Gee Whiz, It’s Carla Thomas: Queen of Memphis Soul

The legendary soul singer’s lifelong search for knowledge and wisdom — from the library stacks to Stax Records — has elevated her artistry.

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I dreamt a dream! What can it mean?

And that I was a maiden Queen

Guarded by an Angel mild

— William Blake, Songs of Experience

Not long into a conversation with Carla Thomas, the Queen of Memphis Soul, you realize that the musical titan is about a great deal more than music. Which is not to say that, at age 82, her musical life has fallen dormant — far from it. She has recently racked up an array of honors and accomplishments, both onstage and in the studio, with only some of them related to her hit-making at Stax Records (more about that later).

When she shares about her life and outlook, she talks about those memories and experiences in the same breath, all part of her quest to learn, to interact, to see and hear the world in all its wonder. That’s what made her, of all the fabled Stax Records artists, the one with the greatest penchant to move around, to explore. Even the initial rise of the label she and her father helped put on the map wasn’t enough to keep her pinned down in Memphis.

In the summer of 1960, things were popping at Satellite Records, not yet called Stax. The label had its first regional hit with “’Cause I Love You,” recorded on a lark at the fledgling studio by Carla and her father, Rufus Thomas, a celebrated DJ, singer, and talent impresario who was still working at a textile plant. By the fall of that year, she had recorded her own song, “Gee Whiz (Take a Look at His Eyes),” which was slowly making waves, on its way to becoming a top-ten pop hit. So, what did Carla Thomas, just turning 18 that December, decide to do? Head off to college to study Renaissance literature, of course.

“I didn’t have this dire ambition,” she says today. “I just liked being around the music. It’s not that I didn’t care that I had a hit record. But I was getting ready to go to TSU [Tennessee State University]. Now, I really didn’t understand how the process worked, how to apply and get a scholarship — I was too busy singing that summer! But all my friends were saying, ‘We’ve got to be up there in Nashville. You need to come up there with us!’ So I said, ‘Oh, okay.’”

“I was playing piano, and the melody came first. I wrote ‘Gee Whiz’ in about half an hour. When I write a song, that’s how it usually happens.” — Carla Thomas

With that seemingly casual choice, she launched what would be a recurring fascination for her from then on: to expand her horizons, to discover.

It’s but one of the charming qualities that have made her a universally beloved figure in her hometown: the youthfulness of the seeker, positively unafraid to be astounded. Thomas, with a gleam in her eye, is quick to laugh but just as often poised to inquire, making her an insightful commentator on her own history and echoing the Thomas family’s reverence for good teachers.

Time and time again, speaking with her, the names of former teachers come up: Mrs. McGee, her third-grade teacher; Blair T. Hunt Jr., her principal at Booker T. Washington [BTW] High School. “Blair T. Hunt was very sophisticated,” says Thomas. “Everybody who went to Booker T. Washington back in those days talked like they were from England.” The school was a cultural center for the Thomas family’s community. “We had the soul people, the blues people, and the intelligentsia,” she says of BTW, contrasting it with the more jazz-oriented Manassas High School of that era. “I was more musical than intelligentsia, but I picked up on it all.”

Radio and education were inextricably bound in Thomas’ experience. Speaking to me in 2017, Thomas recalled how much she’d learned simply listening to WDIA. “There was a show that came on with A.C. “Moohah” Williams, who also oversaw the Teen Town Singers, where I started when I was a kid. Through that show I learned a lot of Negro spirituals, jazz tunes, pop tunes. I think it really helped strengthen my voice and my knowledge.”

Williams also encouraged her to think big. “Moohah had been to TSU,” says Thomas, “and he said, ‘You need to go to college.’ He just said that one day, and I thought, ‘Well, yeah.’” Moohah was right: Higher education clearly suited Thomas. After TSU, she earned a master’s degree, also in Renaissance literature, from Howard University. “I loved English. I loved English literature, Renaissance literature. Anything Shakespeare!”

O heaven, O earth, bear witness to this sound,

And crown what I profess with kind event

If I speak true!

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Thomas’ love of language long preceded her college ambitions, and it was to fuel the musical career that paid all her tuition over the years, and then some. Perhaps it was that sophisticated way of speaking at Blair T. Hunt Jr.’s high school, combined with those thought-provoking songs on the radio, but for whatever reason, Thomas’ late high-school years were a time of prolific creativity. “I wrote a lot of songs in ’58,” she says of the year she was 15. “Just a lot of writing. I wrote short stories. I wrote comments. I was even going to write a movie [screenplay] one time, but by that time I was in 12th grade, and I was too worried about trying to graduate.”

The creativity, she says, flowed more from her love of language than music per se. “I was not really carried away over the prospect of being an artist,” she says, but she did play some piano and had been singing in WDIA’s Teen Town Singers for some years by then. One day in 1958, on a lark, she struck gold. “I was playing piano, and the melody came first. I wrote ‘Gee Whiz’ in about half an hour. When I write a song, that’s how it usually happens.”

The new song needed something more than the band gathered for the session, and that’s where Carla saved the day, and altered the course of history.

Her father, with his finely tuned ear, heard her playing and singing it in the family home. “He came in there: ‘I’m gonna put this on tape.’ And he did, on one of those reel-to-reel machines,” says Thomas. Rufus began plugging her demo right away. When the young Curtis Mayfield, still a teenager himself but already a celebrated member of the Impressions, came to Memphis, Rufus saw an opportunity. “He said, ‘Curtis, I want you to take this back to Chicago and see what you think about it.’ Curtis goes and plays it, and calls Daddy,” Thomas says. “Now all this is happening behind my back. I was kind of mad at Daddy, in a way, but Curtis said, ‘She’s too young!’”

Mayfield’s focus on Thomas’ youth was ironic, in part because he was only about six months older, but also because youth itself was becoming a hot commodity with the rise of rock-and-roll. Producers across the country, often square but curious about this new, profitable demographic, were seeking gifted young musical artists who were in touch with their peers. A new youth movement was brewing, and Thomas both typified it and found it thrilling. Her mother, Lorene, saw her daughter’s future.

“One time, I had just come from school, and American Bandstand was new. Jackie Wilson came on, and my mother said, ‘Who is that?’ I thought, ‘Oh my God. She likes Jackie Wilson!’ He was singing his little ‘Reet Petite,’ and she said, ‘Oh, I like that!’ Because it’s kind of cutesy, you know? So I said, ‘Why don’t you come out here and watch him? He can dance too.’ It was like a commercial! She said, ‘Oh, he has a beautiful voice.’ She was so intelligent about it, and I’m just going, ‘Oh, wow!’ She says, ‘Oh, that’s so nice. Look at all the little teenagers dancing.’ Now she’s watching the whole thing. And just as she’s getting ready to go back to whatever she was doing, ironing or something, she looked at me and asked, ‘What’d you say the name of this was?’ I said, ‘This is American Bandstand, and his name is Dick Clark.’ And she said, ‘You’re gonna be on there.’”

To young Carla, the comment came from the clear blue sky. Though she sang with the Teen Town Singers, she had no aspirations to be a recording artist or pop star. But today, in retrospect, she remembers her mother’s comment with wonder. “That’s that circle of time, see?” says Thomas. “It was all in there, in my mother’s prophecy.”

Cut to 1960, when her father learned of a new venture on McLemore Avenue and decided to check it out in person. “He said, ‘You want to go? They’re opening up a new theater; it’s going to be a studio. You want to see it?’ I went with him, and I’m just sitting as usual, listening to [Stax co-founder] Jim Stewart and my dad. When we were getting ready to leave, Jim said, ‘Hey, Rufus, you thought about recording again?’”

By then, of course, Rufus had recorded a few singles, albeit sporadically, including one of Sun Records’ first successes, “Bear Cat,” an answer song to Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog.” But that had been way back in 1953. Still, Rufus was plugged into the music scene.

“Dad said, ‘Oh, I’ve got a song in my glove compartment!’” Thomas says. “He went and got a tape of a song, ‘Deep Down Inside,’ kind of like ‘Gee Whiz,’ that he made, a duet. We were having fun, and I sang with him on it. Jim said, ‘Let’s cut that! Now, I don’t know any Black musicians right now.’ Well, Dad knew all of them. So, we go sing ‘Deep Down Inside.’ Jim was standing there and said, ‘You know, we have to have a B side. We can’t just put out a one-sided record.’ He was getting excited. Dad stood right there and wrote ‘’Cause I Love You’ by the piano.”

The new song needed something more than the band gathered for the session, and that’s where Carla saved the day, and altered the course of history.

Booker T. Jones, who went on to co-found Booker T. & the MGs, recalls it vividly today. “Carla was my first connection to Stax Records,” he remembers. “I knew Carla before Stax. We were both members in our churches [Mount Olive Cathedral and St. John Baptist], and I can remember going to her church and getting ice cream afterwards with her. Her church was close to mine, and I can remember walking over there and meeting her there when I was in eighth or ninth grade.” Of course, they both attended BTW as well, and that’s where Jones was on the day that Rufus and Carla needed to beef up their band.

“I had always wanted to get in to try to play at Satellite, as we called it then,” says Jones, “but I didn’t have an opportunity until she was recording there with her dad, Rufus, and they sent David Porter over to Booker Washington to get me to play baritone sax for that song ‘’Cause I Love You.’” Porter even wrote a fake hall pass to get Jones out of his second-period class, after which they grabbed a horn from the band room and quickly returned to the studio.

In your verse all Cupid’s armory,

His flames, his shafts, his quiver, and his bow,

His very eyes are yours to overthrow.

— Ben Jonson

’Cause I Love You” was so good, it became the A side of the new single — and, as Satellite had just worked out a distribution deal with Atlantic Records, it was released on the Atlantic subsidiary Atco, making for a minor hit and putting Satellite on the map. The label, having previously dabbled in various types of music in search of an identity, was now firmly committed to R&B and soul.

It had all been a bit of a lark for Carla Thomas, but now she found that spinning piece of plastic captivating. “It was a real record!” she says. “This is really weird,” she recalls thinking, “I can play my own record!”

That was all well and good, but A.C. Williams’ advice still reverberated: “You need to go to college.” So, even as “’Cause I Love You” was making waves on the R&B charts, Thomas was TSU-bound. “But before I went,” Thomas says, “Jim asked Dad, ‘You think she might want to cut something by herself?’” Inevitably, the demo of “Gee Whiz” came up. “Then he said, ‘Okay, we’ll do this before you go to college.’ So I’m sitting there, scared to death now, thinking, ‘College was bad enough. Now I gotta sing something by myself!’”

Fear aside, she gave it her all, pouring emotion into the sparse, simple lyrics that reveled in teen vernacular. “And little by little, they added stuff,” says Thomas, including violins played by the head of the Memphis Symphony at the time, Noel Gilbert, and his kids.

She was forging her own path, distinct from others in the Stax orbit. “I’m living in L.A. now!” she says of that period. “I was listening to Carole King, James Taylor, the Bee Gees. I covered everything! I just cut what I liked. I was just having fun!”

“Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes),” ultimately released on Atlantic, caught on like slow wildfire, reaching #5 in the R&B charts and #10 in the pop charts in 1961. Sure enough, as her mother had foreseen, Thomas made it to American Bandstand and beyond, playing the Apollo Theater, meeting heroes and celebrities.

Yet even then, composing it seemed like ancient history to the girl who had suddenly become Satellite’s and Atco’s top star. Even as Thomas matriculated at TSU (her tuition financed by her songwriting royalties), Atlantic wanted more songs, more singles, and an album. “I don’t have anything!” Thomas recalls. “I’ve forgotten all these songs that were in my notebook somewhere, and I’m so sorry I lost them, because when ‘Gee Whiz’ became a top-10 record, the others probably would have been hits. But I was two years older. I didn’t write the same way. The next record I wrote was much more adult, ‘A Love of My Own.’”

The entire Gee Whiz album that Atlantic eventually released is classic contemporary pop of its day, having been partly recorded in Nashville with session players and the Anita Kerr Singers. Soon enough, though, Thomas would become ensconced in the production process and the raw Memphis Sound that evolved in the studio on McLemore Avenue, as Satellite was renamed Stax, and the label became a hit-making force. Though nothing was quite the smash hit that “Gee Whiz” had been, singles like “B-A-B-Y” or “Tramp” (with Otis Redding) cemented her place as one of the label’s most reliably popular artists. Until Mavis Staples and her family joined the Stax roster in 1969, Thomas was the only female performer on Stax to have albums released under her own name.

Yet even after she had become a star of ’60s soul, other worlds called to her. After TSU, she pursued a master’s degree at Howard University in Washington, D.C., which was her gateway to New York.

“A lot of things came about through going to Howard,” says Thomas. “I was in D.C., so I went to New York all the time. I went to see Hair. I saw all the Broadway shows. At Stax, they were keeping up with what I was doing, and I ended up cutting ‘Where Do I Go?’” That song from Hair, so uncharacteristic of the Stax sound, still charted in the R&B Top 40.

Meanwhile, she continued to explore, to discover. “I studied acting in New York, at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. I studied under Strasberg.” That in turn led her to Los Angeles, where she studied with Harry Mastrogeorge. She had a shining moment in 1972’s Wattstax concert in L.A., but as Thomas tested her independence, she was not connecting with the Stax aesthetic in the same way. She remains defiantly proud of a 1970 album she cut during her L.A. years, Sweet Sweetheart, though at the time Stax declined to release it. (Craft Recordings finally issued the LP only this year.) That album remains a symbol of her determination to follow her own star.

She was forging her own path, distinct from others in the Stax orbit. “I’m living in L.A. now!” she says of that period. “I was listening to Carole King, James Taylor, the Bee Gees. I covered everything! I just cut what I liked. I was just having fun!”

Ultimately, the Stax empire crumbled for a time, before its revival as a museum, school, and foundation years later. But Thomas kept having fun. That didn’t include as much performing, but she appeared on national television in the ’80s, and toured intermittently, even as her younger sister Vaneese found success as an R&B singer in her own right. Carla eventually returned to Memphis and has lived here for decades, throwing herself into education.

Most sure, the goddess

On whom these airs attend! Vouchsafe my prayer

… that you will some good instruction give.

— William Shakespeare, The Tempest

I taught with the Memphis Literacy Council for years, when I first came back [to Memphis],” Thomas recalls. “That program was called Each One, Teach One. Then I founded the Artists in the Schools Residencies with Babs Feibelman — that’s my girl!”

Even today, she often visits the students at Delta State University and the Stax Music Academy (SMA), and has performed with the latter on international stages, her voice as strong and melodious as ever.

Well into the twenty-first century, music is still a major part of this Renaissance woman’s life. The 2003 documentary Only the Strong Survive, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, featured Thomas and other Stax artists. In 2021, Thomas sang on Valerie June’s single, “Call Me a Fool,” which received a Grammy nomination for Best American Roots Song.

And of course, the Stax legacy has only grown. The box set Written In Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos won a Grammy in 2023. In 2024, the label’s history was championed in the HBO documentary series Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. And these days, who hasn’t melted a little to the sweet strains of “Gee Whiz, It’s Christmas,” Thomas’ 1963 sleeper single whose popularity has only snowballed over the decades?

Onstage, few who were there will ever forget her cameo at a Booker T. Jones concert at Crosstown Theater in 2019, where she sang “B-A-B-Y” with Jones and the SMA band, or her show-stopping performance at the 2024 RiverBeat Music Festival, when she stepped out before the Hi Rhythm Section with a crutch, due to a minor injury, and still delivered her hits with aplomb.

Through it all, she’s maintained that same unquenchable sense of fun and playfulness in all she does, with no sign of slowing down. She has a gleam in her eye as she reflects on where her life has taken her. “Ain’t no harm in being a legend,” she says, “especially a living one.”