It was easy to tell the Hollywood Scientologists from the Memphis music people as they passed the gantlet of television cameras and entered the suburban Memphis megachurch to pay tribute to Isaac Hayes. They were on the whole paler and skinnier and showed rather more cleavage than is considered properly funereal here in the South.
 
The Memphians, on the other hand, tended toward vintage dresses and dark three-piece suits with expertly origamied handkerchiefs and matching ties.
 
Then there was the soul royalty, like Bootsy Collins, who wore a get-up involving wide pinstripes, a kerchief, and rhinestone-coated sunglass lenses with peepholes in the shape of stars, and the actual royalty, like Princess Naa Asie Ocansey of Ghana, who wore gold and red African finery and managed to get surprisingly low to the ground when she danced.
 
But there were also thousands of regular people, wearing regular clothes, who poured into the sanctuary of the Hope Presbyterian Church.
 
For a superstar known for his slick image and “bedroom baritone,” as one speaker called it, Mr. Hayes was deeply involved in the workaday life of his hometown, where he recently appeared on a billboard with a local congressman, Steve Cohen, who was fighting off a challenger. The billboard read, “Can you dig it?”
 
Mr. Hayes was also involved in literacy programs…