David Porter Sets the Record Straight on the “Myth” That Ended Stax Records

The Stax songwriter tells Broken Record’s Bruce Headlam how a sloped movie-theater floor, a driver named Otis Redding, and a dead-end street in Memphis built one of American music’s defining sounds

David Porter has spent six decades as one of Stax Records’ most essential architects, and his new memoir, The Soul Man: Life of Songwriter David Porter, traces how he and writing partner Isaac Hayes built a catalog of hits without ever learning to read music. Porter sat down with Broken Record’s Bruce Headlam to talk through the mechanics of the “Stax sound,” a legendary bathroom exchange that became a number-one single, and the true story behind the studio’s near-mythical reputation for racial harmony.

Finding an Identity Apart From Motown

Porter said he and Hayes admired Motown’s “straight four” beat and the intricate melodies of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, but concluded early on they couldn’t out-Motown Motown. “We had to find an identity that could, in fact, work for us,” he said. That identity came from the low end—bass, drums, guitar and keyboards built into what Porter called a “signature line,” layered under horn parts written as singable melodies rather than simple accents. The breakthrough came on a Sam & Dave record called “You Don’t Know Like I Know,” the first time the approach fully clicked.

None of it was written down. “None of us read music,” Porter said. Instead the team relied on “head arrangements”—going around the studio, teaching each musician his part by ear, then assembling the pieces into a finished song. Otis Redding, Porter said, was the technique’s true master, sometimes composing lyrics on the spot at the microphone after handing out instrumental parts without ever singing a note in rehearsal.

A Bathroom Joke Becomes a Rescue Song

Porter’s favorite origin story is “Hold On, I’m Coming.” Isaac Hayes already had a horn pattern he loved, inspired by Superman‘s TV fanfare, weeks before the two men had a song to put it in. The lyric arrived when Porter ducked into a restroom mid-session and Hayes yelled for him to hurry up. “I screamed, ‘Hold on, I’m coming,'” Porter recalled. “I came out of the restroom and said, ‘Hey buddy, I got one.'” They built the “rescue song” around Hayes’s horn line and finished it in 20 minutes. It became Stax’s first number-one record.

A Reluctant Solo Star

Porter was mainly a behind-the-boards figure, but he also cut his own records at Stax, including Gritty, Groovy & Gettin’ It, the concept album Victim of the Joke?, and Into a Real Thing, which featured an 11-minute reworking of “Hang On Sloopy.” None matched the multi-platinum numbers Hayes racked up as an artist, but 150,000 to 200,000 copies sold was still “worth your recording,” Porter said—he simply preferred the studio to the stage.

Otis Redding, Discovered by Accident

Porter also detailed how Redding arrived at Stax not as a singer but as driver and gofer for Johnny Jenkins, an artist Jim Stewart had booked for a session. While Jenkins struggled to deliver, someone convinced the room to let Redding try the microphone; he sang his original song “These Arms Are Mine” and, in Porter’s words, “changed our world forever.” Porter was in the room for it.

Dismantling the Myth

Porter pushed back hard on the popular narrative that Stax’s later collapse was driven by racial division and corruption, calling those accounts “the furthest thing from the truth.” He pointed to white musicians Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn refusing to stay in hotels that wouldn’t accommodate their Black bandmates on the college-circuit tours. “How could you make music as beautiful and connected as that,” he said, “if there was anything remotely close to” the divisions later attributed to the label.

He also traced the studio’s signature delayed-beat groove to an accident of architecture: Stax’s building was a converted movie theater with a sloped floor, and drummer Al Jackson Jr. ended up positioned closest to the screen, hearing the band through amplifiers rather than direct lines. The natural lag, Porter said, became “a groove or a pocket” that Jackson adapted to and that came to define the label’s rhythm section.

Porter still lives in Memphis, where he runs a free nonprofit, the Consortium MMT, offering young musicians recorded guidance from artists including Philip Bailey, Valerie Simpson and Stevie Wonder.

Listen to the full conversation on Broken Record. 

Related reading: Rolling Stone on the “Hold On, I’m Comin'” origin story.