David Porter: From South Memphis to musical fame

“Just hold on, I’m comin’.” Anyone in America alive in the great age of radio probably heard these soulful lyrics a hundred times:

“In a river of trouble and about to drown, just hold on, I’m comin’.”

The song came out of Stax, a renowned Memphis music recording studio.

And while the old studio is gone, the writer who penned “I’m comin’” and dozens of other Stax hits is still here.

And, at age 75, the Memphis Music Hall of Fame songwriter is trying to pick up where Stax left off.

David Porter has launched Made in Memphis Entertainment, the first major music studio to open here in decades.

In 2012, Porter opened a musician’s training program named The Consortium: Memphis Music Town. Porter points out MMT on South Main was not created to funnel musicians to the new studio.

The recording studio is a commercial venture that will recruit musicians from around the country, he said, while MMT was specifically created with local donations intended to nurture Memphis musicians.

Porter grew up near Crump and Third Street, a humble district then and now. He played music in church and at Booker T. Washington High School.

After bagging groceries at Big D market, Porter, son of a railroad man who had died when he was two, walked across the street to Stax and urged Estelle Stewart, the ST in Stax, to hire him. She did. Soul, blues and gospel aired on radio and television then, stirred white teenagers across the country.

Porter found a way to pen timeless lyrics.

“One of the promises this music communicated was that anything was possible, the game was wide open. No one (at least that was the myth) had to be constrained by his or her position at birth,” Peter Bowman, now a music professor in Toronto, wrote in his 1997 book, “Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records.”

Remember the classic song “Soul Man?”

“I was brought up on a side street ... I was educated at Woodstock.”

This was written before the Woodstock, the farm in New York where hippies cavorted. Porter’s Woodstock was a community near Memphis he remembered for its isolation when he was writing the lyrics with another Memphis musical star, Isaac Hayes.

It was one of 200 songs they would pen together at Stax, though “Soul Man’’ in particular seemed to touch young Americans. In 1966, every Top 40 radio station in the country was playing the song.

Later, Hollywood made a movie of the same name with famous actors singing the line, “Comin’ to ya on a dusty road,” though Woodstock came out on the lyric sheets as ‘‘good stock.’’