We won't be able to replace the two icons of African American culture -- comedian Bernie Mac and singer Issac Hayes -- who died this weekend. Newcomers may arrive on the scene and follow behind them, but they will be the branches of the tall trees these men rooted among us.
Both men were to be featured this November in a new movie, "Soul Men," which is named after the song, "Soul Man," which Hayes wrote with David Porter, according to TVGuide.com.
Bernie Mac, born Bernard Jeffrey McCullough, had that gift to dig insightfully into the cracks in human nature and find humor in it. "The Bernie Mac Show" on television, and the film, "Guess Who?" and the "Ocean's" film series display his gift at its best. How Bernie Mac intrepreted parenting is refreshing and authentic in his television series. TV Guide named him #47 among the "50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time" in 2004, according to The Internet Movie Database. In "Guess Who?," Bernie Mac is the face of Americans across the country, growing in his understanding of his daughter's choice to pursue an interracial marriage, yet, by the end of the movie, displaying fatherly wisdom to her fiance. In the Ocean series, he was a fitting player that helped give the films their comic strength.
Issac Hayes will always remind me of growing up in East St. Louis. I remember days cleaning up the house while his album, "Hot Buttered Soul" played on the stereo, a melodic accompaniment, a soundtrack for my adolescence in the 1970s. Hayes represents what I miss most now in contemporary music. So many singers then (think Marvin Gaye, Nancy Wilson, Dionne Warwick, Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, and Donnie Hathaway, just to start the list!) sang of angst, loss, hope, tenderness, and struggle. Play songs like "Walk on By," the theme from "Shaft," or "Soul Man" and I'm immediately transported to my teen years and home.
Bernie Mac and Issac Hayes, thank you for planting such tall trees for us.
Judy Howard Ellis
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