Last week, Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Corruption) introduced a resolution honoring the life and music of the late Isaac Hayes. With 20 co-sponsors, the bill praises Hayes for his “vocal performances, songwriting, humanitarian work, and television and motion picture endeavors, and as a radio show host, pianist, saxophone player, restaurateur, and cookbook author.” HRes 1425 was dropped on the Judiciary Committee and will likely come up for “debate” (read: Tennesseans patting each other on the back) this week.
While this is clearly one of those yay-my-district bills, It’s a little hard to imagine the Congresswoman’s 87% white constituents wholeheartedly embracing Black Moses. That said, she does technically represent his birthplace, and a combination of home field advantage and personal preference has been known to cause otherwise ultra-conservatives (Blackburn, Issa, Orrin Hatch, Lamar Alexander,) to stand with the musicians’ union on key issues.
More on Orrin Hatch in particular from teh Wiki:
In the early 1970s he was the band manager for a Mormon-themed folk group called the Free Agency. The Free Agency was made up of members of an earlier Mormon group called the Sons of Mosiah, that was formed when guitarist David Zandonatti and vocalist Ron McNeeley relocated to Utah after their San Francisco based psychedelic group Tripsichord music box disbanded in 1971.
Rock musician Frank Zappa composed a guitar instrumental entitled “Orrin Hatch On Skiis,” which appears on his album, Guitar (1988).
Yes, Tripsichord Music Box and their San Francisco values.
Anyway that’s a digression. Point was, this Congressional resolution includes such gems as:
“Whereas Isaac Hayes was a television and film actor, appearing in countless television shows and three dozen movies, including roles in `The A-Team’, `The Fresh Prince of Bel Air’, `Girlfriends’, and `Miami Vice’
It’s not quite Cynthia McKinney’s Who Shot ‘Pac? bill, but the A-Team? Any day Mr. T gets name-dropped in the Congressional Record is a good day. Also this:
Whereas Isaac Hayes created the groundbreaking musical score and theme song for the movie `Shaft’
(For the record, this is the only bill in the current Congress featuring the word “shaft” that doesn’t relate to cars, energy or homeland security. Minds out of the gutters and search it yourself.)
But most crucially, this post allows me to re-use the John Kerry Spits Hot Fire tag.
[…] of all, his co-sponsorship of the Isaac Hayes Bill allows me to re-use the “Shaft Among the Jews” […]