Editor’s Note: Some might tell you that Memphis is the biggest small town in America. We would say that Memphis is a patchwork of small towns — in the form of distinctive neighborhoods — stitched closely together into the form of a city. So we’re highlighting some of the city’s best towns, if you will, by spotlighting some of our classic neighborhoods. Maybe this will remind you to revisit an area you don’t call home, or to identify more strongly with the one you do.
The iconic Stax sign towers over the Soulsville neighborhood in more ways than one. In a recent event celebrating the Stax Museum of American Soul Music’s 20th anniversary, singer/songwriter William Bell explained what the studio meant to locals in its prime. Describing how Stax responded to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Bell noted that Stax stood unscathed while rioting damaged many nearby businesses. To many, the former movie theater on McLemore was a beacon of hope, not least to the neighborhood kids who would frequent the label-owned Satellite Record Shop next door, then find themselves chatting with Stax co-owner Estelle Axton, then be recruited to play on a recording session or otherwise join the Stax family.
Acclaimed songwriter David Porter was one such youngster, as was Booker T. Jones, leader of the famous M.G.’s. Indeed, many musical luminaries either hailed from or resided in the Soulsville neighborhood, including William Bell himself. Beyond Stax artists, the list includes blues piano legend Memphis Slim (whose former home now houses a music education nonprofit), Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White, and even Aretha Franklin, whose birthplace was saved from demolition by a community development corporation based at nearby LeMoyne-Owen College.
The historically Black college is another beacon of hope in Soulsville, having offered classes continuously since Memphis was occupied by federal troops during the Civil War. It’s no coincidence that LeMoyne-Owen hosted not only the official announcement of the Stax Music Academy’s (SMA) founding in 2000, but also some of its first classes, before the current SMA building was finished.
As conceived by former Stax publicist and songwriter Deanie Parker, the SMA and Stax Museum, both overseen by the Soulsville Foundation, had to work hand-in-hand from the start. And Parker’s conviction that the museum should include an educational component only grew when she first set up her foundation’s offices down the street from the site of the old studio, which had been demolished in 1989.
“When we went back into that neighborhood,” she says of that time, “and interfaced with it, and watched what was going on every day, and how rotten that area had become, we thought, ‘We need to start with where the greatest need is first.’ And the need was with those children. It was heartbreaking. They didn’t have any place to call their own except maybe the youth center, or the YWCA that was on Mississippi and Walker.”
Thanks to the SMA, the Stax Museum, and the Soulsville Charter School campus, children near the musical mecca have more options now, and even opportunities to travel the world with the academy’s student and alumni bands. Though Parker has retired from helming the Soulsville Foundation, it carries on robustly under the direction of Pat Mitchell-Worley, and more community development has sprung up around it.
Memphis Flyer’s Jackson Baker has called a “textbook description of an underserved population.” Explaining the TIF system, he wrote that “TIF is one of three basic financial means by which local or state governments can incentivize investment,” adding that Soulsville representatives have already “accelerated the active recruiting of new businesses to serve the area.” There’s also been the steady work of Rev. Marlon Foster, executive director of the youth outreach program Knowledge Quest (best known for its verdant community gardens), and founder of Christ Quest Community Church, a non-denominational church rooted in social justice and evangelism.
The churches are still a vital part of this neighborhood (just as the church was always vital to Stax), and when patrons fill up the Four Way Grill after Sunday services, as they have ever since 1946, it harks back to “Soulsville,” the song Isaac Hayes recorded here more than 50 years ago:
The place where he lives, God, he gives them names
The Hood, The Projects, The Ghetto, they are one and the same
And I call it “Soulsville” ah, yeah.
