Tag: Deanie Parker

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Music Music Blog

Memphis Wins Big at 66th Annual Grammys

(L-R) Mason Williams, Michael Graves, Cheryl Pawelski, Deanie Parker, Michele Smith & Robert Gordon, winners of the "Best Historical Album" award at the 66th GRAMMY Awards.(Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)

As the 66th Annual Grammy Awards unfolded over the weekend, many names associated with Memphis and the Mid-South were among the winners, including musicians, songwriters, producers, engineers, and writers.

If award-winning music creators are already a well-established Bluff City tradition, the music writing being done here is quickly becoming another of the city’s music industry exports. In 2021, the Commercial Appeal‘s Bob Mehr won the Best Album Notes award for the writings he penned for Dead Man’s Pop, a collection of music by The Replacements, and scored another win last year for his notes in the deluxe edition of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, co-produced by Cheryl Pawelski of Omnivore Recordings.

This year, it was Robert Gordon’s and Deanie Parker’s turn to take home the Best Album Notes prize — for yet another Pawelski project, Written in their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos, Craft Recordings’ seven-CD collection offering a glimpse into the the rare songwriting demos of Stax Records in its heyday. Profiled in the Memphis Flyer last summer, the collection is an intimate portrait of the men and women who wrote the songs of the pioneering soul label. The same box set, produced by Gordon, Parker, Pawelski, Michele Smith, and Mason Williams, also won the award for Best Historical Album.

It’s a subject that’s been thoroughly researched by Gordon, who also won a Grammy in 2011 for notes accompanying Big Star’s Keep An Eye on the Sky box set before penning the book Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion in 2013. But if Gordon knows Stax, co-writer Parker outdid him with her eyewitness accounts, having worked at Stax through most of its existence and even serving as a songwriter there herself.

Over the past 20 years, Parker has also championed the creation of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, the Stax Music Academy, and the Soulsville Foundation, as celebrated in this 2023 Memphis Flyer story. Thus her Grammy win was an important tribute to one of the label’s key behind-the-scenes players, and as the co-producers of the set gathered onstage to receive the award, they naturally deferred to Parker to speak on their behalf.

Album note writers Deanie Parker and Robert Gordon on the jumbotron, accepting their Grammy Award. (Credit: Pat Rainer).

“Stax founders Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton gave the Stax songwriters a racially integrated paradise where they were encouraged to discover and develop their authentic talents by Al Bell,” Parker said while accepting the award. “This set highlights some of Stax’s and America’s most talented rhythm and blues songwriters: Eddie Floyd, William Bell, Steve Cropper, Homer Bates, Mack Rice, Bettye Crutcher, Bobby Manuel, and Henderson Thigpen.” After thanking the Recording Academy and her fellow co-producers, she also gave a nod to local artist Kerri Mahoney for designing the look and layout of the box set, before concluding with a warm acknowledgment of “the remarkable visionary and producer, Cheryl Pawelski.”

Another non-performing contributor to Grammy wins was Matt Ross-Spang, who engineered on Weathervanes, the Best Americana Album winner by Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, and who co-produced and mixed Echoes Of The South, the Best Roots Gospel Album winner by the Blind Boys Of Alabama, at his Southern Grooves studio in the Crosstown Concourse.

Beyond the scribes, historical producers, and knob-twiddlers, musical artists from Memphis also made a strong showing at this year’s ceremony. While Memphis has always loved native daughter Julien Baker, it seems all the world loves boygenius, her band with fellow singer-songwriters Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. Their 2023 album The Record garnered six nominations, and ended up winning Best Alternative Music Album, with the group also scoring Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song wins for the single “Not Strong Enough” — featured in this week’s Music Video Monday.

boygenius (Photo courtesy Chuffmedia)

When boygenius, decked out in matching white suits, accepted their second award, Baker wore her heart on her sleeve. “All I ever wanted to do in my life was be in a band,” she said, visibly shaken with emotion. “I feel like music is the language I used to find my family since I was a kid. I just wanted to say thank you to everybody who ever watched me play.”

Bobby Rush, based in Mississippi but with longstanding ties to Memphis (and awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humanities by Rhodes College), also saw his latest work celebrated, with his 2023 album All My Love For You winning Best Traditional Blues Album. He too was eloquent in his gratitude. “I treasure this, and honor Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Tyrone Davis, Johnnie Taylor, all the guys coming before me that I looked up to…thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Finally, while not winning as a performing artist, the legendary DJ Paul was a towering presence onstage as Killer Mike accepted awards for, Best Rap Album, Best Rap Performance, and Best Rap Song. He co-wrote his track, “SCIENTISTS & ENGINEERS,” with DJ Paul (aka Paul Beauregard), Andre Benjamin, James Blake, Tim Moore, and Dion Wilson. In winning the latter category, Killer Mike and his collaborators edged out another Memphis talent, producer Tay Keith, who was among the songwriters for the Grammy-nominated track “Rich Flex” by Drake and 21 Savage.

Right out of the gate, Killer Mike acknowledged his colleague from Memphis as they stood together at the podium. “I’m from the Southeast,” he said. “Like DJ Paul, I’m a Black man in America. And as a kid, I had a dream to become a part of music, and that nine-year-old is excitedly dancing inside of me right now… I want that thank everyone who dares to believe that art can change the world.”

DJ Paul, of course, has long been an integral player in the Oscar-winning Three 6 Mafia, and is an active solo artist and producer to this day, as profiled by the Memphis Flyer here. His old crew included the late Gangsta Boo, who was honored during the In Memoriam segment of the ceremony. Wayne Kramer of Detroit’s MC5, whose appearance on Joecephus & the George Jonestown Massacre’s Call Me Animal album was likely his last released recording before his death on February 2nd, was also remembered in the segment.

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Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday: “Not Strong Enough” by boygenius (Plus Other Grammy Winners)

Memphis was well-represented at last night’s Grammy Awards. The album of long lost Stax demos, Written In Their Soul, won for Best Liner Notes, an award which was accepted by Stax’s PR person turned champion Deanie Parker and Memphis writer/director Robert Gordon.

Bobby Rush, now entering his ninth decade, won Best Traditional Blues Album for All Of My Love For You.

Supergroup boygenius—Pheobe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and former Memphis punk rocker Julien Baker—won three Grammys, including Best Alternative Album for The Record. “Not Strong Enough” won both Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance. Watch Baker get emotional while accepting the group’s third award of the evening.

The music video for “Not Strong Enough” was shot by the band themselves while hanging out in Southern California, and edited by Jackson Bridgers. The video shows off the group’s low-key appeal, which charmed the nation on the summer’s blockbuster tour which climaxed with a sold-out Halloween show at the Hollywood Bowl. The visuals may be unassuming, but the music is powerful.

You don’t have to win a Grammy to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday. All you have to do is email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

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Music Music Features

Jim Stewart: A Remembrance

Jim Stewart (Photo: Courtesy Stax Museum)

This Saturday, July 29, would have been Jim Stewart’s 93rd birthday had he not passed away last December, and so we linger a while longer at the doorstep of Stax Records to pay tribute to the man who started it all. With the Stax Museum of American Soul Music celebrating its 20th anniversary all this year, and fast on the heels of Stax Music Academy’s triumph at the Lincoln Center, it seems a fitting time to honor Stewart, whose unorthodox vision led him to recruit his sister, Estelle Axton, to invest in recording equipment for a storage space he’d rented in Brunswick, Tennessee, back in 1957. That would become the first studio for what was then called Satellite Records.

His no-nonsense manner didn’t mark him as a firebrand, but his quiet determination made him a maverick of sorts in West Tennessee, as Stewart “had to stand before the [Brunswick] town council and testify to his own integrity, and promise that drug addicts, thieves, and other lowlifes attracted to the music business would not infiltrate the crossroads and poison the minds of Brunswick’s fine children,” Robert Gordon writes in Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion. As it turned out, defending his business before the Brunswick town council was just the beginning of his trials.

That was foremost in the mind of Deanie Parker when reminiscing about Stewart recently. Parker, who started as a songwriter and singer at Stax before becoming the label’s chief publicist, worked with Stewart during the 1960s and ’70s, and knew him well. Recalling those days of racial segregation, Parker noted that creating a safe space for Black and white artists to work together came at a price.

“I can clearly remember Jim standing out in front of his own damn business under the marquee,” Parker says, “talking to his Black artists, only to have a white policeman come up and tell him, ‘Get your ass out of here, you can’t be talking to these Black people. No! That’s not going to happen out here in front of this building on McLemore Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee!’ I don’t remember if it was Isaac or Otis that Jim was talking to, but it was one of them. And Jim tried to reason with the police and the officer said, ‘I tell you what, I’ll just take your ass down and lock you up.’ So he was not liked. He was not respected. I don’t think he was encouraged. I never heard any white person say they appreciated him except for the people he worked with. That’s a lot to swallow. One thing he never got over was, in the end, Jim did not have a social circle. The white friends that he had, I bet you could count them on one hand.”

Nonetheless, he persisted. Indeed, Parker credits Stewart with initiating both the professionalism and the multiculturalism of Stax. “It really was about him,” she says. “Because if he had not been who he was, we would not have had the place, the resources, the encouragement, or even the demands to ‘Do it again, play that again — somebody’s out of tune!’ ‘No, it ain’t right yet!’ Jim would say. That was the discipline he had and demanded of us. Without that, it would never have happened. Stax was like a garden spot. It was a utopia where we could feel safe, all of us working together, playing together, learning about each other together. Being creative and making a decent living … in Memphis, Tennessee!”

The struggle to keep that spirit alive, and the forced bankruptcy that caused the label to fold in 1975, haunted Stewart for decades. “The privileged and powerful in Memphis had something else in mind for Stax Records,” says Parker ominously, and Stewart took the label’s demise personally. When Parker later took up the cause of creating a Stax museum and music academy, Stewart was less than gung-ho. “Jim had not healed,” she says. “He had not gotten over his feelings of disappointment and feeling, I’m sure, that every good deed he did was punished.”

Finally, after the museum and Stax Music Academy were underway, Parker sensed the moment when Stewart embraced them. “It happened when he saw how that Stax Music Academy was training the next generation of people to learn and respect and preserve the music that he had made possible on that corner. When we were able to get him there to witness the students, he was never the same.”

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Music Music Features

Summit of the Scribes: A Gathering of Stax Legends

Panel moderator Robert Gordon and Written in Their Soul panelists Deanie Parker, William Bell, Eddie Floyd, Bobby Manuel, CD producer Cheryl Pawelski, and Henderson Thigpen (Photo: Filmmaker Kyle Taubken)

The air was charged last Friday night at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, as five of Stax Records’ most valuable players gathered together to answer questions and speak their minds. The sold-out event was first and foremost a celebration of Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos, Craft Recordings’ seven-CD compilation (reviewed last week in the Memphis Flyer) featuring 140 never-before-heard recordings made in the studio’s back rooms, when songwriters made reference tapes of their compositions. Those demos would ultimately be filed away among the holdings of East/Memphis Music, the label’s publishing company, with the best serving as blueprints for full-on studio recordings by Stax artists.

Hence, it was not in their capacity as Stax performers that William Bell and Eddie Floyd appeared last Friday, but as some of the label’s best songwriters. They were joined by Deanie Parker, Bobby Manuel, and Henderson Thigpen, fellow masters of the craft, in a kind of summit of the scribes. The panel was rounded out by wordsmith Robert Gordon and the visionary record producer who’d first conceived of the release, three-time Grammy Award-winning producer Cheryl Pawelski.

Although the museum, built according to the original building’s plans, always conveys a sense of the bustling Stax studios and offices to the casual visitor, this historic gathering made it more palpable, as the panelists discussed their days in those very halls when Stax was at its zenith. It was a veritable money machine in its heyday, but, as Robert Gordon explained, that money wasn’t just from record sales. East/Memphis Publishing oversaw the equally lucrative income stream of song royalties. For songwriters like those gathered at the museum Friday, those royalties translated into “mailbox money.”

Henderson Thigpen was perhaps the purest expression of the songwriter’s ethos that evening. The others were involved with Stax in several capacities besides songcraft: Deanie Parker headed the label’s public relations and was later known as the primary conceptualizer of the Stax Music Academy and associated museum, Bobby Manuel was an ace session guitarist, and Bell and Floyd were stars, the most public voices and faces of Stax. Thigpen, however, focused on writing with laser-like determination, always keeping “a pen in one pocket and two notepads in the other pocket,” as he explained.

He described writing the Shirley Brown hit, “Woman to Woman,” noting the care with which he sang the demo to show Brown how the opening monologue had to be delivered. Then the museum’s executive director, Jeff Kollath, cued up the demo featuring Thigpen’s vocals, sung from a woman’s point of view, seeming to take the songwriter by surprise. He winced good-naturedly as his haunting voice from half a century ago filled the room, then took a moment to point out his wife in the audience. His only regret about the master recording of No. 1 R&B hit, he said, was that it didn’t open with the sound of a ringing telephone.

The room lit up when “Dy-No-Mite (Did You Say My Love)” by composer Mack Rice was played; while the song was recorded and released by the Green Brothers, all agreed that Rice’s high-spirited delivery on the demo, complete with whistles, could not be topped. Indeed, the late Mack Rice was a recurring presence at the event. So were prolific songwriters Bettye Crutcher, who passed away last October, and Homer Banks, who died in 2003.

The set’s art director and designer, Memphis’ own Kerri Mahoney, was in the audience and noted afterwards how stunned she was that so little memorabilia was preserved from those days. She’d had little to work with, she said, though her work ultimately resulted in a richly illustrated and smartly designed package.

Pawelski, for her part, sat back and let the legends speak, but eventually Gordon asked her to tell the long tale of the collection’s genesis and realization. When she worked for Concord Records (of which Craft is a subsidiary), she learned of the demos kept by East/Memphis. But, having been archived haphazardly, many were buried in long, uncatalogued tapes on which completely unrelated demos also appeared. Over 17 years and a few career changes culminating in the founding of her own label, Omnivore Recordings, Pawelski gradually listened through nearly 2,000 hours of audio in her quest to identify the lost gems of Stax. She was clearly elated that her baby was now out there in the world.

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Cover Feature News

Power to the People

Photo: Paul Mckinnon | Dreamstime.com

It was a dark day in 1989 for Memphis music fans when word got out that the old Stax Records building on McLemore, then owned by the Southside Church of God in Christ, was slated to be demolished. It had been in disrepair for some time, unused since the company’s 1975 involuntary bankruptcy, with crumpled PR photos and odd reels of tape scattered in the debris, languishing in limbo between the hopeful past and an uncertain future. Ironically, Stax fans had only seemed to multiply in the meantime. On this day, those in Memphis worked their landline phones, alerting others to a protest that was brewing.

Deanie Parker, who had headed artist relations and publicity at Stax before it was forced to close, was in on that phone tree, but she was not having it. “I started getting phone calls from people who knew me, and they said, ‘We’re getting ready to protest the razing of the Stax building!’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ And they asked, ‘Are you going to join us, are you coming?’ And my attitude was, ‘What good is it going to do? Why are we trying to save a run-down building that was already run-down when we converted the theater into a studio? Who in the hell is in the building? Is it doing any good? Are they cutting any records there? Are they providing jobs for anybody? What the hell — let ’em tear it down!’ And I felt badly after I had done that because I understood their passion, and I knew what they were trying to do. But this was deeper for me. What was that raggedy-ass building going to do? It wasn’t going to bring Stax back.”

Deanie Parker at Stax (Photo: Courtesy the Concord API Stax Collection | Bill Carrier Jr. All rights reserved)

Parker, as it turned out, was playing the long game. She knew better than anybody that Stax’s magic wasn’t in the building’s walls, but in the people who walked its halls. Now, nearly three and a half decades after the original building bit the dust, those faithfully reconstructed walls are celebrating their 20th year of being peopled again, animated by the same spirit that made Stax unique in the first place. On the eve of a 20th anniversary gala on April 29th, Parker notes that the creation of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music benefited from “the things that happen when people are working together. Allowing their creativity to take over, in the spirit of cooperation.”

Or, as executive director Jeff Kollath says of the Stax Museum now, “This is such a people-driven endeavor. And this is a Memphis people-driven endeavor.”

Carla Thomas and Al Jackson Jr. (Photo: Courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

The Birth of the Soulsville Foundation

The campus built around the Soulsville Foundation, under which the museum, the Stax Music Academy, and the Soulsville Charter School operate, is striking in just how closely it resembles Parker’s original vision. Called to protest the building’s demolition or to invest in a Stax-themed nightclub on Beale Street, Parker instead asked, “What’s wrong with a museum and a companion school of some sort, an academy or a performing arts center?” She recalls telling other parties, “I’d like for people to study and preserve and promote what we did. And pass it on, with an educational component and a museum that people could come and see.”

By the early ’90s, the working group sharing Parker’s vision called itself CISUM, reverse-spelling the word at the center of it all, having architectural renderings made and securing a license to use the Stax name for some 20 years. Nothing came of that, but by the decade’s end, Sherman Willmott of Shangri-La Records had started a new nonprofit, Ewarton, using letters from the names of Stax’s co-founders, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, that had not been used when “Stax” was coined.

After years of false starts, Parker recalls, “What I said to them was, ‘It’s about doing the right thing, and it’s about damn time! So count me in.’ And that was where we started. Sherman and I worked together, and he was busy procuring artifacts from everywhere and anywhere. And a curator, he was not! But nevertheless, he had the passion and the vision and he was making hay while the sun was shining.”

And, Parker’s lack of interest in the old building notwithstanding, the original lot on McLemore Avenue was a prime concern. “We felt very strongly that success rested on us getting the original site back. There’s something spiritual about that place, I’m telling you. It wasn’t in that raggedy building. It was a sense of place. A sense of place.”

Soul Comes Home

That in turn led to a change in priorities. “We were driven by building the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. But then I became reaquainted with that community and realized how that area had decayed after Stax was closed. That area had deteriorated beyond recognition. People didn’t give a damn because they felt that they had been thrown away and that nobody cared. So it was good that the board decided to switch horses, and you know what we finished and cut the ribbon on first? The Stax Music Academy. That was opened a year before the museum.”

Meanwhile, as Ewarton became the Soulsville Foundation, seeing a new museum facility take shape according to the blueprints of Stax Records’ original home was emotional for many. “Every day until that museum was opened, I walked from the front door to the back door of that place,” says Parker, “and the day that I walked through there and didn’t cry, I knew we had achieved what we were trying to do. By that time I was too tired; I was all cried out! It was an emotional thing, seeing it come alive.”

True to the Stax spirit, that also meant reuniting the people who’d made the label what it was. As befitting a people-driven enterprise, Parker was the ideal recruiter. “One of my responsibilities at Stax Records had been artist relations. And as the publicist, I was acquainted with all of them in some way. I was connected,” she says. But she found that it wasn’t as straightforward as she’d hoped. “I focused on galvanizing the Stax family. But I got mixed responses. Some of us left there bitter. People who were essentially told to go to hell, with nobody ever saying, ‘Thank you.’ Some of us left there with all kinds of damn baggage — baggage that I’m still finding out about today.”

Nonetheless, most of them were moved by the finished space. Touring the museum with his extended family, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn enthused that everything looked the same but now had air conditioning (the original space had none). “After it opened, Eddie Floyd told me, ‘I went through there 12 times.’ They were ecstatic,” says Parker. “It was tangible evidence of Memphians finally celebrating what we thought was great and wonderful.” The greatest celebration was not the ribbon cutting on May 2, 2003, but the concert at the Orpheum Theatre anticipating it. Dubbed Soul Comes Home, the Stax and Memphis music reunion concert (featured on this week’s cover) included Isaac Hayes, Booker T. & the MGs, Mavis Staples, the Rance Allen Group, Jean Knight, Eddie Floyd, William Bell, Carla Thomas, Ann Peebles, Al Green, Jimmie Vaughan, and other luminaries.

William Bell, Johnnie Taylor, and Carla Thomas (Photo: Courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

Back to the Future

Now, 20 years later, it’s impossible to imagine the Soulsville neighborhood without the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, the Stax Music Academy, or the Soulsville Charter School. The museum alone has hosted enough art exhibits, book discussions, and music events to keep it at the forefront of ever-evolving scholarship on American soul music. But over time, the exhibits themselves have not evolved much — until now.

The 20-year mark has inspired some long-overdue makeovers to the museum this year. As Jeff Kollath points out, “The public isn’t really aware how much our collection has grown in the last five to 10 years. We see it because our shelves are full, and we’re always connecting with new objects and new materials in the archives. [Collections manager/archivist] Leila Hamdan is doing a lot of organizing and getting a better handle on some of our documents.”

Now some of that will see the light of day, but, Kollath stresses, “This isn’t an expansion. We’re prettying the place up and changing some things out for the first time in 20 years. And we’ll have a rolling, gradual opening of new exhibits. We’ll be correcting errors, especially where they have birth and death dates. Some things have aged out. And we’ll include more Memphis history: how Stax sprang up in this city, and what about this city made that happen? The big thing is relating the end of Stax Records as accurately and as engagingly as possible. Currently, the end of Stax is on three oval panels with no photographs; it’s a book on a wall. And it’s not totally accurate, either. People want to say Stax was dead, but it never really died. Obviously we’re the legacy of that.”

Retelling the story of Stax Records’ latter days will also include a heightened focus on the political activism of the era. “We started looking at that side of Stax Records in 2018 with the ‘Give a Damn’ exhibition we did at Crosstown Arts,” says Kollath. “That was built around activism at Stax. Artists felt more compelled to speak out, to act, and became more involved in the community here in Memphis, and in the case of Isaac Hayes becoming internationally involved in charitable pursuits. That peaked with future presidential candidate Jesse Jackson acting as Isaac Hayes’ hype man at the WattStax festival. There’s all these reminders of the cultural and political impact of Stax that I don’t think are addressed enough.” Look for more of that, not to mention Rufus Thomas’ blazing-hot pink hot pants, as this anniversary year progresses.

The Night Train and the Church

Having duly recognized the sociopolitical impact of Stax, it should be noted that the prevailing mood at the Soulsville Foundation these days is more in line with those hot pants: “Let’s party!” This museum does not take the launch of its third decade lightly, and from 7 p.m. till midnight on April 29th, its walls will witness some serious celebrations. As Soulsville Foundation president and CEO Pat Mitchell Worley says, “The party itself is a trip through Black music. That’s why we call it the Night Train Gala. It reflects how important the train has been historically for African Americans, as far as travel, especially in the South. It’s how the Chicago Defender was delivered to the South, when Pullman porters would give copies of the Defender to people who wanted news that was important to African Americans. The trains went through the South and then up North, mirroring the map of how music was moving.”

Pat Mitchell Worley (Photo: (Photo: Courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul Music)

Such an implied journey, complete with signature drinks and Pullman porters in each room, will underscore the degree to which the Stax Museum is indeed representative of all American soul music, as party patrons move through different stages in the evolution of Black music. “We’re owning that we’re the global capital of soul,” says Mitchell Worley. “The event will start with Shardé Thomas’ Rising Stars Fife & Drum Band to give that nod to Mississippi, and then we’ll move to jazz with Joyce Cobb and then on to a capella doo-wop. Then we’ll come to the sweet soul music, with our Stax Music Academy Alumni Band performing with special guests. A couple of Stax artists will jump up for a song or two. That’s going to be fun! From there we’ll go into hip-hop ciphering and spoken word, in recognition of those styles’ place in the story of African Americans. It’s an important piece because from the ciphering came rap. So we’ll end with the hip-hop piece and a multiple DJ battle focused on all the Stax songs that have been sampled. It’ll be interactive, so if people know the song that was sampled, they can go put it up on the board. Sort of like the Soul Train board!”

Yet as the party righteously rages on, patrons would do well to remember the quiet, beating heart at the center of the Soulsville Foundation, embodied in the first thing that most patrons see when entering the museum: a little country church, fully reconstructed, that represents both Stax’s musical roots and its people-centered mission. In this case, it’s a direct expression of Deanie Parker’s people. “My grandparents were buried on a lot at Hooper’s Chapel A.M.E. Church in Duncan, Mississippi,” she says. “It was the first church I ever attended in my life. One weekend when I took my mother down, over 20 years ago, she looked at the church and said, ‘I’m afraid that one day lightning is going to strike this church, and I don’t know if I could bear to see it burn. I’d almost rather tear it down.’ And I thought to myself, ‘What a wonderful opportunity it could be if we could dismantle this church, move it to Memphis, reassemble it so that it would fit into that Stax museum, and serve as a means of helping people appreciate the roots of soul music.’”

That church still stands in the heart of Soulsville today, much as Parker’s original dream stands in the form of the museum, the music academy, and the charter school. “Those three programs are dynamic and make the Soulsville campus and foundation distinctly different from any other in the world,” she says with more than a little pride. “Because we’re doing exactly what I dreamt we should do the first time I had an opportunity to communicate my vision: to showcase and preserve the incredible contributions of Stax Records, and to pass on and teach that style of music. And most importantly, we’re doing something for the children.”

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Music Music Features

Soul Explosion: The New Stax Reissue

CREDIT: Wayne Moore, photographer; Stax Museum of American Soul Music

“I’m gonna have a hit if it’s the last thing I do!” exclaims Albert King. “Hanging around the studio for three days in a row now, I think ain’t nobody can get a hit outta here but Sam and Dave, Rufus Thomas, or Carla Thomas … I can play the blues myself! Yeah! Gonna get every disc jockey in business across the country. If he don’t dig this, he got a hole in his soul!” King is speaking over a song from half a century ago, but it sounds as urgent as this morning’s news. Such was the galvanizing spirit animating Stax studios throughout 1968 and 1969.

By then, the need for hits had become a matter of survival: Atlantic Records, which had distributed all Stax material through 1967, was enforcing the contractual fine print that made all Stax master recordings the property of Atlantic. Severing relations with the industry giant, Stax, guided by co-owner Al Bell, began cranking out new music at a furious pace.

Wayne Moore, photographer; Stax Museum of American Soul Music

Soul Explosion Summit Atendees with Covers

It was known as the “Soul Explosion,” and Craft Recordings has just re-released a two-LP set by that name that served as the capstone of this Herculean effort. Last year, the five-CD Stax ’68: A Memphis Story gathered every release from the first year of the label’s reinvention. The new double-vinyl reissue, identical in appearance to the original 1969 album, captures the time even more viscerally. Deanie Parker, former head of Stax publicity (and, more recently, president and CEO of the Soulsville Museum), recalls the time wistfully. “That was a time when people loved to read, to see pictures, to touch the album covers, singles, and labels, and have the artists autograph them.”

The vinyl reissue literally brings it all back home. As part of the label’s “Made in Memphis” campaign, the lacquers were cut by Memphis-based engineer Jeff Powell and manufactured at Memphis Record Pressing. And for Parker, the reissue transports her back to that time. “You’d hear something new and think, ‘Oh, this is fantastic! Look what these people did in the studio! Did you hear what they came up with last night?!’ Overnight, something dynamic could happen creatively, and it would modify the strategies that you had in mind earlier in the week, in terms of how we were gonna package it,” she recalls.

Package it they did, with an ever-refined sense of strategy. The Soul Explosion album assembled the biggest hits of 1968, with other diverse potential hits from that productive year. Johnnie Taylor’s “Who’s Making Love,” the label’s first big post-Atlantic smash, is followed in quick succession by Booker T. & the MGs’ “Hang ‘Em High,” Eddie Floyd’s “I’ve Never Found a Girl (To Love Me Like You Do),” and other chart-toppers and rarities. The LP was assembled for maximum impact, just before the label hosted a massive summit of industry players in May of 1969. As Parker recalls, “That album was the centerpiece.”

Al Bell recalls, “We were multimedia before multimedia was even a thing! During that one weekend in Memphis, we had large projections on the walls the size of movie theater screens, and we had video interspersed with live performances by all of our top acts. The energy during that weekend was like nothing the music industry had seen before.”

Beyond appearing 50 years after the original release, the timing of the reissue was especially poignant, coming only days after the death of John Gary Williams, the star vocalist of the Mad Lads. The LP’s two numbers from that group, “So Nice” and “These Old Memories.” In more ways than one, “these old memories” will “bring new tears.”
Editor’s note: Memorial services for John Gary Williams will be Saturday, June 8th, at the Brown Missionary Baptist Church, 7200 Swinnea in Southaven, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

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Cover Feature News

Relaunch

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Fifty years ago, white Memphis fiddle player Jim Stewart started a music label, called Satellite, releasing a few pop, rockabilly, and country singles. A few years later, that label, rechristened Stax, would emerge as the Southern giant of soul music, rivaling its Detroit counterpart Motown as the country’s most important purveyor of “black” pop music (not such a simple distinction at Stax).

This year, three organizations — Soulsville (which operates the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and the Stax Music Academy on the original label site at the corner of College and McLemore in South Memphis), the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau (MCVB), and Concord Music Group — have joined forces to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Stax with a yearlong campaign that will involve a massive slate of classic Stax reissues, a publicity campaign, a new documentary about the label, a series of revue-style concerts (including June 22nd at the Orpheum), and, most daringly, a relaunch of Stax as an active record label.

According to Deanie Parker — a former Stax publicist, songwriter, and artist who would go on to head up the Soulsville organization and is spending her final year on the organization’s board overseeing the “Stax 50” celebration — the genesis of this celebration came a few years ago, right after the museum opened in 2003 and Soulsville board members were looking toward the future: “While we were concentrating on the stabilization of Soulsville — the academy and the museum — we were also thinking, What is the next thing that warrants our time and attention? And one of the things the board had put on its agenda was Stax 50.”

Under Parker’s direction, Soulsville partnered with the MCVB, which had overseen the city’s “50 Years of Rock and Roll” celebration in 2004. But what could have been — like the “50 Years of Rock and Roll” campaign — a primarily Memphis-generated P.R. initiative became something more tangible when the California-based Concord Music Group came into the mix.

Concord purchased Fantasy, which had acquired the bulk of the Stax catalog (that not distributed by Atlantic records during the early years of the Memphis label’s history) and the Stax name after the soul label’s messy mid-’70s dissolution, in 2004, with plans to re-energize the Stax brand.

“In the purchase of Fantasy, everyone thought that Stax was a very important part of the package,” says Robert Smith, senior vice president of strategic marketing for Concord. “Those Stax records, obviously, never went away, but it was certainly looked at as a property where the catalog could be further revitalized and the label could be relaunched. It’s one of those very few actual brands in music. So the plan was never just to do more reissues and raise awareness about the legacy but also to move forward and relaunch it as an active soul-music label.”

Smith says that the 50th anniversary of the label was a definite factor in Concord’s initial planning, making a partnership with Soulsville and the MCVB a mutually beneficial relationship.

“We found within the Concord family, I think, an appreciation for and a sincerity about the Stax catalog,” Parker says. “And one of things that I like about Concord is that they do have marketing and promotional savvy. They’ve got that. They’ve got the capacity and creativity to recognize promotional opportunities, seize them, and take them to the next level. And [we’ve] not had that opportunity with the previous owner of the Stax catalog.”

Parker praises Fantasy as a respectful guardian of the Stax catalog, but says that now “the need is different.”

Concord’s revitalization of Stax began earlier this year with what promises to be a massive reissue campaign. The first foray came in February with Johnnie Taylor: Live at the Summit Club, a concert album from the Stax singer (best known for his 1968 hit “Who’s Making Love”) recorded in Los Angeles during the filming of the famous 1972 WattStax concert. Concord followed in March with the two-disc Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration, the first self-contained collection to span the gamut of Stax’s history, and a bonus-track-laden reissue of Carla Thomas’ 1967 studio album The Queen Alone.

The reissues will continue with a series of “very best of” collections from multiple Stax artists, expanded reissues of Isaac Hayes’ studio albums, multi-disc sets dedicated to the Staple Singers and the 1967 Stax/Volt Revue European tour, and other releases.

A Stax documentary — Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story — produced and directed by Memphian Robert Gordon and Los Angeles filmmaker Morgan Neville will be released on DVD by Concord in August, following a broadcast as part of PBS’ Great Performances series.

Many of these releases require cooperation between Concord and Rhino, which holds the rights to the portion of the Stax catalog retained by Atlantic after that label’s distribution deal with Stax ended in 1968.

“Traditionally, over the years, there has been a great deal of cross-licensing between Atlantic, now Rhino, and Stax, so that’s just continued,” says Smith. “If you go through your Stax Justin Fox Burks

collections, there is a great deal of intermingling. Stax 50th is clearly a major piece of collaboration. Twenty-one [songs] from Atlantic and 29, I think, from our Stax catalog.”

The Stax 50th compilation was produced and compiled by noted Stax scholar Rob Bowman and Cheryl Pawelski, a Concord executive who left the company in January to take the job of vice president of A&R at Rhino, a move that Parker hopes will help bring the two sides of the Stax legacy even more in line.

“Without a total understanding of how all of that fits together, and realizing that whatever they’ve structured today is going to change tomorrow, because the industry is in flux, I will say this with total confidence: That woman loves the Stax product and the soul music that comes out of Memphis,” Parker says. “So we have an ally. We have somebody there who understands and appreciates it enough that when she has to go to a meeting where there are 20- and 30-year-olds making a decision and who can only relate to rap and hip-hop, she’ll bring some balance to the table. Makes a difference.”

But as exciting as the current (and future) reissue campaigns might be to fans of Stax’s classic sound, Smith emphasizes that that’s only a part of what Concord has planned for Stax.

“The real purpose is to combine the heritage and legacy of Stax with the relaunch of the label and the signing of new artists and releasing of new records,” Smith says. “If you’re only dealing with it from a catalog standpoint, then you’re really missing what is truly behind this, which is that soul music is truly an important part of American musical culture.”

This relaunch of Stax as an active label began modestly with the March release of Interpretations: Celebrating the Music of Earth, Wind & Fire, a tribute album to the ’70s Chicago funk/R&B band — founded by Memphian Maurice White — in which contemporary soul artists cover the band’s songs.

This relaunch kicks into a higher gear in August with a new release by highly regarded neo-soul singer Angie Stone, followed by albums from Lalah Hathaway (daughter of soul star Donnie Hathaway), N’Dambi, and Soullive. But the highest-profile release on the new Stax will likely come from a name inseparable from the old Stax: Isaac Hayes, whose first album of new material under the Stax name in 20 years is set for release later this year.

John Burk, Concord’s executive vice president of A&R, acknowledges that it was important for Concord to launch this new Stax with a connection to the label’s legacy, but Smith says the signing of Hayes goes far beyond mere symbolism.

“Isaac Hayes is still a really vital artist and still a really important one, and we’re very fortunate to have him recording for Stax,” Smith says. “It wasn’t done for another reason. He’s just a great artist and one who does stand for what Stax is about, so of course it’s important from that standpoint. But Isaac Hayes is not recording here because he was on Stax. He’s recording here because he’s Isaac Hayes.”

Concord hopes to expand interest in a classic artist with the Hayes release, something the label, which released the hugely successful 2004 Ray Charles album Genius Loves Company, has some experience in.

“There are a lot of reasons it would be satisfying,” Smith says. “Isaac Hayes is one of those cornerstones of great American music. He hasn’t gone away. He’s so well-recognized and by young people, which doesn’t mean they own a lot of old Isaac Hayes records.”

And there’s a chance other veteran Stax artists could follow Hayes back onto the Stax roster. Booker T. Jones has acknowledged discussions with Concord, and Burk says, perhaps teasingly, “a lot of those original Stax artists are still around and still have things to say.”

But however much original Stax artists may get involved in the relaunch, the core of the new Stax is likely to be just that: new.

“There are great singers who, in a modern way, fit what that Stax tradition has always meant,” Smith says. “I think it’s exemplified by Angie Stone or Lalah Hathaway. Of course, if we didn’t have Stax we’d still want to have Angie Stone on our label, making a great record. She really epitomizes what Stax is about.”

But this relaunch may be bittersweet for a lot of Memphians. After all, Stax isn’t just a name but the product of a specific time and place, a specific set of unrepeatable historical circumstances. Burk cites the way Motown has remained a viable label over the years. But even though records have continued to be released with the “Motown” imprint, that hasn’t made those records Motown. Similarly, can the new “Stax” be Stax, especially based in Beverly Hills rather than South Memphis?

“I’m not critical of that,” Deanie Parker says of the relaunch. “But I have thought about it. I take comfort in my belief that Concord is not going to put anything on that Stax label that would destroy or belittle the integrity of that brand. I am all for Stax making a quantum leap into the 21st century and providing an opportunity for today’s artists to express themselves if they have a love, understanding, and appreciation for what we did.”

“It can’t be repeated,” Burk says of the creative formula that forged Stax, “but it can be a model for an artists’ community, which is what we’d like it to be. But that’s not geographic anymore. The world has changed.”

“People buy music because its great music,” Smith says. “I think the new releases will speak for themselves. They’re certainly of great quality. Very few things stay the same or stay in one place. What Stax was at its very beginning is different from what it was in its later years. Art, the commerce of art even, evolves. Tastes change. And social and cultural influences change music. What Stax started as and what it was by 1975 were very different things, because it’s a living tradition. One wouldn’t expect anybody to make music that tried to sound like it. So, I think the question is, what did Stax stand for, and how would it have evolved going forward? I think that the kind of artists we’re signing and the respect we’re paying that label and what it stands for will be really self-evident in the records we’re putting out.”

“The kind of place that Stax Records created is not one that can be duplicated,” Parker acknowledges. “But we could emulate it, and I’d like to see that happen in Memphis.”

If you believed everything you read in Memphis last fall, you would have been under the impression that it would, indeed, be happening in Memphis, with Millington-bred pop star Justin Timberlake overseeing Concord’s Stax relaunch from here in the heart of Soulsville. But that didn’t happen and isn’t likely to.

“There are so many things that are reported, and there are so many conversations that happen that go somewhere or don’t go somewhere, and I’m not in any official capacity to be able to talk about it,” Smith says of the Timberlake rumors.

Another source close to the situation acknowledges that there were discussions between Concord and Timberlake, though the two sides never got close to an agreement about the extent of his involvement with the label. But the two sides have maintained a good relationship, and it isn’t out of the question that Timberlake could get involved in the new Stax in some capacity.

Even though the new Stax won’t be based out of Memphis, Concord executives stress that an active relationship with the city is a priority.

“We’d like to have a presence in town,” Burk says, suggesting that could come in the form of a satellite office in Memphis or the signing of contemporary Memphis artists to the new Stax, if the right situation emerged.

“We feel that we’re attached at the hip,” Smith says. “And that’s where the pleasure of working with people in Memphis, especially Deanie Parker and [original Stax] artists, is very satisfying.”

As for Parker, her hopes for the bundle of activity surround this 50th anniversary celebration are many, from financial and publicity benefits for Soulsville and its mission to tangible benefits for original Stax artists to raising the profile of Stax as a model for what’s possible in Memphis.

“Stax served its community,” Parker says. “Too much of [music today] exploits the community. This focus [on Stax] distinctly defines what music can do: economically, morally, socially, culturally. It has the capacity to do that.”