During the 60`s, in Memphis Tenessee, Stax records developed a identifiable promising sound that showed the possibilities of southern soul music. Stax was racially integrated, in the studio as in the front office, in a time and place where black kids were not allowed in the same pool that white kids were swimming in.

Although Jim Stewart, who knew nothing about black music or black culture, issued a handful of rockabilly, pop and country forty-fives on Satellite Records, the precursor to Stax, beginning in 1957, the legacy of the company, gets started with the summer 1960 issue of Rufus and Carla Thomas’ “Cause I Love You.”
From that point on, the history of Stax can be understood to divide roughly into two halves: 1960 through May 1968 and June 1968 through December 1975. In the first period Stax was distributed by the New York-based Atlantic Records, the Volt subsidiary was created and the company developed what became known as the “Stax Sound,” manifest on the recordings of a panoply of soul greats including Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the MG’s, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, William Bell, Eddie Floyd and Albert King.

The “Stax Sound” was the result of a number of factors. Perhaps the most fortuitous of these was Stewart’s decision in early 1960 to move his fledgling company to an abandoned neighborhood movie theatre in South Memphis at the corner of College and McLemore. With his then right hand man, Chips Moman, various members of the Mar-Keys (whose membership included Stewart’s nephew, Packy Axton, as well as future Stax session musicians Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn and Wayne Jackson) and a handful of others, Stewart converted the cavernous theatre into a recording studio. Once the seats were ripped out, a wall was constructed dividing the recording room in half, acoustic material was fastened to the walls and ceiling and a control booth was constructed on what had been the theatre’s stage.
A crucial element in determining what became the Stax sound was Stewart’s decision to save money by not leveling the sloping theatre floor. The finished studio turned out to be totally unique in terms of design, ambiance and, most importantly, acoustics. With a sloping floor and angled walls, there were no directly parallel surfaces. This meant that sound waves would continuously reflect off one surface after another, ping ponging around the room until their energy was eventually totally dissipated, in the process creating an exceedingly “live” reverberent sound that characterized each and every recording made at the company’s 926 E. McLemore studio. A discerning ear can consequently identify a recording made at Stax in the 1960s within less than four bars.

While the theatre’s acoustics played a large part in the “Stax Sound,” so did the theatre’s location. At the time that Stewart and his co-owner and sister, Estelle Axton (the name came from combining the first two letters of each of their last names), took over the Capitol Theatre, the neighborhood around College and McLemore was rapidly shifting its demographic base from white to black. When Axton decided to convert the theatre’s candy concession into the Satellite Record Shop, her clientele naturally reflected the larger shifts in the neighborhood and became nearly exclusively black. Besides generating much needed cash flow, the record shop served as a means of aiding and abetting neighborhood relations; as a ready made test market for potential Stax releases; and as a conduit for recruiting local talent.
By the summer of 1962 the four original members of Booker T. and the MG’s: organist Booker T. Jones, guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Lewie Steinberg and drummer Al Jackson Jr., had become the “house” rhythm section at Stax Records. In 1964 Duck Dunn replaced Steinberg on bass and Isaac Hayes often sat in for Booker T. while the latter was at college. When both Booker T. and Isaac were available, they would often both play on sessions, Hayes on organ, Jones on piano. On most recordings the rhythm section was joined by what were originally known as the Mar-Key Horns and later dubbed the Memphis Horns. While there was some fluidity as to who played horns on a given session, in the earliest days the section mostly consisted of baritone saxophonist Floyd Newman, tenor saxophonists Gilbert Caple and Packy Axton and trumpeter Wayne Jackson. By the mid-sixties tenor saxophonists Andrew Love and Gene Parker came on board, followed a little later by Joe Arnold as Newman, Caple, Axton and eventually Parker drifted away. It is crucial to recognize that both the rhythm and horn sections were comprised of white and black members. While all were engaged in the creation of African-American music, the racial composition of the band invariably meant that a number of pop, rock and country influences would also play a part in the creation of the Stax sound. Most notable among these are Steve Cropper’s use of open sixth dyads (typically used by country guitarists such as Chet Atkins) and Duck Dunn’s tendency to craft melodic, contrapuntal bass lines (Paul McCartney being a big influence in this regard).

Precisely summing up the sound on the several hundred recording issued on Stax and Volt in the 1960s is a nigh-on impossible task. One can, though, delimit in general terms the main features of the Stax sound in the 1960s, all of which stand in stark contrast to the musical practices of Detroit’s Motown Records, Stax’s main rival in this period. The Stax sound consisted of (1) an emphasis on the low end; (2) the prominent use of horns which often took the place of background vocals; (3) pre-arranged horn ensembles often serving as bridges in place of the more typical “improvised” guitar, keyboard or sax solos heard on many popular music recordings (this concept was originated by Otis Redding); (4) a “less is more” aesthetic manifested in sparse textures, the absence of ride cymbals on a lot of vocal recordings, unison horn lines, the absence of strings until late 1968 and so on; (5) a mix that placed the vocalist in the middle of the recording rather than way out in front; (6) a prominent gospel influence as heard in the juxtaposition of organ and piano, the extensive use of the IV chord and, most importantly, in the deployment by vocalists at Stax of extensive timbral variation, pitch inflection, melismas and highly syncopated phrasing all in the service of emotional catharsis; and (7) a delayed back beat. The latter was developed in 1965 by Steve Cropper and Al Jackson Jr., in response to a new dance on the scene known as the Jerk and became a component of virtually every Stax recording through the end of the decade.

Less tangible but just as important with regard to the Stax sound was the process through which these recordings were made. In the 1960s time and money were initially not important considerations at Stax when working up a recording. While Northern musicians were paid by the three hour session, for the longest time in the South musicians were paid by the song. If it took half an hour to get a song recorded, great. If it took a day and a half, well that was also okay. In the North, where time was money, record company owners and producers expected to cut four songs in a typical three hour session. This left little time to collectively work out different grooves and arrangements in the studio and instead necessitated the employment of arrangers to work out as many of the parts as possible in advance of the actual session. At Stax, the four members of Booker T. and the MG’s plus Isaac Hayes and the Memphis Horns would typically saunter into the studio one at a time in the late morning, slowly getting down to the task at hand–collectively working up a song via “head” arrangements until the session was grooving.
Once the groove had reached the requisite level of intensity, the vocalists, horns and rhythm section all played their parts together, recording “live” in the studio with little or no overdubbing. This, of course, meant that if someone made a mistake, they either had to live with it or everyone would have to perform the song again from the beginning. At Stax, as often as not, if the recording had achieved the desired emotional catharsis, the take would be kept mistake and all. On Sam and Dave’s recordings alone, trumpeter Wayne Jackson misses his first two responses on the repeat of the chorus after the second verse on “Hold On! I’m Comin’” and on “Soul Man” the whole band dramatically shifts the tempo down at the beginning of the first verse. Such vagaries ultimately don’t matter a damn. In fact, if anything they contributed to the magic, giving these recordings a feeling of humanity/realness/authenticity that is often absent from high gloss studio-produced recordings. Through the mid-sixties, recordings at Stax were also mixed “on the fly” with Jim Stewart simply riding the volume control faders governing the recording level of each instrument as the parts were actually played. While such methods were antiquated by the standards of most studios, at Stax they were part of the magic. Taken as a whole, these various aspects of the recording practice at Stax tended to make the company’s releases performance and process-oriented, in stark contrast to Motown’s more composition and product-oriented aesthetic. While both company’s approaches made important, valuable and meaningful recordings, the differences between the two are palpable.
After May 1968 everything changed at Stax, including its sound. In December 1967 Otis Redding and two-thirds of the original Bar-Kays perished in a tragic plane crash. In April 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis forever changing race relations throughout the country, in Memphis and at Stax and on May 6th Stax severed its relationship with Atlantic Records and African-American promotion and marketing executive Al Bell became a minority shareholder in the company. By mid-1969, Bell had bought out Estelle Axton. With Jim Stewart and Al Bell at that point each owning 50% of the company, Stax had become integrated all the way up to the level of ownership.

Bell was a larger-than-life character who, upon coming on board in the fall of 1965, transformed Stax from top to bottom. Described by Booker T. Jones as the front office equivalent to Otis Redding, Bell had taken what had been a Mom and Pop, cottage industry enterprise and in a few short years had guided it to the level of rhythm and blues powerhouse. Prior to Bell’s arrival, Stax had been unable to sell substantial quantities of its records in New York or Los Angeles.

“The problem we had,” explained Bell, “Was that Stax was viewed as a company that was coming up with that ‘Bama music. We had a problem in getting the product played outside of the South, across the Mason-Dixon line. When you got into the bigger urban centers, they were doing the Motown stuff. Being a jock I knew that and then traveling all over the place, I knew what was happening to us in the record stores and what was happening to us at the radio level and on the street level with our music. I started looking to diversify the company and, at that time, I was talking to everybody in there about broadening the music so we could go into New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, and Baltimore much more formidably.

“The position that I had been trying to influence production to get into was maintaining the roots music that we had, but broadening and diversifying the sound. [Eddie Floyd's] ‘I’ve Never Found a Girl’ was one of the first shots at that. The person that was able to contribute most to that, who thought much broader than the roots music that we had been coming up with, was Booker T. Booker was the learned guy. Booker was the only guy on staff who could write music and he was an arranger.”

At the same time that Booker began employing small-scale string arrangements on recordings such as “I’ve Never Found a Girl,” greater changes were in the offing. Bell went to Detroit and brought former Motown and Revilot producer Don Davis to Stax. Davis, in turn, introduced Bell to northern arrangers such as Johnny Allen and Dale Warren and northern producers such as Freddy Briggs and Tom Nixon. As all of these individuals played a tremendous role in transforming the original sound that Jim Stewart, Booker T. and the MG’s and the Memphis Horns had developed, Stax ascended to its commercial peak, selling a tonnage of records and grossing several million dollars annually through the early 1970s. As is usually the case, when something is gained, something else is lost. While Don Davis was turning out hit after hit by artists such as Johnnie Taylor and the Dramatics, the company’s original rhythm and horn sections were becoming alienated. By 1969 Booker had moved to California. Two years later he refused to have anything to do with any artist connected to Stax. That same year Steve Cropper gave his notice and horn players Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love asked to be taken off salary, agreeing to work at Stax only on a per session basis.

With the arrival of the Detroit contingent, sessions ceased to be recorded “live,” overdubbing became standard fare, massed orchestral arrangements became de rigeur and the original Stax aesthetic and sound became distant memories of days gone by. Over time most of the overdubs and some of the rhythm section tracks weren’t even recorded in Memphis. As all of these transformations took Stax long beyond the ‘Bama stigma that had so concerned Bell, he began to produce the Staple Singers himself, conducting all of their rhythm sessions in Muscle Shoals, Alabama while cutting the group’s vocal overdubs at Ardent Studios in Memphis. The results were impressive as the Staples reinvented themselves as contemporary soul stars, and recordings such as “Respect Yourself,” “I’ll Take You There” and “If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me)” came to define much of what was soulful and good about the first half of the 1970s.

Stax’s greatest success in the second period belonged to Isaac Hayes. A songwriter, producer and session player, by 1969 Hayes had established an enviable reputation in partnership with David Porter, writing and producing such seminal hits as “Hold On! I’m Comin’,” “Soul Man” and “B-A-B-Y.” In the first few months of 1969, Al Bell offered Hayes the chance to record a solo album completely on his own terms. The result was Hot Buttered Soul.

“When I did Hot Buttered Soul,” Hayes reflects, “it was a selfish thing on my part. It was something I wanted to do. Al said, ‘However you want to do it.’ I didn’t give a damn if it didn’t sell because I was going for the true artistic side, rather than looking at it for monetary value. I had an opportunity to express myself no holds barred, no restrictions, and that’s why I did it. I took artistic and creative liberties. I felt what I had to say couldn’t be said in two minutes and thirty seconds. So I just stretched [the songs] out and milked them for everything they were worth.”
Hayes, Marvell Thomas (son of Rufus, brother of Carla), and Bar-Kays members Michael Toles, James Alexander, and Willie Hall recorded Hot Buttered Soul at Ardent Studios with Terry Manning engineering. Allen Jones, Marvell Thomas, and Al Bell were credited as co-producers. Only four songs were cut; an 18-minute version of Glen Campbell’s 1967 hit “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” a 12-minute version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk On By,” a nine minute track Al Bell called “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,” and a relatively short five-minute take on Memphis songwriters Charlie Chalmers and Sandy Rhodes’s “One Woman.” The length of the songs, the arrangements that equally fused rock, soul, pop, jazz and classical, the long rap that preceded “Phoenix,” and Hayes’s vocal style were all radically different from what was going on in mainstream R&B at the time.

Hot Buttered Soul went on to sell over one million copies, an unprecedented showing for what was nominally an R&B album. Equally unprecedented was the fact that the album charted in the upper reaches of four different charts–jazz, pop, R&B, and easy listening–simultaneously, a feat few–if any–artists have ever achieved! Hayes virtually owned the jazz charts for the next few years. Hot Buttered Soul flitted back and forth between the #2 and #1 spots on Billboard’s jazz LP charts for over eight months. A year and a half after it was released, it was still in the jazz Top Ten, joined by Hayes’s next two albums, The Isaac Hayes Movement and To Be Continued. This was the kind of across-the-board success that Al Bell had envisioned for Stax. Ron Capone quickly edited both “Phoenix” and “Walk On By” down to single length, giving Stax’s newest subsidiary label, Enterprise, a double-sided hit, “Walk On By” rising to numbers 13 and 30 on the R&B and pop charts, “Phoenix” reaching #37 on both charts.

Thomas, Hall, Toles and Alexander, alongside guitarist Bobby Manuel, would become the main session players at the McLemore studios in Stax’s second period. In various permutations they cut hit after hit for Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas (“Do the Funky Chicken,” “(Do The) Push and Pull,” “The Breakdown” and “Do the Funky Penguin”), Albert King (“I’ll Play the Blues for You,” “Breaking Up Somebody’s Home” and “That’s What the Blues Is All About”), and newcomers Little Milton (“That’s What Love Will Make You Do”), the Emotions (“Show Me How” and “My Honey and Me”), the Soul Children (“I’ll Be the Other Woman,” “Hearsay,” “It Ain’t Always What You Do (It’s Who You Let See You Do It)” and “Don’t Take My Kindness for Weakness”), and the Temprees (“Dedicated to the One I Love”). While Stax and its Volt and Enterprise subsidiaries were storming the charts with such home grown smashes, the company was also enjoying mass success with Johnnie Taylor’s and the Staple Singers’s Muscle Shoals sessions and Al Bell was making master purchase deals for bonafide hits by Mel and Tim (“Starting All Over Again”), Jean Knight (“Mr. Big Stuff”) and Frederick Knight (“I’ve Been Lonely for So Long”).

Al Bell’s influence extended well beyond marketing and A&R. In fact, there were seemingly no limits to his vision of the future of Stax Records. By 1972 the company had expanded into the world of film, Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack for Shaft jump-starting the so-called blaxploitation movement while also providing the groundwork for several of the key sonic components of late seventies dance-music grooves.

Anyway one looks at it, Shaft was one of the crowning achievements of Stax and rhythm and blues in the 1970s. Bell had been wanting to move the company into the world of film since at least 1968 when Stax had been sold to Gulf and Western. Isaac Hayes shared Bell’s keen interest and in early 1971 signed on to compose the soundtrack. Considering this was his first film assignment, Isaac’s score was nothing short of ingenious, containing numerous highlights. For most people, though, the film, Isaac Hayes, and the blaxploitation era are inextricably wedded to the title song, “Theme from Shaft.” Released as a single in September 1971 two months after the album was on the market, “Theme from Shaft” contains an inordinate number of hooks. The two that are invariably the most indelibly etched into the listener’s cranium are the sixteenth-note hi-hat riff and wah-wah rhythm guitar part that are heard virtually from the beginning to the end of the track. Both licks were recycled endlessly during the disco era. Topping it all off were the incredibly dramatic string parts.

The Shaft album went to number one on both the pop and R&B album charts, staying on the pop listings for a staggering 60 weeks. The single, “Theme from Shaft,” also went number one pop, although, oddly enough, it only made it to the number two spot on the R&B charts.

It’s ironic that while Al Bell was hot in pursuit of crossover success and expansion in several different directions, the company’s founder, Jim Stewart, who initially wasn’t even interested in black music, would have been content to keep things a lot simpler, focusing on recording soul records that replicated the original Stax sound; mass success and mega-money be damned. As is so often the case when a cottage industry becomes a large corporation, at Stax the company’s owners became embroiled in a sea of never ending paper work and meetings. Consequently, from the late 1960s through 1974 Jim Stewart rarely set foot in his beloved McLemore Studio. In many respects, then, it is fitting that when Stax found itself in financial trouble in 1974, Stewart stepped back into the studio and produced in tandem with Booker T. and the MG’s drummer Al Jackson Jr., what was the company’s final hit single, Shirley Brown’s “Woman to Woman.”

Although the company folded in the last days of 1975, the legacy of Stax remains potent over thirty years later. In the 1960s rock groups such as the Rolling Stones were routinely covering Stax classics such as Rufus Thomas’s “Walking the Dog” and Otis Redding’s “That’s How Strong My Love Is.” In the 1980s ZZ Top hit the charts with their cover of Sam and Dave’s “I Thank You” as did the Fabulous Thunderbirds with a similarly refashioned cover of the dynamic duo’s “Wrap It Up.” In the world of rap, the Stax influence has been even more ubiquitous. From Heavy D & the Boyz crazed cover of “Mr. Big Stuff” to Salt-N-Pepa’s reworking of Linda Lyndell’s “What A Man” to Will Smith’s use of the Bar-Kays’s “Sang and Dance” on “Let’s Get Jiggy With It,” samples of Stax recordings have been omnipresent on the rap landscape. Finally, there have been dozens of urban covers of Stax material, notable examples including Jewell’s Snoop Doggy Dogg-produced cover of Shirley Brown’s “Woman to Woman,” the Winans’s Grammy-nominated version of the Staple Singers’s “I’ll Take You There” and Janet Jackson’s take on Johnny Daye’s “What’ll I Do for Satisfaction.”

2007 is the 50th anniversary of Jim Stewart’s first recording efforts and the beginning of Stax Records. To mark the occasion a number of major events will be held at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and Concord Records, which purchased the Stax label in 2005, plans to release a plethora of Stax box sets and single CDs, all with previously unreleased bonus cuts. Some of these sets will also contain previously unreleased DVD content.

Well into the twenty-first century Stax Records, the “little label that could,” remains a potent force in the world of popular music.

This essay is adapted from Rob Bowman’s essay originally written for the 4-CD box set, The Stax Story.

Rob Bowman is the author of the award winning book Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records issued by Schirmer Books.

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