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Isaac Hayes, 65, the Oscar- and Grammy-winning soul singer and songwriter whose swaggering "Theme from Shaft" became a signature sound of the 1970s, died Sunday at his home outside Memphis.

Steve Shular, a spokesman for the Shelby County, Tenn., sheriff's office, said that Mr. Hayes' wife, 2-year-old-son and a cousin returned from the grocery store shortly after noon and found him lying beside a still-running treadmill in a downstairs bedroom. Mr. Hayes was pronounced dead about an hour later at a Memphis hospital. The cause of death was not immediately known.

With his deep, mellifluous baritone and his gleaming, bald dome, Mr. Hayes, dubbed Black Moses, was one of the first black music superstars of the 1970s. A later generation of fans knew him as the voice of Chef, the school cook on the animated television show South Park.

Mr. Hayes was born on Aug. 20, 1942, in a tin shack in the small town of Covington, Tenn., north of Memphis. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, who were sharecroppers.

Desperately poor, the family moved to Memphis when Isaac was 6. By the time he was 8, he was picking cotton.

He was drawn to music early, and when he graduated from high school at 21, after having left and returned a couple of times, he was offered several music scholarships. He turned them down because of his family obligations.

He went to work in a meat-packing plant but continued his musical gigs and at one point had his own group, Sir Isaac and the Doo-Dads.

On New Year's Eve 1963, a bandleader who recorded for Stax Records in Memphis asked Mr. Hayes to fill in on the piano at a nightclub. Needing the money, he said yes, even though he only knew the key of C and a couple of chords. Luckily, the band was drunk and so was the audience, Mr. Hayes recalled.

Eventually Stax hired him as a backup pianist. His first sessions were with Otis Redding. He also began writing songs and, in 1962, began to collaborate with David Porter. The team eventually composed several songs for the soul-singing duo Sam and Dave, including one that became a gold record.

"Isaac didn't read [music], but you couldn't believe a guy could sit at a piano and come up with the sounds he did," Sam Moore of Sam and Dave told The Washington Post in 1995. "When people talk about the Memphis sound, that was Isaac."

Mr. Hayes' ambitions as a singer came to fruition in 1967, when he recorded his first album, Presenting Isaac Hayes.

His breakthrough came with his second album, Hot Buttered Soul, produced in the summer of 1968. The album, which contained only four lengthy songs, sold more than a million copies.

In 1971, when Mr. Hayes was approached to write the music for Shaft , Gordon Parks' story of a black private eye battling drug lords, he had never before scored a film.

"They said Shaft was a relentless character, and it had to denote some kind of action or drama," Mr. Hayes told The Post. He recorded the song in two hours; the soundtrack stayed on the charts for 60 weeks.

A year later, Mr. Hayes, his torso draped in gold chains, performed his "Theme from Shaft" at the Academy Awards. The song and score brought him an Oscar and two Grammys.

Starting in the 1980s, he appeared in several films and began playing Chef on South Park in 1997.

He angrily left the show in 2006 after an episode mocked his Scientology religion.

Mr. Hayes was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006.

He was married four times and had 12 children. Survivors include his wife of three years, Adjowa Hayes, and their son.