Tag: Stax Records

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Film/TV TV Features

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A.

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. (Photo: Courtesy HBO)

Jamila Wignot was nervous. It was Friday night, May 17, 2024, at Crosstown Theater in Midtown Memphis, and she was about to premiere the first episode of her latest HBO documentary series Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. to a hometown crowd. The sold-out house was full of Memphis music royalty: David Porter, Al Bell, Deanie Parker, Eddie Floyd, the list goes on.

“It’s like somebody was just saying to me, ‘Didn’t Janis Joplin get booed in Memphis?’ And I was like, ‘Exactly!’ That’s why I was nervous,” Wignot says on a Zoom interview a few days later.

Turns out, she needn’t have worried. The crowd responded to “Chapter One: ’Cause I Love You” with a Cannes-level standing ovation. During the Q&A after the screening, Deanie Parker, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music’s first CEO, seemed taken aback. “This really has been an emotional experience for me,” she says. “I think it’s because, while we achieved a lot, we did it in about a decade — which is astounding! We made a mark globally.”

Booker T. Jones, Donald “Duck” Dunn, David Porter, Al Jackson Jr., Bonnie Bramlett, Delaney Bramlett, Isaac Hayes, and Steve Cropper (Photo: Courtesy Don Nix 
Collection/OKPOP)

Wignot says her involvement with the Stax story started as she was finishing up her last documentary, a portrait of modern dance pioneer Alvin Ailey. “I’ve been working in documentary filmmaking, particularly historical documentary filmmaking, for a long time. But I came out of a kind of PBS model of documentaries that were narrated by a kind of ‘Voice of God’ narrator. They used archival [film and stills], but there were very specific ways that you had to use it at that time. With Ailey, I finally got to do the kind of documentary filmmaking that I like to do, which is first-person, kind of witness-driven documentary filmmaking. As a kid, I saw Eyes on the Prize and thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’ When you are hearing from somebody who was there on the front lines, and then you’re seeing them in the archival footage, it all just feels very immersive and alive and urgent.

“On the heels of that, I was then approached first by Ezra Edelman and Caroline Waterlow who made O.J.: Made in America. We’d all been friends for a very long time. Ezra said, ‘I’m working with this company, White Horse Pictures, and we’re looking for somebody who wants to direct a series on Stax Records, and do you think you’d be into it?’ And I was just immediately like, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’”

Bruce Talamon and Isaac Hayes at the 1972 Wattstax concert (Photo: Howard Bingham)

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. skillfully blends interviews with the surviving players and extensively researched archival footage from the label’s heyday. “I don’t bother to interview RZA, who’s a diehard fan of the label. There’s no Justin Timberlake, there’s no Elton John, there’s no Paul McCartney. I was not interested in having the kind of secondary fan in there, just appreciating it. I wanted to understand how the label came together, the experiences of the people on the ground, and then let the music do the work of generating enthusiasm.”

The story is one of triumphant highs, stunning reversals of fortune, and missed opportunities, such as the time The Beatles tried and failed to schedule a recording session at the Stax studio on McLemore Avenue. (“Had that happened, for sure Ringo and Paul would’ve been up in this documentary!” says Wignot.)

Wignot’s approach is immediate and visceral. In one priceless take, shot in Booker T. Jones’ Nevada home, the Stax organist and arranger walks us through the creation of the timeless instrumental “Green Onions,” explaining how the song works from a music theory standpoint. It’s a little like watching Albert Einstein sketch out the equations for general relativity on a cocktail napkin.

“The thing that’s so incredible about Booker T. Jones is, he’s quite a quiet guy. Put him in front of a crowd and he’s like, ‘I’m ready!’ But then put him in a more intimate setting, and that’s not his milieu, which I love about performers. So he walked in and he said, ‘Oh, I’m feeling a little bit nervous and shy.’ He looked amazing, that blue suit and the hat, everything styled to perfection. And he said, ‘I’m going to sit at the piano and just start playing. It helps me settle down.’ As we were finishing up our setup, Booker T. Jones — Booker T. Jones! — is giving us a private concert. You’re trying to act like it’s very normal and not to go full fan-girl on him, just like, ‘How is this happening?’ The cameraman is like, ‘The light’s going to go here?’ And we’re like, ‘The guy is doing his thing RIGHT NOW.’

“Finally, I said, ‘[‘Green Onions’], it’s such a classic, that song. Since the process of working in Stax was so spontaneous, it could feel like things just kind of emerged out of nothing, give it to me. What’s the thought process? How do you get to this song?’ He was already at the piano, and he just started explaining it. It’s hands down one of my favorite scenes in the whole series. … Once you understand how ‘Green Onions’ came about, do you really need a famous person to talk about how much they love that song?”

The fact that Stax soul was chronically underappreciated by both the music industry and music press is a recurring theme in the series. In the intro, Parker promises to tell uncomfortable truths about how the powers-that-be never really wanted the company to succeed. The racial discrimination of the Jim Crow-era South is never far from the surface of the story, such as the time the label’s first breakout star, Carla Thomas, had to ride the service elevator to get to a meeting with the head of Atlantic Records.

It wasn’t until the Stax/Volt Revue toured Europe in the spring of 1967 that the Black musicians realized what it was like to be respected for their music, and not judged for the color of their skin. The segment of “’Cause I Love You” documenting the tour is powerful, says David Porter. “You could see a little bit of it, as an artist looking at the film, but to be there and to see that energy and that spirit was all over that space. There were people who were enjoying that music just breaking down and crying, getting tremendously emotional when they looked at Otis Redding, or Sam & Dave, or Eddie Floyd. It was something to see.”

Sam Moore acts as an informal narrator for the story of the tour, as you see his younger version hyping up a crowd of Norwegian teens. “There’s so many different films that have been able to make use of this material,” says Wignot. “Thank God it exists, but I was thinking, how do you take something that’s been often seen and give it a new life, a new kind of vitality? … When Sam Moore started talking about his love of the church, I wanted to get that in there, but not the way it is often told, up front. That’s the story of how R&B came together, in a way. It’s so central to what moves him as an artist. We have him talking about the power of the preacher to communicate. I just love in documentaries when you see somebody thinking. Then he says, ‘I would do anything to get that crowd to do a show with me.’ And that is so powerful because he’s not just trying to ‘turn them on.’ Even there, there’s a collective exchange, ‘Come with me, let’s do this together. …’

“The challenge of scenes like that, is how do you do it so that the music gets to live, so that we experience it as viewers as if we were there in the concert? But you’re adding just enough commentary that you’re not speaking on top of the scene, and you’re communicating what was going on emotionally for the performer. So there’s a real balance of too much dialogue versus too little dialogue, and understanding that the material is incredible in and of itself.”

“Chapter One” ends on the high note of the tour, says Wignot. “Episode one builds the way that ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ builds as a song. It was informed by Jim Stewart saying he thinks that that’s the song that best sums up the kind of spirit of Stax. It’s collaboration. It starts with one thing and then another thing gets laid on top and another. It just kind of builds over time and then becomes this big, explosive powerhouse climax of a song.”

“As you go forward with each of these segments, you’re gonna find that it is gonna get heavy. It’s gonna get fun, it’s gonna get powerful because it is alive,” says Porter. “The camaraderie that was between us, enjoying it, was shown in this film. It was a different time, and not a sweet time. We applauded what Jim [Stewart] was doing, giving us the freedom to go into the studio and do that. Everybody worked together in such a cohesive way, and there was a love and magic that happened in a continual way from day to day, hour to hour, all the way to the midnight hour. All that we would do, we’d have fun doing it. Because music is never good unless you can feel the joy inside of doing it.”

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. is now streaming on Max.

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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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Music Music Features

Stax Meets Motown

Rickey Fondren III center with microphone (Photo: Claire James)

“If you want to master something, teach it,” the great physicist Richard P. Feynman is said to have remarked. “The more you teach, the better you learn.” That’s certainly borne out by the recent experiences of students who teamed up to create a new musical film and instructional package on African-American history for the Soulsville Foundation. Once it premieres online this Friday, February 2nd, it will be available as a free download for educators and students throughout Black History Month and into September. Producing such a film for the national event is a tradition the foundation began after Covid made live performances risky, and it’s continued ever since. And taking the project’s mission to heart caused this year’s student-producers to learn much along the way.

“What Stax wants to do is keep the history and message of soul music alive, but especially that of Stax Records, and the impact that the label had not only on the Memphis community, but the world at large,” says Anaya Murray, a high school senior and Stax Music Academy (SMA) student who served as the film’s co-writer and co-producer. “Black History Month is an opportunity to remind people of this important part of Black culture and American culture. In our film, Stax Meets Motown, we focus on two record labels who were rivals and competitors, and what they both contributed to music, but it’s about more than that.”

Anaya Murray (Photo: Ayanna Murray)

Indeed, the film and companion study guides delve into the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the Detroit Riots of 1967, the history of Black radio, the recording industry, and fashion. At the same time, the topic is also perfectly suited to a musical. “Think High School Musical and Grease,” Murray says of the film, which she masterminded with fellow high-schoolers Andrew Green and Rickey Fondren III. Green and Fondren attend SMA, as does most of the cast.

“There are moments where they’ll break out into song, where there’s dancing, and it’s all Stax and Motown music. And then, I’m one of the songwriting students at the Academy and we wrote an original song for the end credits. So we pay homage to Stax and Motown and then add something new. And all the sounds that you hear are Stax students singing and playing.”

That includes Murray herself, who also studies voice at SMA, and the story, set entirely in Booker T. Washington High School (which many Stax artists attended), is designed to both teach and give performance, recording, and songwriting students a chance to shine. As Murray explains the plot, “Lisa, the lead, moves from Detroit to Memphis, and it’s the simple story of her learning about Stax and the culture, but also of the Memphis kids learning from her about Detroit and Motown.”

Yet ultimately the film reveals the SMA’s support for more than music. As Murray says, “I’ve been a student at Stax Music Academy since my first year of high school, and once I started to show an interest in filmmaking over the past two years, Stax noticed that and gave me an opportunity to assist on the script for last year’s [Black History Month] film.” She also developed her own material, winning the 2023 Indie Memphis Youth Film Fest Jury Award for her film, Father’s Day.

Eventually she was tapped to write this year’s screenplay. “I’m really excited about the opportunity because screenwriting is something I love to do,” she says. “Then I was able to get Andrew Green, one of my film friends, on board. He’s also planning to go to college for screenwriting and directing. And Rickey is a singer at SMA, but acting is really where his passion lies. He’s actually co-starring in the film as the love interest, but he was really excited to go into screenwriting as well, so he helped a lot with doing research to make sure that we were really providing accurate information.”

Thus did the writers learn as they progressed, and gaining the Soulsville Foundation’s stamp of approval was proof positive that they got the facts right. Now the film and instructional materials are being readied for their premiere. As Murray explains, all involved are aware of how important this educational mission is: “When it goes live, they send that link out to students not only in the United States, but worldwide as well. It is a global event.”

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Music Music Blog

A Talk with Don Nix, Memphis Music Maverick

Packy Axton, Don Nix, and Steve Cropper, ca. 1960 (Credit: Don Nix)

Take heart, juvenile delinquents everywhere: there walks among us one of your kind who parlayed his street savvy into nothing less than crafting a new Memphis Sound. You can learn all about that and more this Monday, October 16th at 7 p.m., when author Robert Gordon sits down to chat with Nix about his life in music. It’s part of Gordon’s ongoing series of listening parties at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, in which he curates playlists of songs by the likes of Steve Cropper, Al Kapone, IMAKEMADBEATS, Boo Mitchell, and others with the artists themselves, using the music as a jumping-off point for discussions of their craft.

Nix’s name may not be as familiar as those others to some, but he’s played a pivotal role in Memphis music ever since he was a student at Tech High School, “where the delinquents were transferred and taught a trade before they flunked out completely,” as Gordon writes in It Came from Memphis. That was when he played sax with a group that included Cropper, Duck Dunn, Charlie Freeman, and Packy Axton: The Royal Spades. Axton’s mother Estelle was busy starting up a new business called Satellite Records, and when she facilitated a recording session for the group, she prevailed upon them to change their name to the Mar-Keys.

That session would yield the instrumental track “Last Night,” which was a shot across the bow of pop music, an R&B smash hit by a bunch of white kids that would presage the integration championed by Satellite, as it soon morphed into Stax Records.

Packy Axton and Don Nix in their delinquent daze (Credit: Don Nix)

But Nix was destined to be more of a behind-the-scenes player. As he told Gordon in It Came from Memphis, “I didn’t play on any sessions after a certain point. Not after they got good musicians to play … Eventually, I was producing, and that’s all I ever wanted to do. I wanted to write and to put records together in the studio.”

He embraced that role with aplomb, eventually working as a producer, arranger, and musician for artists as diverse as Furry Lewis, Albert King, Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Jeff Beck, Brian May, Eric Clapton, and many others. His song, “Going Down,” originally recorded by the band Moloch in 1969, has become a rock standard covered by Freddie King, Jeff Beck, Deep Purple, JJ Cale, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Who, Led Zeppelin, and others. The Rolling Stones performed “Goin’ Down” as recently as 2012 on a televised live concert with John Mayer and Gary Clark, Jr.

Now 82, Nix has decades of stories to share. He was the one member of the Mar-Keys “who could draw the crowds because he was so completely entertaining to watch,” writes Gordon. That instinct for entertaining, and a story well-told, hasn’t left him.

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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 Record Reviews

Stax Songwriters Shine in New Set of Rare Demos

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.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Wattstax Lives On in New Vinyl, CD Collections

With so many Stax-related anniversaries happening lately — including the 20th of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, officially this May 2nd, and the 60th of the song “Green Onions,” recently celebrated by Booker T. Jones in New York — it’s easy to forget that 50 years ago this February, the main Stax news everyone was talking about was Wattstax, the then-newly released film documenting the previous summer’s festival of the same name.

That moment can be relived visually by anyone lucky enough to dwell in cities with an Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (not including Memphis, alas), with whom Sony has recently partnered in special screenings of the film. But for those who can’t see it, never fear: Stax Records and Craft Recordings have got you covered.

This year the twin labels have released and/or re-released several versions of the live albums that Stax dropped soon after the festival went down on August 20, 1972. The various packages, some documenting the day more completely than ever before, include Soul’d Out: The Complete Wattstax Collection (12-CD & digital), Wattstax: The Complete Concert (6-CD & 10-LP), The Best of Wattstax (1-CD & digital), and 2-LP reissues of the original soundtrack releases Wattstax: The Living Word Volumes 1 & 2.

It’s a worthy tribute to a concert considered historic for bringing the likes of Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, Rufus Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, Carla Thomas, The Bar-Kays, Kim Weston, Albert King, Eddie Floyd and many more under one billing. It was also a watershed moment in forging a national Black identity, with up to 112,000 (mostly Black) attendees that day. That was about twice the crowd that The Beatles had at Shea Stadium six years earlier, a third of the attendance at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, and a fourth of Woodstock’s.

So while there was a palpable sense of activism to Wattstax, it was fundamentally celebratory. Al Bell, the festival’s creator and President of Stax Records at the time, called it the “most jubilant celebration of African American music, culture, and values in American history.” And indeed, there’s a mellow yet elated air apparent in the many hours recorded that day at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. That’s in the context of the Watts neighborhood of L.A. enduring crushing poverty, systemic racism, and, in 1965, riots. Bell reflects in the liner notes that “the residents of Watts had lost all hope.” By bringing the best of Southern soul to the neighborhood through Wattstax, at only a dollar a ticket, Bell and Stax aimed to restore hope through Black music (and oratory) that affirmed Black culture and community at every turn.

And oh what music they brought. Among the new Stax/Craft releases, the best way to experience Wattstax as it felt at the time is listening to Soul’d Out: The Complete Wattstax Collection. For lovers of ’70s soul or Stax, it’s hard to imagine a more compelling box set, even if a 12-CD collection can be rather daunting, to mark the transition from classic ’60s soul to the more complex sounds of the ’70s.

The sheer size of the collection helps it capture the luxuriousness of that sprawling day. Now, for the first time, across half of the collection’s discs (also available, without bonus material, as Wattstax: The Complete Concert), is nearly every moment of audio from the show, as recorded by the film crew and later mixed by Terry Manning back in Memphis.

Right out of the gate, we reap the benefits of the set’s completism, as the opening strains of Salvation Symphony by Dale O. Warren, conductor of The Wattstax ’72 Orchestra kick in. Previously available only in an abridged form on the 2003 three-CD release Wattstax, hearing the full 19-minute composition is a revelation. Starting with a martial, neo-classical approach, it reaches a climactic chord (not unlike the final strains of Also Sprach Zarathustra) which abruptly sinks away to make room for an extended soul organ passage, in turn giving way to an extended funk/fusion workout. After that is played out, a new classical movement is taken up. It’s a significant work in its use of multiple genres to mark a new historical moment celebrating the richness and diversity of Black life, very intentionally mastering Western traditions even as it revels in African-derived traditions too. Indeed, the fusion segment relies on an undeniably funky groove that the band falls back on time and again between artists throughout the day. It never gets old.

And there are a lot of artists. Sequenced in the style of a revue, many perform only one song, at least in the early hours of the festival. One standout, also previously unreleased, is an intriguing re-imagining of “The Star Spangled Banner” by Kim Weston and band. While her version of the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was released in 1973, this take on the more conventional U.S. anthem is just as compelling in terms of artistic ambition.

After these tracks and some introductory comments, the rest of Disc 1 is centered on The Staple Singers, then at the top of their game. Having such bill-toppers kick off the festival is a generous gesture, and quite in keeping with the framing of Wattstax as a kind of gift to the audience. Disc 2 then presents a series of lesser-known Stax artists, dubbed “The Golden 13,” who sing their own hits, then team up to lead the crowd in several choruses of “Old Time Religion,” sounding more New Orleans than Memphis. There’s also a surreal moment when Al Bell receives special honors at an event that he himself planned.

True to the festival’s aesthetic, emcee William Bell reads out an official recognition of Al Bell from the Los Angeles City Council, “now therefore let it be resolved,” etc., to which William Bell adds, “translated it means: Al, you’re outta sight.”

Even more telling is the announcer who appeals to a burgeoning Black nationalism as a way to control the crowd, as he tries repeatedly to clear the stage area of hangers-on. “Folks,” he says, “we have a logistics problem that is really — well anyhow, it’s hard … Now look brothers and sisters, we have to cooperate to make a nation, and a nation doesn’t mean ‘Me, privileged.’ If you’re not working, please have the courtesy to leave the area … Now please, God don’t like ugly!”

It captures the politicized spirit of the event well, and it doesn’t hurt that it’s followed up by one of the most incendiary tracks ever released by Stax, “Lying on the Truth,” by the Rance Allen Group.

More extended sets follow on the remaining CD’s, including those by David Porter, The Bar-Kays, Carla Thomas, Albert King, Rufus Thomas, and, at the climax, Isaac Hayes. Due to technical difficulties experienced by the film crew, Hayes and company play “Theme from Shaft” twice, back to back. (The first version has never been released until now).

Overall, the performances are carried off with precision, passion, and grit, made all the more powerful if one listens across a single afternoon, immersing oneself in festival time. The buildup to Hayes’ set is inexorable, and he and his band are in top form, with the added draw of hearing Hayes take several saxophone solos.

Beyond the festival itself, the Soul’d Out set offering six more discs documenting the Stax-related music featured that September and October in L.A.’s Summit Club. Some of these made their way into the film and the Living Word LPs at the time, but the more complete collection features many never-heard tracks. What’s more, having been recorded in a nightclub, the recordings have the urgency of an interior space filled with people. That quality especially benefits a previously unheard set by Sons of Slum, a hard-hitting Chicago group that unleashes a positively frenetic cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect.”

And there’s comedy, too, with not only the Richard Pryor routines originally featured in the Living Word LPs, but also a comedy set by Rufus Thomas. With these touches, not to mention the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s oration at Wattstax itself, this collection captures a good deal more than music. And the new packaging perfectly matches this time capsule from 1972, including a deluxe LP-sized book of liner notes by Al Bell, A. Scott Galloway, and Rob Bowman.

In sum, it’s an extravagant record of an extraordinary time, and, given the ongoing civil rights battles still being fought today, a history and a spirit worth treasuring in our collective memories.

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Music Music Blog

“Green Onions” Lives! Booker T. Jones at City Winery, NYC

Booker T. Jones and band at City Winery, NYC (Credit: Alex Greene)

In a fitting warm up to this week’s 20th Anniversary of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music (see our April 27th cover story), Booker T. Jones was on the road this month, ostensibly to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of “Green Onions,” the tune that propelled Booker T. and the MG’s and Stax Records into the national spotlight. Given that the song was recorded and released in 1962, the most chronologically appropriate homage was at the museum last September, when Jones joined the Franklin Triplets, all Stax Music Academy alumni, in what would have been the record company’s old tracking room to play a short set of MG’s classics. And indeed, nothing could have topped the magic of that moment, now available as an episode of Beale Street Caravan.

But 2023 is becoming the de facto year of tributes to the classic track, cut almost as an afterthought by the group and originally dubbed “Funky Onions” by then-bassist Lewis Steinberg, until label co-owner Estelle Axton made it more palatable by changing the first word to “Green.” It was only this February, more than 60 years on, that Rhino Records re-issued the original Green Onions LP, notably the first album ever released by Stax.

Jones himself has paid tribute to the tune this year with multiple cover versions released on streaming services, all adapting the song’s basic riff to styles as disparate as Latin rock, straight rock, and country.

And so it was that an appearance by the famed organist, composer, and producer at New York’s City Winery on April 15th was billed as “Booker T. Jones: Celebrating 60 Years of ‘Green Onions.'” What was more surprising was the venue’s release of a special wine dedicated to both the song and the show. Sales of the dedicated vintage will benefit the Stax Museum.

(Credit: Alex Greene)

That night, my date and I sampled a freshly uncorked bottle as we settled into the spacious, sold-out venue and its sweeping view of the Hudson River, the dusky spires of Jersey City looming in the distance. Soon the band, sans Jones, took the stage and began playing the descending figure of “Soul Dressing,” a cut off the MG’s album of the same name. “Wow,” exclaimed a fellow patron, representative of the night’s older demographic, “it’s not every day you get to hear the MG’s!”

I refrained from correcting him, but in my mind I heard Steve Cropper’s recent quip that “if I went out with Booker now, we’d have to call it Booker T. and the MG!” Meanwhile, I was content to take in the band before us: Dylan Jones on guitar, Melvin Brown on bass, and Ty Dennis on drums. Soon Booker T. Jones himself sauntered out to the organ, looking dapper in a blue suit and flat cap, and “Soul Dressing” began in earnest.

What followed was a tight, focused journey through not only the MG’s catalog, but other Stax hits as well. The band, while missing the inimitable swing of the original Stax house band, was on point with the arrangements. Dylan Jones carried off many of Steve Cropper’s original guitar parts faithfully, though he couldn’t resist injecting a bit of shredding when he soloed at length. His work on the the MG’s “Melting Pot” was quite venturesome, but that was in keeping with the song’s original jazz-inclined aesthetic. Brown’s bass solo on the same tune also went far beyond anything the MG’s recorded, but was imaginative and soulful nonetheless. Throughout, Booker T. Jones’ playing was as funky, tasteful, and restrained as his recorded works, even when stretching out for extended soloing on “Green Onions” in the set’s midpoint. That tune, of course, elicited the evening’s most frenzied applause.

Vocalist Ayanna Irish stepped out to put across numbers more associated with female singers, such as “Gee Whiz” and “Respect,” the latter having more to do with Aretha Franklin’s cover version than the Otis Redding original, and her approach was appropriately old-school.

Booker T. Jones sang as well, and another surprise followed his brief reminiscence. “The first time I came to New York City, in 1962, I was at the Roseland Ballroom,” he said. “With Ruth Brown and Jimmy Reed.” Already holding a guitar after singing Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” (which he produced), he then launched into Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City.” For a moment, you could imagine you were back home on Beale Street.

The show reached its climax with the smoldering build-up of the ostensible set-closer, “Time is Tight,” the coda of which seemed to throw the band for a loop. But as the applause died down, Jones immediately brought everyone back to Memphis. “I was standing on McLemore Avenue, and I see this guy pull up in a van from Georgia, and he starts pulling out guitar amps and suitcases and stuff and carrying them into the studio. Then he sits next to me on the organ and he wants to know if he can sing a song. And of course I say, ‘No, you can’t sing a song. You’re the valet!'” Laughter rippled through the room. “Anyway, he started singing this.” While I expected to hear “These Arms of Mine,” often associated with that story, Jones instead launched into another of Otis Redding’s great masterpieces from the early Stax era, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now).”

At the song’s end, just as we were thoroughly melted into the floor, Jones brought things squarely into the contemporary age. “This song was written by Lauryn Hill, and it’s called ‘Everything is Everything.'” The tune, its title taken from a promotional slogan used by Stax in its heyday, and recorded by Jones in collaboration with The Roots, was the perfect way to remind us that, all anniversaries notwithstanding, this was a restless, thriving artist standing before us. Long live “Green Onions,” I thought, and long live Booker T. Jones.

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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 Blog

Jim Stewart, Other Memphians Recognized at 65th Annual Grammys

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)