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.”
Honoring Jim Stewart at the Grammys: (L-R) Pat Mitchell Worley (Soulsville Foundation CEO), Stewart's children Shannon, Lori, and Jeff Stewart, Michele Smith (VP, Estate & Legacy Brand Management for Concord Records), and Jim's granddaughter, Jennifer Stewart. Photo courtesy Soulsville Foundation.
It’s been less than twenty-four hours since the Grammy Awards wrapped, and there’s been just as much online chatter about what the Recording Academy missed about Memphis as about what they got right. Celebrating fifty years of hip hop music with a sprawling medley, featuring the Roots backing up star rappers from the past half century, was bound to ruffle some feathers, and many zeroed in on the absolute omission of the city’s greatest hip hop innovators.
“If Three 6 Mafia isn’t in this 50 years of hip hop performance at the Grammys than [sic] I don’t want it,” tweeted Silly Little Goose, later adding, “sleep with one eye open tonight, @RecordingAcad.”
Another Twitter user, Jamesetta M. Walker, quipped, “Wow, Gangsta Boo was not included in the Grammys’ 2023 memoriam. No way they never heard of Three 6 Mafia.”
The lack of recognition was indeed striking, given what Memphis has contributed to the genre over the decades. Yet the sprawling medley, curated by Questlove, included a stunning mix of performers such as Grandmaster Flash, Mele Mel, Rahiem, Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Queen Latifah, Missy Elliott, Lil Wayne, Big Boi, Public Enemy, Busta Rhymes, De La Soul, Lil Baby and others. And Memphis was at least represented well by the breakout star Glorilla, who performed a segment of her hit, “F.N.F. (Let’s Go).”
Nevertheless, Memphis music, being the force of nature that it is, was bound to turn up elsewhere during the proceedings. Erstwhile Memphis writer Bob Mehr, now living in Tucson, Arizona, won the Best Album Notes Grammy for his contribution to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (20th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition), his second in that category, while that album’s producers, including Cheryl Pawelski of Omnivore Recordings, also won in the Best Historical Album category.
Meanwhile, Arkansas’ Ashley McBryde won the Best Country/Duo Performance award for “Never Wanted to Be That Girl” with Carly Pearce, and Aaron Neville’s song “Stompin’ Ground,” performed with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band for the film Take Me to the River: New Orleans, which counts Cody Dickinson and Boo Mitchell among its producers, won Best American Roots Performance.
But it was a figure from Memphis history that received the ultimate recognition yesterday, in the form of a Grammy Trustees Award: Stax Records’ co-founder Jim Stewart, who passed away last December 5th. The award, which recognizes “individuals who, during their careers in music, technology, and so on have made significant contributions, other than performance, to the field of recording,” was also given to photographer Henry Diltz and jazz educator (and musician) Ellis Marsalis Jr.
Receiving the award puts Stewart’s name in the company of such legends as Duke Ellington, The Beatles, Thomas Edison, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerry Wexler, and Stewart’s sister and fellow Stax-founder, Estelle Axton.
On hand to receive the award in Stewart’s name were his adult children, Shannon, Lori, and Jeff Stewart, along with Jim’s granddaughter Jennifer Stewart. As Lori noted, “when dad’s dream of being in the music business first began, he was a nine- or ten-year-old boy who received a guitar for Christmas.”
Jennifer Stewart added, “Grandaddy was a man before his time. Not only was he an innovator in the music industry, by creating that distinct Stax sound, he was also an advocate for equal rights and opportunities for everyone. He didn’t care where you came from, what color your skin was, or your gender. If you had any kind of talent, he wanted you to be a part of his family.”
It was a fitting tribute to a man who represented a more progressive demographic among Southern professionals at the time, paving the way for the multi-racial camaraderie that the Stax community strove to foster through all its days.
Jim Stewart with Stax Records publicist Deanie Parker in 2018 (Photo courtesy The Soulsville Foundation)
Bobby Manuel, Rick Dees, Wareen Wagner, and a Disco Duck.
Memphis is one of the greatest studio towns of all time. Sun, Phillips, Stax, American, and Ardent are just a few of the more well-known names, but a plethora of others helped capture the amazing music being made here over the years. One of them, Shoe Productions, was especially shy of the limelight in its heyday of the ’70s and ’80s, but cut some of the most memorable records of that era.
The studio was started by Wayne Crook and Warren Wagner in 1971, and Andy Black joined soon after. In 1977, Jim Stewart (the co-founder of Stax) and Bobby Manuel set up their Daily Planet Productions in the same building. Many decades later, Black went looking for whatever history of his old business might exist, and came up with nothing. So he and his son Nathan, already with years of experience in audio/visual production, set about making the documentary: Shoe: A Memphis Music Legacy. It screens Monday, October 26th, 6:30 p.m. at the Malco Summer Drive-In as part of the Indie Memphis Film Festival.
A quick chat with Andy and Nathan Black revealed that their documentary is just the tip of the iceberg. Shoe was buzzing with activity for over a decade, and the stories and recorded tracks are impressive.
Memphis Flyer:Memphis was really hopping as a recording city back in the ’70s.
Andy Black: Well it was. And I think part of that was, our undoing was because, we had the studio over there, and we were a bunch of kids trying to build things, and do everything ourselves with very little money. And Jim Stewart and Bobby Manuel came down. Stax had just folded and they needed to cut some stuff. And they were looking for a place to do it. So they cut there and loved the place. It was similar to Stax in the way it felt. They called their company the Daily Planet, right across the hall from Shoe. And we wound up building a second studio.
Jim used his connections with Atlantic and they bought part of the equipment. We got a brand new console, an MCI. And it worked out real well. On the Shoe side, we were doing everything ourselves. We built a console from the ground up. I mean, we etched the circuit boards and put every little component in every board in that console and soldered it together. There were about five or six of us working on it. It became such a unique sounding board, especially on the low end.
Then it got to where Jim and Bobby would come over to our studio and cut basic tracks, because they loved the way the bass and bass drum sounded. And we would go over to their side, ’cause that’s the side you wanna put the horns and the vocals on, ’cause it’s cleaner. So it became a back and forth thing. We were more or less rock and roll and pop, and when Jim and Bobby came in, a lot of people started coming over because of them, like Steve Cropper, or other people from Stax, or from Isaac Hayes’ band. So all the pop guys were going, “Wow, that’s really good. They’re good!” So we all learned from each other. Shoe was about the people and it became a learning place. We taught each other by bouncing ideas off each other.
And we kept a real low profile. Jim asked us to do that, because he didn’t want to deal with the media. Stax had just folded. He didn’t want to be bothered. And everyone thought he went “into hiding,” so to speak, and got out of the business, when really he was over there at our studio, and we were cutting every day. It turned into a real good working relationship. We kept it low-key. In this process, Nathan and I did “Take Me to the River,” and I had done a Stax documentary, just the audio. So Nathan shot everything. courtesy Andy Black
The control room at Shoe Productions
I was over at Sun Studios, and killing time with the kid that was running it. And we got to talking about Shoe, and I told him all about it, and he said, ‘Man, I thought I knew everything about Memphis music back in the ’70s and ’80s, but I have not heard these stories.’ Well it turned out that that kid was [Grammy Award-winning producer and engineer] Matt Ross-Spang.
I went home and Googled “Shoe” and got nothing. It was just like we didn’t exist. I said, ‘Damn, we kept such a low profile, we’re getting left out of history.’ So I talked to Nathan and said, what do you think about us going in on this project together? Nathan was practically raised there. I used to take him to the studio with me all the time, as a young child. So he’s well aware of the story.
Nathan Black: It was interesting for me because one of the first things we did was get the old group back together. There’s a recording session in it. So that was the first time a lot of those guys had been there in 30 years, and going back into the space, and it was the first time I’d been in there in 30 years too. And the Daily Planet side is exactly the same way it was back then. It’s still a working studio, and everything’s the same, down to the carpet. It was like walking back in a time warp. I spent a lot of time there, but I was young, probably 8 or 10 years old. So I knew all the people, but I didn’t really know the stories. So it was interesting to me, hearing all those stories from people I knew and had been around all the time. I was just a kid going to work with my dad. I remember making little forts up under the grand piano, playing with my GI Joes.
AB: Jimmy Griffin was co-founder of Bread with David Gates. And he’s a Memphis boy. He was from Memphis and went out to L.A. and they formed Bread. And had many, many hits. And he came back and we became friends. He was out jogging one day, and came in and introduced himself. He and I and two other guys had a writing group. We wrote songs all the time. And we wound up cutting an album with Terry Sylvester of the Hollies.
Was that one of the first things you did there?
AB: It was an early thing. Actually, one of the first things we did was Jimmy himself, because Jimmy was such a good singer. And we had some writers, so we decided that Shoe needed to start a label, and we used Jimmy as our first artist on Shoe Records. It’s funny because the records have turned up a couple times on eBay, and they’re selling for between $50-$100 a piece — for a ’45! And I’m like, ‘Damn, I’ve got probably 75 of these things.’
There’s a whole section on “Disco Duck” and how that came to be. It was originally on Estelle Axton’s label, Fretone Records. [Celebrity DJ] Rick Dees had gone to her with the idea of doing a disco song. She connected him with Bobby Manuel and they finished it, and Bobby cut it, and RSO Records bought it. And they wanted an album right away. So we cut an album in two weeks. Every day, all day long.
NB: There is a whole section of the film about the Dog Police. I remember my dad taking me to the studio where they were shooting it. I even brought home some of the dog masks.
AB: They were doing jingles, because they were three of the finest jazz musicians in town. They’d go over the Media General and crank out those jingles like crazy. Shoe also did jingles, but so we could support our creativity in songs and records. So Tony [Thomas] and them came over and I wound up cutting two jazz albums with them, and both of them got shot down. They didn’t get a deal and they were so bummed out. So they said, We’re gonna do something REAL different. Whatever you want to do, Andy, it’s total freedom. And we didn’t have a lot of electronic gear back then, so I took a microphone and stuck it in the end of a vacuum cleaner hose and gave Tom Lonardo the other end and said ‘Here, sing into this.’
I remember when I was young and used to sing through the vacuum hose and it sounded so cool! So we did all kind of crazy things. And Wayne and Warren heard all this going on through the walls, and they became really interested in it. Wayne was getting into video at that time. MTV was starting to get pretty big. So it just married together. We actually did a whole album.
Still from ‘Dog Police’ video
NB: The video won MTV’s Basement Tapes, hosted by Weird Al Yankovic. I think it was NBC that picked it up and did an actual pilot, they were planning on making it a show. You can see it on YouTube. The pilot has Adam Sandler in it, and Jeremy Piven.
It seems like there was a cool experimental environment at Shoe. I noticed the Scruffs cut their debut there.
AB: Yeah! They used to come in and pull the night shift after everybody else had gone home to bed. The Scruffs would come in and cut til the wee hours of the morning. And then other people would show up in the morning and they would leave. We had two studios that were just pumping out projects all the time. I produced Joyce Cobb. We had a hit song with her, “Dig the Gold,” that went up to #42 in the nation on Billboard. And we had Rick Christian, who got a deal with Mercury records, and one of his songs got picked up by Kenny Rogers and he had a #1 hit with it. And we had Shirley Brown coming over there. We had Levon Helm coming over there. It became a very active place. And that’s why it puzzled me that no one knew anything about it. Then it dawned on me why.
That low profile.
AB: Yeah, it’ll get ya every time!
The first time I heard about Shoe was reading that Chris Bell cut some of “I Am the Cosmos” there. Were you in on that?
AB: I wasn’t in on that session. Warren did. They were friends, so Warren invited him and Ken Woodley to come down and Richard Rosebrough down to Shoe, and they came in late, ’cause that was the only time slot they could fit in there. They cut “I Am the Cosmos” and one or two others. And people are still interested in Big Star and Chris Bell. One day on Facebook, I saw where people were taking pictures through the windows and saying, “Look, I think this is the room where ‘I Am the Cosmos’ was cut.” And I looked at it and went, ‘No, that’s the bathroom!’
That track was actually cut on the other side of the building. We occupied both sides of this really great building. It was supposed to be a basement for a church. So the bottom floor was 16″-18″ of packed concrete and partly underground. So it was super quiet.
NB: Apparently the pastor of the church ran off with the money, so they only built the basement. That’s all that exists! You walk through the front door and you immediately have to go downstairs. So everything was underground. No ground floor, no windows.
AB: It’s really bizarre. We only had one little sign by the front door and that was it. It was just kinda word of mouth. Elvin Bishop came over. Dr. John. I could go on and on. We had to leave out a lot. In fact, there’s enough stories for us to do a Shoe 2!
The Story of Shoe Productions’ Many Hits, Brought to Life on Film
This Wednesday, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music will host a rare visit by the label’s original co-founder, who will present a rare piece of memorabilia to the museum, pay honor to alumni of the Stax Music Academy, and tell tales of the label’s early days. Jim Stewart, who lives in Memphis to this day, albeit with a low profile, is a spry 87, which perhaps accounts for his reticence with the media. I spoke with the museum’s executive director, Jeff Kollath, about the events scheduled for the evening and how Stewart views his legacy.
Memphis Flyer: It must be a big deal for Jim Stewart to return to Stax.
Jeff Kollath: Yeah, I think so. He’s attended Stax Music Academy concerts before, so he’s obviously incredibly supportive of what we’re doing. But I think the thing he’s most proud of, in terms of legacy, is what the Stax Music Academy does. I think he sees what those kids are doing as an extension of the type of things that he and his sister [Estelle Axton] and [onetime executive vice president] Al Bell were trying to accomplish by giving young people in Memphis opportunities fifty-plus years ago. Obviously it’s in a formal educational setting now, as opposed to running a recording studio. But for us, the legacy he created with his sister and Mr. Bell, was one of espousing corporate social responsibility before anybody knew what corporate social responsibility was. And it’s totally true. In terms of enmeshing yourself in a community, being a part of that community, working with the community, supporting that community, and especially for two relative outsiders to come to South Memphis and do that 58 years ago, is pretty remarkable. Whenever he’s been around, that’s the part that always strikes me. When he sees the kids, it’s coming full circle.
It’s only gaining momentum as many years’ worth of students go on to play music.
Yeah, some of ’em aren’t kids anymore. Some of them are full-fledged adults. The Academy started before the museum did, back in 2000. Some of these kids are well into their thirties now. But I think music is just a means to an end. It’s part of the process. And I think the great youth development work that everyone at the Academy does, making informed, engaged, empathetic citizens, is just as much of a testament to Academy graduates as how great they are as musicians.
So they’ll be playing tomorrow night, too.
Yeah. The Stax Music Academy Alumni Band will be playing, and then John Paul Keith is going to play a couple songs from the early Satellite Records catalog, which he did for us during our 60th anniversary stuff last March. I think he’ll do “Blue Roses,” which is appropriate, because that’s the only song that Mr. Stewart has a songwriting credit for, and that was the very first single out on Satellite. I don’t know the other song he’s gonna do. He’ll do something else from the early, early days, from when Mr. Stewart used his wife’s uncle’s garage on the north side of Memphis. And then Krista Wroten is going to play a fiddle tune, since obviously Mr. Stewart got his start as a fiddle player. That was how his love of music really began, playing fiddle around West Tennessee, as Red Stewart and the Tennessee Cotton Pickers.
Jim Stewart Makes a Rare Appearance at Stax, With Special Donation in Hand
Will there be an open discussion?
Yeah, there’ll be some things at the start of the event, then we’ll do some talking, some music, and then Mr. Stewart and [onetime Soulsville Foundation President and former Stax employee] Deanie Parker will have a conversation. And then we’ll go into the rest of the music for the night. It’ll be a nice program. Hopefully some folks will hear some stories. It’ll be a good chance for former Stax employees and musicians to get together and see each other again. There’ll be a few folks floating around.
And he’ll also unveil the new bit of memorabilia that he’s donating to the museum?
Yes, we’ll do that at the start. That’s a surprise, we can’t tell you about that. But we’re pretty excited about it. We really wanna encourage folks to donate. If they’ve got it, share it with us and the world. We’ve been around 15 years, and we’ve got a lot of great stuff out, but we’ve got room for more. Jeff Dunn donated his dad [Duck Dunn’s] jacket that he’s carrying on the cover of [Booker T & the MGs album] McLemore Avenue. He donated that last summer when we did an event for the recent Duck Dunn book. We’re gonna put the McLemore Avenue jacket out on display this fall.
McLemore Avenue, by Booker T & the MGs
An Evening to Remember, Wednesday, July 25th, 6-8 pm: a special celebration during which Satellite/Stax Records founder Jim Stewart will present the Stax Museum with a very special donation of memorabilia. Live music by the Stax Music Academy Alumni Band, John Paul Keith, and Krista Wroten. Free and open to the public. Doors open at 5:45 p.m.
There’s a new exhibit at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music titled “The Grammy Goes to Memphis” that is both interesting and revealing. The actual Grammy statues presented to Elvis, Otis Redding, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and others are collected and displayed for the first time. A highlight film of Memphis-area Grammy winning moments is featured, along with a wall listing all the great artists from the Memphis area who have received the coveted award.
Jim Stewart
Full disclosure requires me to tell you that the Stax Museum is also my place of employment, but it explains why I’ve had the chance to sit and stare at that wall for several hours at a time. All the names you would expect are there: Sam Phillips, Johnny Cash, Al Green, even Sheryl Crow from Sikeston, Missouri. An impressive number of Grammy awards have been bestowed upon the Stax family of artists, including Isaac Hayes, Booker T. & the MGs, The Staples Singers, and Sam and Dave. The prestigious Grammy Trustees’ Award has gone to Stax President Al Bell and company co-founder Estelle Axton. There is one glaring omission, however: Jim Stewart. I first thought it was an oversight and hastened to try and correct the error, but the co-founder and contributor of the first two letters of the name “Stax,” has never been recognized or celebrated by the Recording Academy.
Perhaps Stewart prefers it that way, since I understand that he is a private person, but it seems odd that his sister, Estelle, and his partner, Bell, would each receive one of the Academy’s highest awards, and he wouldn’t.
I don’t know Stewart personally and have only met him once, so I have no axe to grind here for anyone, but if not for Stewart, all those famous names on that Grammy wall would have never been known. Stewart and Axton’s leasing of the Capitol Theatre in South Memphis in 1958 and opening the doors to the talent in the neighborhood began a renaissance in soul music that still reverberates in popular culture. The former banker and country fiddler who fell in love with Ray Charles’ music, supervised and produced some of the most unique sounding recordings of the 20th century. And he did it by working with musicians, singers, talent, and administrators who were white and black, right in the middle of the Jim Crow era in the South.
For people like me, who grew up under segregation but never understood it, this rich and untried collaborative effort was and is a source of great pride. Watching films of the MGs and the Memphis Horns backing up the Stax stars and driving audiences crazy all over the world is still a thrilling experience. It’s not just the Recording Academy that owes Stewart long overdue accolades and appreciation; the city of Memphis does too.
Stewart’s contributions to popular music have not gone unrecognized. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, but sent two granddaughters to receive the award on his behalf. This may be of great interest to visitors of the Cleveland museum, but what about the old hometown? Along with Sun Records scion Knox Phillips, Stewart’s efforts were instrumental in bringing the chapter of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) to Memphis, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. The local organization also recognizes its most vibrant and vital contributors to what has become known as the “Memphis Sound.” In annual programs and ceremonies over the years, NARAS Memphis has paid special tribute to Rufus and Carla Thomas, Eddie Floyd, Albert King, and the legacies of both Sun and Hi Records. It’s highest honor, the Governor’s Award, has been presented to Rufus Thomas and Axton, but not Stewart. The man who produced Otis Redding’s
”Respect,” can’t seem to get any from the same chapter he helped establish. Either Stewart called and personally insisted that he not be further involved in these awards, or somebody’s asleep at the switch.
In Robert Gordon’s perfectly pitched, new Stax biography, “Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion,” he describes Stewart’s selling his interest in Stax to Bell in 1972. Yet two years later, when the company began feeling a financial squeeze from all quarters, Stewart reinvested his assets in an attempt to save what he had helped create. In the resulting bankruptcy and padlocking of Stax by the same bank for which Stewart once worked, he lost his fortune and his home. Stewart has remained retired from the music business and semi-reclusive in his private life, yet he attended the opening of the Stax Music Academy and has generously advised and assisted the young musical talents who were not yet born during Stax’s heyday.
I have always believed in sending flowers to the living, because afterward, they can’t smell them. Axton’s Trustee’s Award from the Recording Academy was given posthumously. Stewart is 84 years old. A man who has touched so many lives and literally altered the social fabric of the cosmos deserves at least an “attaboy” from his acolytes. Can I get a witness?
Randy Haspel writes the Born-Again Hippies blog, where a version of this column first appeared.
courtesy Andy Black 
courtesy Andy Black 
api photographers 
