Digging Back Through the Stax

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'Stax was out of the church -- country and city, white and black. We did things spontaneously. It was a grassroots thing: just country folk and blue-collar folks feeling it.'

Listening to the just-released Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration (Concord Music Group), you can almost see Rufus Thomas 'Walking the Dog' in his white knee-high boots. Feel Otis Redding, head thrown back, eyes squeezed tight, begging for a little 'Respect.' Sense the heat as Booker T. and the MG's burn down a patch of 'Green Onions.' Laugh out loud when Johnnie Taylor asks, 'Who's making love to your old lady, while you were out making love?'

Then you can read the liner notes, composed by Stax scholar Rob Bowman, and consider this: It all got started because Jim Stewart, a white country fiddler inspired by the success of Sam Phillips' Sun Records -- birthplace of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash -- decided to start Satellite Records in 1957.

Stewart, initially recording country pop and struggling, found modest success recording a song by an all-black group in 1959. He didn't know anything about R&B at the time, but the experiment set things in motion, and a year later he and his sister Estelle Axton moved their business back to Memphis and bought a movie theater with a classic marquee that would eventually become a fixture in indie label lore. 'Soulsville U.S.A.' earned iconic status in part because of that movie house turned recording studio, with its sloped concrete floor, lack of right angles, schizophrenic sound waves, and freakishly live vibe -- conjuring smoke-stained ceilings, sweat-soaked work shirts, and straight whiskey.

Above all, though, it was that palpable sense of community, of like-minded artists trusting one another enough to groove out on a limb, that explains what came out of Stax from 1960 through May 1968, a period considered by Bowman, who also wrote Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records (Shirmer Trade, 1997), to be the first of two distinct eras.

'Right out of the gate, the eyes of the black community were on Stax Records,' explains Deanie Parker, who worked at the Satellite Record Shop, which Axton put in the movie theater's lobby. There, neighborhood kids would come hang out, listen to records, and dream of being stars. The fledgling record producers, in turn, could test musical styles on a tailor-made target audience and look for local talent. 'If Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton had not been welcoming and respectful of our similarities and differences, the experience and outcome would have been completely different,' Parker says.

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