My Top 1000 Songs #706: Theme From "Shaft"

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.] 

Here's another childhood song with which I have a complicated relationship. As described at length in the book, I grew up in a largely rock & roll-free home, my father's 8-track tape collection populated by adult contemporary schlock and mostly-instrumental movie soundtracks. In the latter category, he had some compilation of film music, and I distinctly remember "The Theme From 'Shaft'" being part of it. I don't recall much else about the tape--ok, the "Pink Panther" theme was there, that one's hard to forget--but something about "Shaft" made an impression (probably those amazing wah-wah guitars?).

Like most of my father's music, I was glad to move beyond it when I discovered rock music as a pre-teen. But while it was easy to write off most of those 8-track tapes I endured as a kid as crap, I've gradually come to appreciate bits and pieces of it over the ensuing decades.

At some point in my adulthood, I developed a taste for early 70s funk. Despite most of my musical preferences being described (not unfairly) by a friend as the "jittery white guy music" which I adopted as the title for my book & this blog, I got heavily into artists like Funkadelic, Curtis Mayfield, Ohio Players, Shuggie Otis, etc. This exploration naturally led me to Isaac Hayes, where my relationship with the Shaft soundtrack was renewed--this time not in the context of the Henry Mancini string-laden soundtrack music on my dad's 8-track tapes, but as part of Hayes' blend of highly-varied R&B and soul. And it was much cooler in this context.

Live on Letterman: