Stax Records: The Integrated South

In nineteen fifty-seven, Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton started a recording operation in Memphis that they named Satellite Records, moving a few years later into a former movie theater on McLemore Avenue in South Memphis. They changed the name to Stax in nineteen sixty-one by combining the first two letters of their last names. What they built there became one of the most integrated workplaces in the Jim Crow South.

In a city and era where Black and white Memphians were legally separated in schools, restaurants, buses, and hotels, the musicians and producers at Stax recorded together, argued about arrangements together, and shared creative credit in ways that were illegal in the public life around them. Booker T. Jones, who was Black, led the MGs, whose rhythm section included white guitarist Steve Cropper. The resulting sound, spare, funky, and warm, was the engine beneath Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and dozens of others who recorded at McLemore Avenue through the nineteen sixties.

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in April nineteen sixty-eight, Stax was transformed. The musicians had known King. The sanitation strikers whose cause had brought King to Memphis lived in the neighborhood around the studio. Isaac Hayes, who had been writing songs for other artists, responded by recording "Hot Buttered Soul" in nineteen sixty-nine, a sprawling, unhurried album that used long instrumental passages to create space for grief. It sold one million copies and remade the idea of what a soul record could be.

The label signed a distribution deal with CBS Records in nineteen seventy-two that it could not survive. A contract dispute over master recordings left Stax unable to access its own catalog; the label declared bankruptcy in nineteen seventy-six. The original building was demolished in nineteen eighty-nine.

The Stax Museum of American Soul Music opened on the same footprint in two thousand three, built to resemble the original theater. The neighborhood around it remains majority Black and majority poor. The integration that happened inside those walls did not extend to the city outside them.