly origamied handkerchiefs and matching ties.

Then there was the soul royalty, like Bootsy Collins, who wore a get-up involving wide pinstripes, a kerchief, and rhinestone-coated sunglass lenses with peepholes in the shape of stars, and the actual royalty, like Princess Naa Asie Ocansey of Ghana, who wore gold and red African finery and managed to get surprisingly low to the ground when she danced.

But there were also thousands of regular people, wearing regular clothes, who poured into the sanctuary of the Hope Presbyterian Church.

Full article from The New York Times: www.nytimes.com

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