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Videos by American Songwriter
Nearly a decade before the Detroit riots, a country fiddler and bank manager named Jim Stewart moved his fledgling recording studio from a garage in rural Brunswick, Tennessee, into an empty theater on McLemore Avenue. At the time it was called Satellite Records, although that name would soon change. In the space next door was a small record shop where Stewart’s sister Estelle Axton worked, and across the street was a grocery store where a young kid named David Porter was toiling away as a bag boy. Barely nineteen, just out of high school, just married, and recently a father, he dreamed of becoming a full-time musician and was gigging around town under the stage name Little David. He even went so far as to record and release his own single, “Ain’t That A Lot Of Love,” which went nowhere.
Curious about the new record label across the street, Porter started hanging out in the record shop. “Estelle was an extremely nice lady who saw a passion in me. She would play music to sell to the customers, and I would see what people were buying, then we’d talk. She would say, This is the kind of records people are buying, so if you’re interested in doing music, just look at some of these examples of what works.”
Porter further ingratiated himself by bringing some of his talented friends into the studio, including Booker T. Jones (later of Booker T. & the MGs fame), Andrew Love (one half of the Memphis Horns), and William Bell (who penned the soul standard “You Don’t Miss Your Water”). Country & western tunes weren’t selling, and the influx of neighborhood kids gradually shifted the company’s focus to urban r&b, and by the time they had big hits with the Mar-Keys’ instrumental “Last Night” and Carla Thomas’s “Gee Whiz,” Satellite Records had changed its name to Stax (a combination of the names STewart and AXton).
“They wanted to develop more of an expertise in r&b music, and it just so happened that I looked like somebody who might know something about that,” says Porter with a laugh. “I told them I wanted to get involved and asked if I could work there, but I didn’t realize they didn’t have a lot of money at the time. For whatever reason they decided to give me a shot.”
Making Porter the label’s first staff songwriter would prove to be a fortuitous decision, but at first he struggled to find a partner. It wasn’t until he started working with Isaac Hayes, then playing keyboards as a session musician, that everything clicked. Hayes had grown up out in Covington, Tennessee, before moving to the city and eventually playing in a variety of local doo-wop, r&b, and rock groups.
But before they were partners and friends, Porter and Hayes were local rivals. “On Wednesday nights the Palace Theater on Beale Street would host talent shows,” Porter explains, “and we would compete to win three dollars, five dollars, depending on how much of an audience there was. I had a group called the Marquettes, and he was the leader of a group called the Teen Tones. We had no idea that in the future we would connect.”
Porter approached him about forming a songwriting partnership, something like Holland-Dozier-Holland up in Detroit or Burt Bacharach and Hal David in New York. Hayes was a self-taught musician who learned the ropes on the local club circuit, yet he could play any instrument you handed him, in particular the piano. He also possessed an intuitive understanding of how songs fit together, how arrangements were built, and how to get other people to play the sounds that were in his head. They both understood that they could create bigger things together than they could individually.
Almost immediately, the team began racking up hits for Stax in 1966: a pair of modest singles for Johnny Taylor, a song called “I’ll Run Your Hurt Away” by Ruby Johnson, and two smashes for Carla Thomas, including the sublime “B-A-B-Y.” Porter and Hayes were putting Stax on the map.
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“The story of Stax is about empowerment and opportunity and resiliency,” says Jeff Kollath, executive director of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. “Opportunities abounded at Stax in the early years. If you could sing, you got a chance to sing. If you could play guitar, you got a chance to play guitar.”
David Porter and Isaac Hayes could write songs, so they got a chance to write songs. Not only that, but they were able to determine what songwriting would entail at Stax. It wasn’t just devising the lyrics and the melody, then handing it off to the next person on the assembly line. Instead, the duo worked at every stage of the process, ushering a song from its conception all the way through to its release. Porter and Hayes were composers and lyricists, producers and session players, studio engineers and idea men.
They were able to fulfill so many responsibilities precisely because they had little formal musical training. Neither read music or had the technical ability to notate music, so they had to devise new ways to convey their ideas to the Stax musicians and singers. Porter describes their method: “We would give the bass a line to play, then go to the guitar, then to the horns, and then we would orchestrate the vocals. I would stand on one side of the microphone and direct the singer as though I was directing a choir.” He and Hayes built songs from the ground up. “We were fortunate to stumble into that. It was one thing to say we were geniuses, but that wasn’t it. We just knew what we wanted to do, and it was working.”
Around the Stax offices on McLemore, Porter and Hayes were inseparable. They worked round the clock, huddled together to work out new compositions or collaborating with musicians to produce songs on which they would get no billing. (For the Bar-Kays’ signature hit “Soul Finger,” Porter recruited neighborhood kids to give the song its party atmosphere, creating one of the liveliest and most distinctive instrumental singles of the decade.) When the hits started coming in, they bought matching clothes, even identical cars.
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Their greatest subject was romance, from the puppy-love excitement of Carla Thomas’s “B-A-B-Y” to the adult trials of “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby,” a hit for Sam & Dave. Every song, no matter its mood or tempo, is celebratory, the tone determinedly optimistic — which distinguishes the duo from the gender recriminations of blues and rock. These aren’t songs about women doing their men wrong, but about men and women supporting and encouraging each other.
“Part of our focus was making the music communicate subliminally,” says Porter. “It was about making the music and the message and the melody each talk individually and tell a story that would work on an emotional level. I called it subliminal seduction: making someone fall in love with the song, and they like what the overall thing is but don’t know all of the things that cause them to feel that way.”
Take “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby,” which they wrote for Sam & Dave in ’67. Porter was feeling pretty down one day, moping in his living room, when his wife put her arms around him and commiserated, “What’s wrong? Is something wrong with my baby?” Not anymore. The question flipped a switch in his brain, and he raced to meet up with Hayes and sketch out a song.
The resulting single opens with a time-stopping duet, just Moore and Prater wringing every last ounce of anguish out of the title. Earning their reputation as Double Dynamite, they draw each syllable out sympathetically, which teases the listener’s attention. Then, the horns come in, followed by the drums and guitar, each instrument sympathetic and gentle, as if this moment between lovers is fragile and precious:
When something is wrong with my baby
something is wrong with me.
If I know she is worried,
Then I would feel that same misery.
It’s a reassuring hug of a song, a quiet declaration of support in trying times, and it works both straightforwardly and subliminally.
Porter and Hayes did some of their best work for Sam & Dave, giving them a string of hits that established the duo as one of the most exciting live acts in the world — not just “Soul Man” and “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby,” but “You Got Me Hummin’,” “Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody,” “I Thank You,” and “Wrap It Up.” They took inspiration wherever they found it. On “You Don’t Know Like I Know” Porter and Hayes transformed an old church hymn into an ode to romantic love, changing “… what the Lord has done for me” into “… what that woman has done for me.” It hit number 7 on the r&b charts in 1966.
One of their greatest compositions was written in the men’s room at Stax. The two were working out a new song in the studio but having a tough go of it. Porter retired to the restroom while Hayes continued brainstorming, finally landing on the right chords. Hayes yelled for his partner, and Porter yelled back, “Hold on! I’m coming!” By the time he joined Hayes, he had the foundation for Sam & Dave’s biggest hit.
But circumstances beyond their control — in particular the business machinations between Stax and Atlantic Records — would test their friendship and destroy their partnership.
