Through the (Cracked) Looking Glass

50 Years of Memphis Music

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Editor’s Note: As part of our 50th anniversary, we asked writers to reflect on a half-century of Memphis history, but through a specific cultural lens. What follows is Alex Greene on music. You can find the entire package in our April 2026 print edition. Not a subscriber? Start one, and we'll send you a copy of the special issue.

On December 19, 1975, a federal marshal barged into the offices of Stax Records, jumped onto the receptionist’s desk, and announced, “You’ve got 15 minutes to get out of the building!” Stax had been forced into involuntary bankruptcy. By January 1976, the independent label that had done so much to make Memphis a music industry town was no more.

Thus, just months before a new magazine called City of Memphis debuted, a stark dividing line was drawn across Memphis music history: the before, and now the after. American Sound Studio, another hit factory, had closed in 1972, and by 1976 even Willie Mitchell of Hi Records, the game-changing label of Al Green, Ann Peebles, and others, was saying, “It’s time for a change.” By the following year he had sold the label, but prudently retained Royal Studios, where he’d cut those hits.

Yet we Memphis musicians (and I’ve been one since 1988) drove on into the future — I’m picturing a metallic blue ’76 Chrysler Cordoba — our eyes firmly locked on the rear-view mirror. It was a cracked mirror at that, each facet of the looking glass refracting different elements of the blues, rock-and-roll, and soul that had put Memphis on the map.

Ghosts in the Machine

As it turned out, all was not lost in the Memphis music industry, thanks to one refracted shard of that old Stax magic, dressed up in a costume that quacked. “Disco Duck” was the brainchild of WMPS DJ Rick Dees, produced by Stax alum Bobby Manuel, and recorded at Shoe Productions. A smaller studio founded in 1971, Shoe had connections to both of Stax’s founders, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton. The Memphis Horns so vital to Stax’s sound played on it, and Axton’s label, Fretone Records, released it before RSO Records picked it up. With lyrics like “Flappin’ my arms, I began to cluck (Quack-quack) / Look at me, I’m the disco duck!” it could have been a Rufus Thomas track on Stax/Volt, albeit one with a disco beat, squelchy synth-guitar, and strings. The single quacked its way to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for a week — the last Memphis-recorded track to reach such heights for nearly 40 years.

Those wacky, quacky highs were soon undercut in the summer of ’77, when Elvis Presley’s death shook the pop world to its core. By then, Presley wasn’t the commercial juggernaut of his earlier years, but was of course beloved in his adopted hometown. He had played the Mid-South Coliseum in July of ’76, and, as with any true celebrity, the simple pleasures of taking in a movie or show were still denied him. “The man who had entertained tens of millions in countless auditoriums and theaters could not himself enter such a place,” wrote Jackson Baker in these pages then, for Elvis was a giant here.

Nationally speaking, he was still a force. The year prior to his death delivered two respectable Top 40 singles, “Hurt” and “Moody Blue,” but those were soon eclipsed by “Way Down,” which made the Top 20 within weeks of his death in August, and “My Way,” which did nearly as well that autumn.

Profit, Pedagogy, and the Past

If marking the death of The King in terms of his record sales seems crass, that calculus nevertheless figured into the post rex future of Memphis, and as the late-twentieth century roared on, the city still simmered with ties to radio, labels, and promotional machines, not to mention the sheer talent and lore driving the music business. A half-century later, when RCA-Legacy sought remixes of tracks Presley had cut in Memphis, it was a Memphian, Matt Ross-Spang, who produced them at his thriving studio here. Meanwhile, the carefully curated success of Elvis Presley Enterprises, which first opened Graceland to the public in 1982, created a new model for music tourism and an annual beacon for the tribute act industry.

That would blossom into other reliquaries of the city’s past, as museums fitted to every musical niche opened, including Sun Studio (celebrating much more than just Elvis), the Center for Southern Folklore, the Smithsonian’s Rock ’n’ Soul Museum, the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

The latter was especially notable for literally rising out of the ruins. A decade after being padlocked by the Feds, the old Stax building was abandoned, set to be razed. Writer Robert Gordon jumped the chain-link fence around the demolition site in the late ’80s and made off with some moldering reels of tape (later included in the 2023 Grammy-winning collection, Written in their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos) before the final bulldozing began. People in town even collected Stax bricks.

Congress officially declared Beale Street, which had fallen into neglect and disrepair, the “Home of the Blues,” indicative of a broader embrace (and institutionalization) of the city’s musical past, and by 1982 the Beale Street Development Corporation began revitalizing the strip.

Onetime Stax publicist and songwriter Deanie Parker wanted to do more than save the building: She wanted to save the label’s spirit. “Why are we trying to save a run-down building that was already run-down when we converted the theater into a studio?” she thought. “Let ’em tear it down!” And with her trademark gumption, aided and abetted by Shangri-La Records owner Sherman Willmott, she rallied supporters of the old Stax sound to create a new building and the Soulsville Foundation at the dawn of this century, with one eye on the road ahead. Tellingly, it was Soulsville’s Stax Music Academy, rather than the museum, that opened first, and both are thriving to this day.

The rearview mirror was only reinforced when Congress officially declared Beale Street, which had fallen into neglect and disrepair, the “Home of the Blues,” indicative of a broader embrace (and institutionalization) of the city’s musical past, and by 1982 the Beale Street Development Corporation began revitalizing the strip. New clubs celebrated blues dating from the early part of the century, but the music venues catering to tourists did more than look backward; they supplied work to musicians. When Hi records fizzled out, for example, the Hi Rhythm Section players plied their craft on Beale. By 1991, the district had revived to such a degree that B.B. King, by then a blues icon, opened the first club bearing his name there.

Rock and Soul Go Global

Meanwhile, our ’76 Chrysler Cordoba rolled on. Local players, producers, and songsmiths had not given up their ambitions: Songwriting and the ears for a pop gem were still valued here, and although the city was no longer an industry hub, it was a player in the world of major record labels and radio. Ardent Studios (founded by John King, Fred Smith, and John Fry), which had initially thrived by booking sessions Stax couldn’t accommodate, became a force in its own right after Stax’s demise. Ardent’s commitment to the latest technology helped onetime blues purists ZZ Top to reimagine themselves with drum machines and synths, leading to their domination of the global music charts through the ’80s.

Ardent had also pioneered what came to be known as power pop, starting with the radio-friendly sounds of Big Star. While that band’s 1972 debut, #1 Record, had flopped upon release, the half-century that followed saw a slow but steady ascent in the record’s popularity. Indeed, their combination of hard-rock guitar and soaring pop melodies became a defining sound of the ’70s and ’80s.

Other groups had quicker success, such as Southern-flavored Cobra and lead singer Jimi Jamison, who later went on to front Survivor. R.E.M. — the band’s members all diehard Big Star fans — visited Ardent to record their 1988 album Green, which went on to sell four million copies. Still more artists, like Van Duren (and, later, his band Good Question), Robert A. Johnson, and Richard Orange’s Zuider Zee, would make power pop with a more upbeat energy in the late ’70s. Though radio success eluded them, their work has been revisited and re-released in this century to much greater acclaim. That’s been especially true of Big Star founder Chris Bell’s work, with his I Am the Cosmos, widely ignored on its release in 1978, now internationally celebrated.

When it comes to international celebration, few Memphians fared as well as Rufus Thomas, who has a park named after him in Porretta, Italy. That’s where an annual festival of soul music has been held every year since 1987, helping ensure that soul, too, has only risen in stature since the original Stax ended prematurely. The festival has hosted many Memphis artists, including both Rufus and Carla Thomas, Isaac Hayes, and other Stax greats, plus those contemporary champions of old school soul, the Bo-Keys, who have backed local talents under-recognized in their day, like Don Bryant and Percy Wiggins. The whole world, it seems, was looking in the rear-view mirror — and listening to what they had missed the first time around.

But soul music’s continued success was more than retro. In 1993, Wendy Moten, then a young unknown, had a minor hit with “Come In Out of the Rain,” which captured that era’s version of soul, imbued with contemporary gospel’s jazzier chords and very fluid vocal stylings. It also marked the rise of the city’s smaller studios, having been recorded at Cotton Row, a relative newcomer. Meanwhile, former Stax hitmakers the Bar-Kays, who had always stayed contemporary into the disco and funk era under the leadership of James Alexander, rode that wave through the 1980s with a string of successful singles, and even re-entered the charts in 2012 with their Grown Folks EP.

That twenty-first-century volley into the pop charts was not recorded in Memphis; nor were the many contemporary hits by former NSYNC singer and Memphis-area native Justin Timberlake. The city was still a crucible of talent; it just didn’t have the infrastructure to capitalize in a big way, as in the “before times.” Even Wendy Moten recorded most of her work in Detroit after her first success.

It would take a producer from the U.K., Mark Ronson, to turn a locally recorded track into a massive global success when he cut the Bruno Mars single “Uptown Funk” at Royal Studios, where Willie Mitchell’s son, Boo, carried on after his father’s 2010 death. Released late in 2014, “Uptown Funk” occupied the number-one spot in the U.S. charts for more than three months, ultimately being certified 11-times platinum. It was the city’s greatest commercial success since “Disco Duck.” And, combining classic Memphis horn blasts with juicy ’80s synthesizer squalls, it was unmistakably a product of Royal.

That marked a turning point for Royal, and the studio has emerged as a go-to destination for anyone looking to capture a certain vintage sound (and a feeling for the blues, as Grammys for Cedric Burnside and the Sinners soundtrack attest). But Royal’s not alone. Sam Phillips Recording Service kept doing business right through the doldrums of the ’70s and beyond, with Phillips himself assisting on Pink Cadillac, the classic 1979 album by John Prine, produced by Sam’s sons, Knox and Jerry. Today, that studio also preserves “the Memphis sound,” under the guidance of Jerry and his daughter, Halley, combining older recording gear with state-of-the-art technology. More recently, newer studios like Memphis Magnetic and Southern Grooves have emulated this combination, tipping their hats to vintage analog gear.

Denizens of the Underworld

In the post-Stax, post-Elvis world, artists emerged who forswore mainstream music. 1976 marked an aesthetic shift, with debut releases by both The Ramones and Richard Hell & the Voidoids. The new sound would soon be called punk rock: short, choppy, and rude in a way that commercial music of the era never was.

Memphis was on the cutting edge of this new, do-it-yourself approach. Alex Chilton, having tasted his greatest success as the voice of the Box Tops, American Sound Studio’s hitmakers of the ’60s, joined Big Star and embraced more experimental, idiosyncratic music in the last days of the latter band. Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers was produced by Jim Dickinson in 1974, yet was so hard to sell that it wasn’t released until 1978. Embracing chaos, dissolute and dissonant in places, ethereal and orchestral in others, that album marked Chilton’s shift toward edgier sounds, and by 1976 he was spending a lot of time in New York. Playing his newer, ragged-but-right material there, he also became enamored with The Cramps, bringing them to Memphis to record their debut at Ardent.

Chilton and The Cramps also gazed into the rear-view mirror, and it was definitely cracked. That was just how they liked it, regularly putting their punkish spin on obscure B-sides and rarities from the ’50s and ’60s. And they weren’t alone. The disparate crew of Jim Dickinson, Sid Selvidge, Lee Baker, and Jimmy Crosthwait formed Mudboy & the Neutrons, putting a hard-rock spin on classics like “Land of 1,000 Dances” and “Shotgun,” as with their signature tune, “Land of 1,000 Shotguns.”

Inspired by Mudboy & the Neutrons, photographer and videographer Gus Nelson reinvented himself as Tav Falco, taking a circular saw to his guitar while playing Leadbelly’s “Bourgeois Blues” in his first performance. Soon, Chilton had formed a band with Falco, the Panther Burns, and to this day Falco makes internationally celebrated records. Also inspired by Chilton and Dickinson, one of the first “all-girl” punk groups, The KLiTZ, also appeared on the Memphis scene in the late ’70s, and still make music in various configurations.

Other raucous women followed, including The Marilyns and The Hellcats, the latter spawning the solo career of Lorette Velvette. (Full disclosure: Lorette and I were married for a time.) And for all these groups, the backward-looking gesture was key, as they made a point of reinterpreting classic blues and rock-and-roll, even while penning original music.

Beginning with homemade, lo-fi mixtapes, then building from that underground notoriety into popular success as hip hop established itself as the commercial sound of our age, Memphis has been a hub for hip hop innovation for over three decades.

They were “punk” chiefly in being anti-commercial, though they were often celebrated in Europe. In part, they were driven by the artistic, chaotic deconstruction of the past. Chilton himself epitomized this approach, known for his covers of material by artists from Furry Lewis to Michael Jackson to Chet Baker. And they heralded a D.I.Y. aesthetic in Memphis, centered for decades on the legendary Antenna Club.

That club also spawned Lucero and the Grifters. And among dozens of hardcore punk groups, the 1990s also brought the bluesier and wittier Oblivians, a trio of visionary songwriters who carry on as solo artists or entrepreneurs today: Greg Cartwright formed Reigning Sound, and more recently The Hypos; Jack Oblivian became a mainstay of the live scene both here and in Europe; and Eric Friedl co-founded the venerable Goner Records, a store and label that draws fans from across the globe for its annual Gonerfest. The label, for its part, has brought many celebrated artists to light, most notably the late Jay Reatard, highly regarded in his late-2000s heyday. For many thousands of fans, this brand of garage/punk is the Memphis sound.

The Memphis Bounce

Yet another D.I.Y. aesthetic was also brewing in the Bluff City starting in the ’80s, one that would prove to be the basis for an entirely different “Memphis sound.” For much of the world, that began in 1991 with the debut of M-Team, a group Boo Mitchell formed with his brother, and the first rap group from Memphis to release a full-length album and have a video played on MTV. But it was brewing years before that. As DJ Paul recalls, “1986 was the year that me and Lord Infamous, may he rest in peace, told ourselves on Halloween night that we wanted to be rappers … I didn’t take piano lessons, I went straight to the organ. That’s what helped me create Three 6 Mafia’s sound. That’s why we always had an eerie, underground, spooky feel.”

That creepy, cinematic sound, sometimes dubbed “horrorcore,” became a Memphis trademark, along with the heavy use of the Roland TR-808 drum machine. Beginning with homemade, lo-fi mixtapes, then building from that underground notoriety into popular success as hip hop established itself as the commercial sound of our age, Memphis has been a hub for hip hop innovation for over three decades.

DJ Squeeky was producing it from the beginning. “I was probably about 15 [or] 16 years old,” he told the Memphis Flyer in 2018. “I did some work with 8 Ball & MJG, Criminal Manne, Project Playaz, and Tom Skimask. We all kinda grew up together in the same neighborhood.” By the twenty-teens, Squeeky was making gold records with the now-deceased Young Dolph, born about the time Squeeky got started. Today, Dolph’s cousin, Key Glock, carries on his legacy.

With groups like Three 6 Mafia and artists like Yo Gotti leading the way commercially, Memphis has come to dominate the airwaves yet again, as underscored when Three 6 received an Academy Award for a song they contributed to Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow — the first such award for a hip hop track. Al Kapone, whose career began in the ’90s, also contributed to that soundtrack, most notably “Whoop That Trick,” eventually adopted by Memphis Grizzlies fans as a victory chant. As he told Memphis Magazine in 2022, “Most people know that Hustle & Flow is what brought that song to the masses, but ‘Whoop That Trick’ was actually my original song. I didn’t write that song for the movie. I wrote that song for me to perform in the hood clubs.”

While hip hop may seem like a rejection of past forms, these artists are looking through the rear-view mirror as well: Most Memphis rappers and producers freely acknowledge the appeal of classic Stax and Hi tracks as sources for their samples. Nowadays, Kapone has embraced mixing live blues guitar with his hip hop, and Lawrence Matthews samples North Mississippi blues from the Fat Possum Records catalog.

And so our trusty ’76 Chrysler Cordoba rolls on, its drivers caught between the rear-view mirror and the road ahead. On the one hand, the Unapologetic collective’s artists, helmed by producer IMAKEMADBEATS, eschew hip hop’s reliance on old soul and funk samples, creating entirely original tracks that only sound like vintage records. On the other hand, we have the Central High School Jazz Band, winners of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2025 Essentially Ellington competition, whose young players have fully internalized music created nearly a century ago. As band director Ollie Liddell tells his alto saxophonist, “Man, you’ve got to be Johnny Hodges.” Yet they too are looking ahead, mastering the art of the now: improvisation. Indeed, that may be how the city’s players have so deftly balanced the past and future. How else to keep an old Cordoba rolling except to improvise?