Click here to play the podcastOn this episode, we take a journey through the rich history of Stax Records, the iconic label that defined Southern Soul music, and I play some of my favorite Stax tracks from their earliest years– 1959 to 1963.
Stax produced some of the most unforgettable songs in music history. Join us as I spin up some of my personal favorites, featuring legends like Booker T. and the MGs, Otis Redding, Rufus Thomas, The Mar-Keys and Carla Thomas. Learn about the unique sound of Stax, the community that fostered it, and the incredible music that continues to resonate today.
Save 15% off t-shirts & merch from your favorite bands by using our discount code lovethatsong at OldGlory.com!
TRANSCRIPT:
Hold on, I’m coming– it’s the “I’m In Love With That Song” Podcast. My name is Brad Page, here on the Pantheon Podcast Network with another edition of the show.
If you’re familiar with this podcast, then you know what we usually do here is to take a song and examine it, looking at the structure, performance and production elements that go into making a great song. But on this episode, we’re going to do something a little different. This is something we’ve never done before.
We’ve looked at specific songs, specific artists, individual albums, and music that came out during certain key years. But this time, we’re going to take a look at the releases from one particular record label– one of the most important record labels in the history of popular music: Stax Records.
I love the music that came out on Stax Records from their humble studios in Memphis, Tennessee, in my opinion, some of the greatest music ever made. So much great music that there’s no way I could cover it all in just one episode. So, this is going to be the first in an occasional series. Well come back to it now and then over the next few years. Today, we begin our exploration of Stax with a look at my favorite Stax singles from 1959 through 1963.
I imagine most people are familiar with Motown– the “Sound of Young America”, as they used to say. It was fresh, urban; the sound coming from the black communities in the northern cities. The sound coming from Stax, well, that was different. It was more raw, more sweat, the sound of southern soul music. Where Motown aspired to be uptown, Stax was down home.
It probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: This was music made primarily by, and for, Black Americans. But music this infectious, this good, couldn’t be contained. It made America a better place, and it caught the ear of people all around the world. But this is music born from segregated communities.. though it would not have been possible without black and white artists, black and white executives, working together, creating something together that was magical. But let’s be honest, it wasn’t always Kumbaya and rainbows. There were conflicts and challenges, and the limitations of integration at the time… I will leave that to the experts, the historians and the scholars. There are some fantastic books on the history of Stax, and there’s a fantastic documentary on HBO Max that I highly recommend.
The story of Stax is, like so many of our greatest stories, a story of triumph and tragedy, of serendipity and bad luck, of dreaming big and overreaching, of success and failure… and most importantly, the story of the music that has survived and outlasted it all.
And it all began in 1959 with Jim Stewart and his sister, Estelle Axton. Jim and Estelle were white, and they both worked in banking; Jim for First Tennessee, and Estelle for Union Planters Bank. But Jim’s real love was playing fiddle, which he did semi-professionally for a while. When Elvis Presley hit the big time with the records he made at Sun Studios in Memphis, well, that got Jim interested in recording. He made a few recordings, rockabilly and country stuff that didn’t really go anywhere.
But his sister Estelle mortgaged her House to buy an Ampex mono tape recorder, and she became an equal partner in the recording business. They set up their first studio, which they called “Satellite”, in Brunswick, Tennessee.
Jim Stewart didn’t really know anything about Rhythm & Blues, but somehow he got connected with a black vocal group named The Veltones, and they recorded a song at Satellite called “Fool In Love” in 1959. I don’t think it’s a particularly great song, it’s most memorable for its vibrato guitar sounds.
But that track was snatched up by Mercury Records and distributed nationally. It also brought Stewart in contact with Rufus Thomas, a singer and DJ on WDIA, the biggest black station in the area.
By now, Jim and Estelle had moved the studio into Memphis, setting up shop in an old movie theater at 926 Macklemore Avenue, in the heart of a black neighborhood. Rufus Thomas and his daughter Carla Thomas came into the studio on Macklemore Ave– in fact, they were the first act to record there– and laid down the track called “Cause I Love You”. Released in August 1960, it became a hit, and set the course for the future.
“Cause I Love You” featured a 16-year-old kid named Booker T. Jones on baritone sax. Though he would soon become known as a legendary keyboard player, Booker T was part of the Stax family from the very first record cut in Memphis.
The success of “Cause I Love You” caught the attention of Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. He reached out to Jim Stewart and made a deal for Atlantic to distribute Stax’ records. Of course, Stax wasn’t even called Stax yet; that would come later. They were still using the name Satellite.
While Jim ran the studio in the back, Estelle ran the Satellite Record Shop out front. The neighborhood kids shopped and hung out there, and Estelle would use them as a test audience for the latest single recorded out back in the studio.
With the success of “Cause I Love You, they cut a solo Carla Thomas single, a song she had written when she was 16: “Gee Whiz”.
That was the record that really put Stax (or Satellite) on the map. It reached number five on the R&B chart and number ten on the Pop chart. In retrospect, it doesn’t really sound like a Stax record. They hadn’t really discovered that sound yet. That would come about a year later with the release of an instrumental by The Mar-Keys called “Last Night”.
Released in June 1961, The Mar-Keys started out as an all white band called, ironically enough, the Royal Spades. The band included guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, trumpeter Wayne Jackson, and tenor sax player Charles “Packy” Axton, who was Estelle’s son.
When they recorded “Last Night” in the studio, they were joined by some black session players: Louis Steinberg, Curtis Green, Floyd Newman, maybe some others, making this the first integrated band at Stax. In its own way, it’s a milestone. It’s also a milestone in terms of the sound: heavy on the horns, powerful drum sound, the organ up front, and that groove.
There is no guitar on this track; Steve Cropper is actually playing keyboards along with Smoochie Smith, who takes the organ lead.
“Last Night” made it to number two on the R&B chart and number three on the Pop chart.
Around the time they were creating the sound that would become the Stax sound, they also created the Stax name. Not exactly by choice; there was another record label out in California that used the “Satellite” name first. To avoid legal trouble, they changed the name of the company. They took the first two letters from Stewart’s name (ST) and the first two letters from Estelle Axton’s last name, (AX) and created “Stax”.
One of the other producers working at Stax besides Jim Stewart was Chips Moman. He would go on to have a long, successful career as a producer, but it was these early years at Stax where he first made his mark. He signed a young singer named William Bell. Bell was also a great songwriter, and his first single for Stax was a song he wrote called “You Don’t Miss Your Water, released in November 1961. It’s a ballad in 12/8 time. If you want a deeper understanding of what 12/8 time is, go back and listen to our episode on “Somebody To Love” by Queen– we covered that time signature in detail there.
“You Don’t Miss Your Water” didn’t make much of an impact on the charts, but I think it was Stax first great soul ballad, and it’s now considered a classic.
Not every song released by Stax was a hit, and not every artist had a lasting career. Many of them, you can’t even call them “one hit wonders” because they didn’t have any hits. There were some forgettable records. Barbara Stevens recorded three singles for Stax between 1961 and 62. None of them hit, but I’ve always had a soft spot for one of them, a track called “Wait A Minute”, a fun song with a lively little vocal from Barbara. After those three singles, Barbara Stevens faded into obscurity.
Now, in 1961, Stax created a sister label, a subsidiary label called “Volt”. Radio stations could be reluctant to play too many records from one label, so it was common practice for many labels to create offshoots to get around that. So Stax had Volt. Most of the singles were released on the Stax labels, with occasional singles released on Volt. The only single released on both the Stax and the Volt labels was a little track by Booker T. And the MG’s called “Green Onions”.
One day, while waiting for another artist to show up at the studio, Booker T, Steve Cropper, Louis Steinberg, and Al Jackson Jr. started jamming on a slow blues riff, and Jim Stewart happened to record it. When they played it back, they thought it sounded pretty good. They called it “Behave Yourself” and decided it was good enough to release. Now they needed something for the other side of the single, so they took another riff that they’d been noodling around with and turned that into “Green Onions”. It was originally released August 1962 on the Volt label. Once it started selling, they reissued it on the Stax label, and it went on to hit number one on the R&B chart and number three on the Pop chart.
Booker T and his crew were really just studio cats and backing musicians, but after “Green Onions” became a smash hit, they became a band on their own. They would release several more hit records as Booker T and the MGs, as well as continue to be the backing band for many of the Stax’s artists.
Around the same time as “Green Onions” was burning up the charts, William Bell released his second single, “Any Other Way”. It never became a big hit, but stay tuned, because this song, um, will show up again on this podcast sometime next year.
Another artist who found his way to Stax in 1962 was Otis Redding. He was working with Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, and he was actually just driving Jenkins to the session at Stax– he wasn’t even supposed to sing. But when the Jenkins session hit a dead end, they let Otis sing a couple of numbers… and one of them was “These Arms Of Mine”, and they were blown away. Jim Stewart signed Otis right away, and “These Arms Of Mine” was released on Volt in October 1962.
In January of 1963, Rufus Thomas released “The Dog”. You know when you see Rufus Thomas’ name on a record, you’re in for a good time.
Deanie Parker was a local teenage girl in a band called The Valadors. When they came in first place in a Memphis talent contest, they won an audition at Stax. They didn’t have any original songs, so Deanie went home and wrote her very first song, “My Imaginary Guy”, which became her first single. Though she never had any big hits as a singer, she continued to write songs for Stax artists like William Bell, Albert King, and Carla Thomas, and remained a Stax employee all the way until the very end. Here’s Deanie with her very first song, “My Imaginary Guy”.
May 1963, guitarist and harmonica player Eddie Kirkland, who had been a member of Otis Redding’s touring band, released a single on his own called “The Hog”, featuring Kirkland on harp. For some reason, they shortened his name to Eddie Kirk for this record. But either way, this song smokes.
Booker T and the MGs continue to release instrumental singles, including one of their best– or at least it’s one of my favorites—“Chinese Checkers” in June 1963. This one features Booker T on electric piano.
In September, Rufus Thomas was back with another “dog” song. This time it’s “Walking The Dog”. This one’s an all-time classic and would go on to be covered by many artists, including Aerosmith. But here’s the original, the one and only Rufus Thomas with “Walking The Dog”.
I love that one. And as 1963 wound down in November, Carla Thomas released “Gee Whiz, It’s Christmas”, the first, but not the last, Christmas-themed single for Stax.
And that’s where we’ll leave it for this episode. But we’ll revisit Stax again next year, because I love these songs and I love the chance to share them with you.
I want to thank Rob Bowman; he’s the guy that wrote the extensive liner notes for the Stax box sets, and that was my primary source for all the information presented in this here episode. I couldn’t have done it without him. So thanks, Mr. Bowman, for your incredible work documenting this music.
I hope this episode inspires some of you to seek out these Stax artists. It’s really great stuff, and I think an important part of American history.
Thanks for joining me for this edition of the “I’m In Love With That Song” Podcast. If you’d like to support the show, why don’t you head over to oldglory.com and buy yourself a t-shirt or two? They have stock on all of our favorite artists, and when you use our discount code lovethatsong, you’ll get 15% off, and we get a little kickback. So you’ll end up with some cool merch and you’ll be supporting this show. Such a deal! That’s oldglory.com and the discount code is lovethatsong.
I’ll be back in two weeks with another new episode. In the meantime, you can catch up on all of our previous episodes on our website, lovethatsongpodcast.com and you can check in with us on Facebook. If you’d like to find more podcasts like this, be sure to check out the Pantheon Podcast Network, its home to our show and a ton of other great music-related podcasts. As always, I thank you for being part of this show and thanks for listening to this episode featuring my favorite tracks from Stax.
REFERENCES:
Stax Records
https://staxrecords.com/
HBO Max Documentary on Stax Records
Stax: Soulsville USA | Official Website for the HBO Series | HBO.com
Booker T. and the MGs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booker_T._%26_the_M.G.%27s
Otis Redding
https://otisredding.com/
Rufus Thomas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rufus_Thomas
Carla Thomas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carla_Thomas
Rob Bowman
https://www.rob-bowman.com/
Satellite Records
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Records