A version of this story originally appeared in the July/August 2002 issue of Memphis magazine.
Former schoolteacher Estelle Axton, shown here outside Stax in 1968, co-founded the studio with her brother, Jim Stewart in a former movie theater on McLemore Avenue.
Photograph courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music.
There’s an old saying that goes like so
Keep trying and you’ll get where you want to go
When things get rough, buckle down,
Don’t give up — you can conquer the world with your original sound
They knocked on the front door and couldn’t get in
They heard a sound and went to the back door
Thus the sound let them in.
— from an early Stax publicity release
Memphis music,” says producer Jim Dickinson, “is about racial collision in both directions” — the impact of two cultures occupying the same physical space. The Memphis Sound is a direct result of that integration — whites recording blacks, learning to play from blacks, impersonating black musicians, and eventually performing alongside them. Dickinson himself was taught music by Alex, his family’s yard man — an exchange, he insists, that in 1956 “was not socially acceptable in any way, shape, or form. It was not all right for teenage white boys to do that.”
Radio, however, could not be segregated, and so the cultural revolution that made Memphis the wellspring of so much good music arrived, incongruously enough, over the airwaves. Pioneering the insurrection was Dewey Phillips, host of WHBQ’s Red, Hot, and Blue radio show. Enthusiastic and unschooled, Phillips broke all the rules of programming, as music historian Colin Escott writes, “with an eclectic mix of blues, hillbilly, and pop that would become an institution in Memphis.” Phillips’ ability to pick hits, as well as his manic sense of humor and refusal to be pigeonholed, made tuning in his radio show a daily ritual for Memphis teenagers white and black — setting the stage for sounds to come.
Less than five miles from the WHBQ studios, WDIA was making waves as the first all-black programmed radio station in the county. Armed with local luminaries such as Rufus Thomas, Dwight “Gatemouth” Moore, and Nat D. Williams, ’DIA, as folks called it, was known as the voice of Memphis’ black community. Inspired by those stations’ success, entrepreneur Sam Phillips opened the Memphis Recording Service in the 1950s “with the intention of recording musicians from Memphis and the locality who I felt had something that people should be able to hear,” he says.
Recognizing the power of the raw black sound, Phillips experimented with great historical (but not financial) success with other musicians — Ike Turner, James Cotton, Rosco Gordon; even Rufus Thomas released cuts on Phillips’ Sun label. Aware that white youth wouldn’t accept the genuine article, Phillips searched for a white artist who could perform with black feeling. In the summer of 1954, as the story goes, he found what he wanted in Elvis Presley.
With other Sun artists, the story was the same. Poor rural white boys like Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Charlie Feathers, and Jerry Lee Lewis all learned their instruments at the hands of neighborhood black musicians. Local blacks, originators of the sound, still hung around the back door looking for a way in.
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Then came Stax. Brother and sister team Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton relocated their tiny studio from rural Tennessee to downtown Memphis in 1960, setting up shop in the unoccupied Capitol movie theater on East McLemore Avenue. More unlikely purveyors of the Memphis Sound couldn’t be imagined.
“We had an open-door policy,” remembers former schoolteacher Estelle Axton, in an interview decades later. “If you wanted to be heard, if you had something unique or different for us to listen to, well then, bring it in and we’d take the time to listen.” None of their plans were intentional — they just happened.
“I had scarcely seen a black person ’til I was grown,” Stewart told author Peter Guralnick in Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. “I had no desire to start Stax Records; I had no dream of doing anything like that. I just wanted music, just anything to be involved with music.” Located in a black working-class community, Stax offered equal opportunities for blacks and whites. And once the door opened at Soulsville USA (as the studio was called), curious neighborhood blacks began to stop in.
Carla Thomas. Isaac Hayes. David Porter. The Mad Lads. The Bar-Kays. The Astors. Booker T. Jones. These names could serve as a roll call for world-renowned black singers and musicians who grew up at Stax. Balancing the scales were white teens Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn, who, along with Jones and drummer Al Jackson Jr., formed the MGs — the rhythm section that became the core of the Stax sound.
Booker T. and the MGs (L-R: Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Al Jackson, and Donald "Duck" Dunn) strike a famous pose on McLemore (above) and listen to a playback in Studio A at Stax (below).
Accordingly, one of the label’s biggest hits came from Booker T. & the MGs, who, after recording a blues instrumental, hastily cut “Green Onions,” a B-side for the single.
Otis Redding appeared on the scene in 1962. “Like almost everything else that happened at Stax, the arrival of Redding was both unforeseen and unplanned for,” writes Guralnick in Sweet Soul Music. “He was only there in the first place because he’d driven his friend, Johnny Jenkins, up from Macon, Georgia.” But once recorded, Redding hit again and again with songs like “Respect,” “Mr. Pitiful,” and “Try a Little Tenderness.”
Otis Redding's "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay" was released after his death in 1967. It became a number-one hit for Stax.
Culminating with his appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival in the summer of 1967, Redding, according to Guralnick, “eventually opened up the world of Southern soul to a large-scale white audience, making Stax a byword in soul circles.” It all ended that December, when Redding’s plane crashed into an icy lake en route from Cleveland, Ohio, to Madison, Wisconsin. His biggest seller, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” was released posthumously.
The Staple Singers, a prominent family group on the gospel circuit, were also hitmakers for the label. Led by patriarch Pops Staples, the group — Pervis, Cleotha, Mavis (and later Yvonne) — was drawn into the civil rights movement by the words of Martin Luther King Jr. “When we heard Dr. King preach,” Mavis says, “Pops said, ‘Now if he can preach this, we can sing it. This could be our way of helping.’ So we started singing protest songs!”
The Staple Singers, a family group, were stars on the Stax Label, with 'Respect Yourself" their biggest hit.
“Respect Yourself,” their biggest Stax hit, evolved from the idea that black folks needed — and deserved — to be proud. “Everybody is somebody” was an idiom Pops typically avowed. “There’s no big I and little you — God made us all.” On the Staples’ version of the song, Mavis delivered the battle cry in the second verse, her rumbling voice erupting on the phrase “big ole man” on her way into the chorus. Pops’ vibrato hooks, sung over the studio rhythm section, took the message home.
But the man who made that notion a reality, Dr. King, was shot down on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel just a mile north of McLemore. Riots ensued, and it seemed that Soulsville — and all of Memphis — would never be the same.
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Though no one realized it at the time, Stax’ days were also numbered. The “Sound of Money,” as the label once called itself, was financially destroyed after a bad distribution deal with CBS Records in 1972. Minor creditors forced Stax into bankruptcy in late 1975. That same year, drummer Al Jackson — Soulsville’s heartbeat — was shot to death in his home. Just a few months later, Union Planters Bank shut Stax down in a foreclosure for default on a $10 million loan. The bank sold the property to the Church of God in Christ for $10.
While filming Mystery Train, director Jim Jarmusch captured the facility at its worst — McLemore Avenue deserted, the building covered in graffiti. This was Stax in the 1980s. By the time Mystery Train was released in 1989, COGIC had razed Stax with plans to build a soup kitchen. Other than an inconspicuous historical marker (courtesy of the State of Tennessee) encircled with weeds, there were few clues that the property was ground zero for soul fans. Soulsville USA was dead.
Then on April 20, 2001, a crowd of 3,000 gathered at the former Stax site to witness the “ground shakin’ ground breakin’” for a planned $20 million Stax Museum of American Soul Music and Stax Music Academy and Performing Arts Center.
The day was overcast and windy, but jubilant musicians, fans, and local politicians turned out to see fireworks explode as a backhoe symbolically dug into the earth. Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas, William Bell, J. Blackfoot, Bar-Kays’ bassist James Alexander, and the Mad Lads’ John Gary Williams and William Brown were among the Stax luminaries present at what Curtis Johnson of the Astors described as “a family reunion. Just about everybody who was anybody, and who worked with, or for, somebody at Stax, was here. It was all smiles, hugs, and love.”
“It’s been a long time coming,” declared Steve Cropper, Stax producer and guitarist for Booker T. and the MGs. “This represents the legacy of some of the greatest music that’s ever been recorded — it’s the stamp of approval of what we did back in the Sixties. This will educate the people, especially the kids, about the music.”
Author Stanley Booth, who chronicled Stax in Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South, attributes the newfound popularity of the Memphis Sound and subsequent Soulsville revival to an unlikely source: “Evidence of its reality is the long, long time it took the politicians to claim it.” Deanie Parker, who began her career at Stax as a clerk in the Satellite Record store — and is now president and executive director of Soulsville lnc., the nonprofit organization behind the museum project — takes a humbler view. “l just want the neighborhood to sing again,” she says.
