Hung Up on My Baby

The record

“Hung Up on My Baby” is an instrumental from Tough Guys, Isaac Hayes's soundtrack for the 1974 Paramount release Three Tough Guys, issued on Enterprise, a Stax imprint. The film, directed by Duccio Tessari and starring Lino Ventura, Hayes and Fred Williamson, was Hayes's acting debut; he played a former police officer and also composed, conducted and performed the score with his band, the Movement, and arrangements for the Memphis Symphony Orchestra. At 6:15, “Hung Up on My Baby” is the longest of the album's nine tracks, which run from the “Title Theme” to “The End Theme,” and it gives the band room to stretch out well beyond the few bars later producers would use.

The break

What producers took from “Hung Up on My Baby” is a guitar part rather than a drum break: a slow, bluesy guitar figure set against the soundtrack's strings and keyboards. The figure repeats with small variations, which gives producers several clean passages to choose from.

Into hip hop

Scarface produced the Geto Boys' “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” released on July 1, 1991, as a single from We Can't Be Stopped on Rap-A-Lot and Priority. He combined loops of the Hayes guitar with a drum break from Graham Central Station's “The Jam” and arranged them into a new verse and chorus structure with an instrumental hook, so the Hayes guitar itself carries the chorus between the verses. The song was first meant for a Scarface solo album, and he wrote three of its four verses. It reached No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Hot Rap Songs chart, and No. 10 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. The same year, the California group 2nd II None used the Hayes track on “If You Want It.”

Legacy

Because “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” is so closely linked to the sample, “Hung Up on My Baby” is known to many listeners mainly through the Geto Boys. The pairing of Hayes's soundtrack guitar with the group's first person verses gave the record its mood, and the full original contains much more music than the short loop suggests. The sample has continued to circulate: Kodak Black used it on “Transportin'” from his 2017 mixtape Project Baby 2, more than 25 years after the Geto Boys single.