Stax: Soulsville U.S.A.: The Soundtrack Studio of a Race-Based Social Shift Gets Its Close-Up Doc Series
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B-plus
Some of the greatest music of the pop/R&B/Soul era came out of a recording studio next to a small record store in Memphis, Tennessee.
These were hit singles by artists who are now considered musical legends like Carla and Rufus Thomas, Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Booker T. & the M.G.'s: .And the songs: Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay, Soul Man, Try A Little Tenderness, Green Onions, The Theme From Shaft, are classics that helped define R&B, soul and the Memphis sound.
This was Stax Records.
For a music nerd, who grew up with those songs blasting out of my transistor radio, those songs shaped my taste in music, and my love for both the artists and the behind-the-scenes people, the writers, producers and record company teams, who were inventing and promoting styles of music that I loved.
Stax: Soulville U.S.A., HBO’s four part documentary about the creation, rise and fall of the legendary record label, and about its staff and key musicians, is a must-see for anyone interested in popular music.
But there’s more to the story than just hit records. You cannot separate the music of that era, especially African-American music, from the history of 20th Century America, particularly the Civil Rights movement.
Stax was founded in the era of segregation. The Jim Crow laws in Tennessee ended in 1955, but the separation of the races wasn’t going to go away easily. The deep racial divide was everywhere, in the way people interacted, on signs declaring things like “No Coloreds Allowed,” and the “N” word was in common usage. The idea of an “integrated” company, especially in the South, wasn’t an easy one.
Stax Records was birthed in that era and, it played a part in a complicated, messy new era in American society.
One of the first things you learn in this documentary is that the label that came to define a strain of Black American music, and the Memphis sound was founded in 1957 by two white people, Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton.
Jim, was a fiddle player who wanted to make country music records, and so formed his own record company. Needing cash to properly set the studio up, he asked his sister to join him. She mortaged her small house for the money, which allowed them to buy an Ampex tape machine, a big deal at the time. And the studio became STAX, an amalgam of the first two letters of their last names,
To help pay for the studio Estelle opened a record store, Satellite Records, next door to the studio. And the seeds of what would happen next were sowed in that environment.
Estelle was a welcoming presence and unlike others doing business in Memphis, hired both Black and White clerks to work in the record store. Further, she encouraged a party atmosphere, where people could come in, listen to records and dance, even out on the sidewalk..
Some of those staffers would go on to form the framework of Stax Records, including a black teenager Deanie Parker, who started as a store clerk and later became a publicist for Stax records, and guitarist Steve Cropper who heard the kind of music being played in the studio and started to work his way in, initially sweeping floors until he graduated to being a respected musician.
For a long time, Stewart thought of Stax studio as a place to make country music records.
The turning point in the history of the label came when local DJ, Rufus Thomas wanted to make a record with his daughter Carla. Jim Stewart didn’t have a studio band that could support them. And that’s when David Porter came in. He was a very young black musician named who had been hanging around hoping to persuade Stewart to let him in to record his band. Porter sprung into action.
He assembled a young group of musicians together that included a talented 14 year old multi-instrumentalist named Booker T. Jones, who he pulled out of his class at school to come play on the session. The resulting song, Cause I Love You, changed everything. The song was fantastic, and it changed how Stewart heard music from there on. Or as he says in the doc: “That was the end of country for me.”
Stax ultimately acquired a house band anchored by Washington, and Al Jackson Jr. and two white players, Cropper on guitar, and a white bass player named Donald "Duck" Dunn. The mixing of Black and White musicians at that time in history was revolutionary, although not widely known. At least not until the band, under the moniker Booker T. & the M.G.'s had a pop hit with the instrumental Green Onions.
Thanks to writer/producers David Porter and Isaac Hayes, and artists like Otis Redding, the label started to have a stable of hit records and star artists. From its position in Memphis, it was inevitable that Stax would be at the forefront of a revolution in music, and be part of the Civil Rights movement.
Director Jamila Wignot marries the story of Stax, the music, the artists, and the label’s management team with the times, using a combination of historical footage, including news footage, and, quite wonderfully some existing filmed material in studio and performance.
Fortunately, many of the people involved from the start are still with us and appear in the doc with first-person remembrances, including key players, Porter, Stewart, Axton, Booker T, Cropper, as well as Isaac Hayes, Al Bell, a DJ who became the key label executive and ultimately co-owner.
There is a Canadian connection to the documentary. It is partially based on the book Soulsville, USA by Toronto’s Rob Bowman, a music historian, University of Toronto professor, and Grammy award winner, for liner notes for a Stax-Volt anthology. Rob appears frequently through the documentary providing perspective. He’s also a co-producer on the documentary.
This is one of the strengths of the series. Too many documentaries are hagiographies that can elevate the subject out of context. Stax: Soulsville U.S.A takes its history seriously.
The series debuts on HBO Crave in Canada over two nights, with two episodes each night: M, the first episode, sets out the creation of Stax records and how the studio and the sound developed. Episode two gets further into Stax hitting its stride as a hit-maker, focusing on Otis Redding, who tragically, died in a plane accident at the end of 1967, just before the song that would be Stax’s first number one, Dock of the Bay, was released, amid the Civil Rights movement, and the final speech made by Martin Luther King the night before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis.
The final two episodes move into the label’s heyday in the early ‘70s. It deals with the Wattstax benefit concert, which aimed to give back to the Black community, and ultimately how financial issues and a bank failure ended the run.
Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. Directed by Jamila Wignot. Streaming on Crave: Episodes 1 and 2, May 20. Episodes 3 and 4, May 21.