Isaac Hayes & David Porter: The Anthem They Wrote in a Bathroom Doorway

Isaac Hayes was trying to get David Porter out of the Stax Records restroom and back to work. Porter yelled back through the door, "Hold on, I'm comin'." Before he'd finished buttoning his pants, the two of them realized what they'd just said out loud was a song title. They wrote "Hold On, I'm Comin'" for Sam & Dave in about twenty minutes, and it became a number one R&B hit in 1966 and one of the defining records of the Stax sound.

That's not the kind of origin story a songwriting duo usually tells about their biggest song. But Hayes and Porter's whole partnership worked a little like that: fast, in the same room, built more on instinct and back-and-forth than on labored craft. Between 1964 and the late 1960s, they wrote more than 200 songs together at Stax, most of them for other people to sing, and turned Sam & Dave, a duo who might otherwise have been a solid regional act, into one of the defining sounds of 1960s soul.

Two writers who started as session musicians

Hayes was born in 1942 on a farm in Covington, Tennessee, and raised largely by his grandparents after his mother died young. He taught himself saxophone and piano and was working as a session musician at Stax, filling in on keyboards for Otis Redding's sessions, when he crossed paths with Porter, a Memphis native who'd started out singing and writing on his own before also settling into session work at the label. Neither of them set out to be a formal writing team. They found each other the way a lot of the best Stax pairings did, by being two of the most reliably useful people in the building, and started writing together almost as a byproduct of being around each other constantly.

Building Sam & Dave into "Double Dynamite"

Hayes and Porter became the primary writers and producers for Sam Moore and Dave Prater, the vocal duo who came to be marketed as "Double Dynamite." Beyond "Hold On, I'm Comin'," the pair wrote "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby" in 1967, a slower, more aching ballad that showed they weren't limited to uptempo hooks, and "I Thank You" in 1968. Their writing method leaned on Hayes's musical instincts and Porter's ear for a phrase people would actually say, worked out together in real time rather than divided cleanly into music and lyrics. It's a genuinely useful model for any songwriting pair: the roles don't have to be fixed. What matters is that both people are in the room, actually listening to each other, when the idea shows up.

Soul Man, and a title with a real headline behind it

"Soul Man," released in 1967, became Sam & Dave's signature song and won Hayes and Porter a Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues Group Performance, Vocal or Instrumental in 1968. Porter has said the title was partly inspired by news coverage of the era's urban unrest, homes and businesses marked "soul brother" to identify Black-owned property and avoid being targeted during riots, reframed by the two writers into a proud, affirmative statement rather than a defensive one. It's later been recognized by the Grammy Hall of Fame and named one of the RIAA's Songs of the Century. Worth noting for any songwriter reaching for a title: the most durable ones often come from something specific and real happening in the world around you, sharpened down to three words simple enough to shout.

Writing hits for the label's other stars, not just Sam & Dave

Hayes and Porter didn't write exclusively for one act. They wrote "B-A-B-Y" for Carla Thomas and material for Johnnie Taylor and other Stax artists through the mid-1960s, part of a small, overlapping group of Stax songwriters and session players who moved between each other's sessions constantly. It's a good picture of what a real "hit factory" actually looks like day to day: not a single duo cranking out songs in isolation, but a tight group of people cycling through each other's projects, contributing wherever they were needed that week.

Two different paths out of the same partnership

By the late 1960s, Hayes had started moving toward a solo career, and 1969's "Hot Buttered Soul," built on long, orchestral, slow-building arrangements far removed from the tight three-minute singles he and Porter had been writing for Sam & Dave, helped redefine what a soul album could sound like. Porter, meanwhile, stayed with Stax through the years that followed, remaining loyal to the label even as it slid toward the involuntary bankruptcy that hit in 1975. After the label's collapse, Porter was the one brought back by new owner Fantasy Records to help relaunch Stax in 1978. The two writers who'd built a catalogue together in the same room ended up on genuinely different tracks, one chasing a solo spotlight, the other staying close to the label's foundations. Both paths were legitimate ways to keep a career going. Neither one was a betrayal of the other.

Shaft, and a first that had nothing to do with the Hayes-Porter catalogue

In 1971, Hayes wrote and recorded the score for Gordon Parks's film "Shaft," and "Theme from Shaft" won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1972, making Hayes the first Black composer to win an Oscar and the first Black winner in any Academy Award category outside acting. It's not a Hayes-Porter song, it came after Hayes had already moved into his solo era, but it's the moment that turned him into a genuine cultural icon well beyond the Stax catalogue he and Porter had built together, and it's impossible to tell his story honestly without it.

What's worth taking from their partnership

Hayes and Porter were both inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005, recognized jointly for the catalogue they built together at Stax in the 1960s. Hayes died on August 10, 2008, at his home in Memphis, at 65; his family physician listed the cause of death as a stroke brought on by chronic hypertension. Porter continued working in music and mentoring younger Memphis artists for years afterward, and Stax's original site is now home to the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, which documents both men's work as central to the label's legacy.

Their catalogue holds together because neither one waited around for the perfect line. "Hold On, I'm Comin'" came out of an actual bathroom door, finished in twenty minutes because two people who worked together constantly recognized a good hook the second they said it out loud. If you're stuck waiting for a more dignified way for inspiration to arrive, Hayes and Porter's biggest hit is proof it doesn't have to look like anything special going in. If you need someone in the room who can catch the idea when it shows up, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Songwriters Hall of Fame: Isaac Hayes, Songwriters Hall of Fame: David Porter, Stax Records: Isaac Hayes and David Porter, Rolling Stone: How a Bathroom Trip Led to the Soul Classic "Hold On, I'm Comin'", MusicRadar: How a Classic Stax Soul Anthem Was Written on the Fly, Today: Isaac Hayes likely died of a stroke, Hollywood Reporter: Isaac Hayes and 'Shaft' Electrified the Oscars in 1972