Most Stax Records fans know at least two names from the label’s roster of songwriters. David Porter and Isaac Hayes were the dynamic songwriting team behind at least 200 songs in the label’s publishing company, East/Memphis Music, and Hayes’ elevation to global celebrity only elevated the team’s profile. Yet they were only two among the dozens of songsmiths working away at 926 East McLemore Avenue in the heyday of Stax and its many subsidiary imprints.
Now, in what may be the greatest behind-the-scenes glimpse into the process of making records since The Beatles’ Anthology series, Craft Recordings is releasing a new seven-CD collection that reveals the depth of that talent. Written in their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos is like a message in a bottle from a half century ago, conjuring the spirit and soul of what was going down in the studio’s back rooms while the final recordings were being cut in the main tracking room. And while some of these demos got the full band treatment, even more of them capture the intimacy of just a singer and one or two others in a room, sketching out the basics of a song, hoping a Stax artist would make it a success.
Exhibit A, below, is a glimpse into the work of Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper as they put down their idea for a new approach to songwriting, using only numbers in the chorus. In the end, they pitched it to Wilson Pickett, who made the full band version a number one hit on the R&B charts in 1966. Yet this raw demo has its own charm. The difference between the hit and what you hear below tells you all you need to know about this extravagant and enlightening collection.
The crunch of Steve Cropper’s guitar almost makes the classic hit into a rock song. Yet such a glimpse into the making of a hit record is only one facet of what’s revealed here. Many more were recorded by Stax artists but released into semi-obscurity, some were recorded by artists on other labels, and still more never made it past the demo stage.
All of that is contained here, including three full discs from the latter category — in other words, 66 never-before-heard songs from the Stax universe. This alone would be a revelation, but even the first three discs, featuring demos for songs that ultimately were cut and released, bring what were often previously deep cuts up to the surface. If the Staple Singers’ version of “Slow Train” was overshadowed by other tracks on their Stax debut, William Bell’s stark rendering of it with just a guitarist (Cropper?) stands out as one of the most haunting tracks.
Going a step further, Carl Smith’s demo of “We the People,” also eventually released by the Staple Singers, has the wonderful loopiness of someone who’s dancing like no one’s watching, complete with squeals of “Ow! Shack-a-lack!” over a sparse — but funky — piano and drum arrangement.
From the haunted to the joyous, this is ultimately a tribute to the power of a song, no matter what form it takes, and a fitting celebration of Stax songwriters both obscure and legendary, from William Brown to Deanie Parker, from Homer Banks to Mack Rice, from Bettye Crutcher to Carla Thomas.
As it turns out, it’s also a tribute of a different kind to the key creator of the set, Cheryl Pawelski, the three-time Grammy-winning producer and co-founder of Omnivore Recordings who previously worked for Rhino, EMI-Capitol Records, and Concord Music Group. It was while producing catalog releases for the latter that she conceived of a collection of Stax demos, most of which she heard while going through the archived audio files of East/Memphis Music, owned by Rondor Music Publishing after the demise of Stax.
As Pawelski describes in the liner notes, these reference demo recordings were filed away with the accompanying sheet music as they were made, but when Stax was forced into bankruptcy in late 1975, the audio recordings were archived haphazardly, ultimately being transferred to digital formats willy-nilly as the decades wore on. It was up to Pawelski to find these gems by reviewing almost 2,000 hours of audio, much of it containing completely unrelated recordings. She identified 665 individual songs, eventually winnowing those down to the 140 tracks being released now.
It was a Herculean effort, taken up in stolen moments of time over more than a decade of Pawelski’s life (and beautifully documented in this Burkhard Bilger piece in the New Yorker). But Pawelski was not alone: her co-producers for the compilation included Deanie Parker, Michele Smith, Mason Williams, and Robert Gordon, and the liner notes by Gordon and Parker are a delight in their own right.
The two writers have the benefit of Parker’s first-hand knowledge, directing publicity for Stax in its heyday, plus the years of research Gordon put into his book, Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion. One recurrent theme is the deeply ingrained sexism of the male Stax songwriters, producers, and artists, leading some of the women, like Parker or Crutcher, to cook up pots of spaghetti as subtle inducements to be taken more seriously. Even then, it was an uphill battle, which makes this collection all the more important. Would-be classics like Bettye Crutcher’s “Everybody is Talking Love” can finally be heard. And even songs composed by men for women artists, often sung here by men adopting the woman’s persona in a kind of recording studio gender-bending, can finally see the light of day. On this set, you can compare Homer Banks singing his “Too Much Sugar for a Dime,” a woman’s demand for relief from her gender-defined duties, directly with Crutcher’s impassioned delivery of the same song on the next track.
If the word “revelation” is overused, this at least is one release that merits it. As Gordon and Parker write, “The history of Stax Records and Southern rhythm and blues is about to change.”
The Stax Museum of American Soul Music will celebrate the release of Written in their Soul on Friday, June 23, from 6 – 8:30 p.m.
Free, RSVP required.
