Eventually he "learned enough piano to get along," and wound up on the staff at Memphis' Stax Records by around '63, having been turned down three times by the label as an artist. An old friend from his doo wop days, David Porter, was already with the label and said to Hayes, "You play music and I write lyrics, let's team up and start writing and producing like Holland-Dozier-Holland up at Motown."

"When we started writing," Hayes remembers, "guys around the city would tease us: 'Hey hit men, how many hits did you write today?' But we kept our noses to the grindstone and we finally clicked with Carla Thomas' 'How Do You Quit' in '65.

Then they chose David and I to write and produce for Sam and Dave, and after we had a big hit with them, more people around town wanted to write songs. We organized a writer's workshop and everything," recalls Hayes. Their writing for Sam & Dave was typical of their approach. "We would come up with a good subject or a good hook. For the meat of the song you have to ask yourselves some questions: If you want this girl, why do you want her? If you get her, what would you do? People have to able to get what you're trying to get across. As far as music is concerned, you've got to come up with a groove with changes and things that keep the emotional content in it.

"Usually our songs came from personal experiences," he continues. "For instance, with 'When Something's Wrong With My Baby,' David and I were working and working and working, and we just couldn't come up with anything. So we gave up and each went home. After about 30 minutes, he called me: 'I got it, I got it, I got it.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He had just written it on toilet paper or something, and said, 'When something's wrong with my baby, something's wrong with me.'

"He came over and we started going over the lyrics. I sat down at the piano and started playing something slow. We got the changes and the melody and put it with the first verse, and the rest was easy. Sam & Dave were in town - we would usually work on their songs when they were around - sometimes we'd have them sitting there while we wrote to get a good feel for them.

"'You Don't Know Like I Know' was originally a gospel song: 'You don't know like I know what the Lord has done for me.' Well, a woman can do some good things for you too. We just switched it around," Hayes says with a chuckle.