Stax Records

Based on Wikipedia: Stax Records

The Movie Theater Where Soul Was Born

In 1960, a brother and sister in Memphis converted an old movie theater into a recording studio. The floor still sloped downward where the seats had been. The acoustics were all wrong—unbalanced, echoing strangely. Any professional engineer would have told them to fix it.

They didn't. And that slope, that acoustic accident, would become one of the most recognizable sounds in American music.

The studio at 926 East McLemore Avenue became Stax Records, and for the next fifteen years, it would rival Motown as the most important soul music label in the country. But where Motown in Detroit built a polished, crossover-friendly sound, Stax created something rawer, deeper, and unmistakably Southern. Music fans can often identify a Stax recording within the first few notes—before anyone even starts singing.

From Country Fiddles to Rhythm and Blues

Jim Stewart was a country fiddle player. In 1957, he started a record label called Satellite Records, operating out of a garage. The early releases were country music and rockabilly—the music Stewart knew and loved.

His sister Estelle Axton changed everything.

In 1958, she mortgaged her family home to invest twenty-five hundred dollars in her brother's struggling label. That was a considerable sum then—about twenty-seven thousand in today's money. The gamble paid for an Ampex 350 mono tape recorder, the first piece of real professional equipment the operation owned.

But the real transformation came through a staff producer named Chips Moman, who introduced Stewart to rhythm and blues. Stewart later described discovering R&B as being "like a blind man who suddenly gained his sight." The music grabbed him completely. From 1961 onward, virtually everything Stax released would be soul music.

The move to the old Capitol Theatre happened because of geography as much as anything. Stewart chose the building specifically because it was close to where the Black musicians lived—near disc jockey Rufus Thomas and the other artists and writers who would become the Stax family. In that era of strict racial segregation in Memphis and throughout the South, this decision was quietly revolutionary.

The Record Shop That Predicted Hits

While Jim Stewart ran the studio in the old auditorium, Estelle Axton set up a record shop in the former foyer, right where the refreshment stand used to be. This arrangement seemed like simple pragmatism—the shop provided cash flow while the label found its footing—but it became something much more valuable.

The Satellite record shop sold music from every label, not just their own. This gave Stax an extraordinary market intelligence operation. The staff knew exactly what people were buying, what they were asking for, what made them dance. When the studio recorded something new, they could test it immediately by playing acetate pressings for the teenagers who hung around the shop, watching their reactions in real time.

Estelle Axton became a mother figure to the young musicians and writers who drifted in and out. They called her "Miz Axton" or "Lady A." She had no formal training in marketing or music, but she had an instinct that the professionals lacked. Booker T. Jones, who would become one of the label's most important artists, called her "an inspirer."

She just loved music, loved people. She was always bringing us up there to the record shop, having us listen to records. She kept us in touch with the music industry. I doubt there would have been a Stax Records without Estelle Axton.

The name "Stax" itself came from the two siblings: Stewart plus Axton equals Stax. They had to change it in 1961 after discovering another Satellite Records already existed in California. The new name stuck.

The House Band That Reinvented Recording

Most major labels in the early 1960s made records like factories. A producer would hire a studio, book an arranger, bring in session musicians who could read sheet music. The arranger wrote out every part. The musicians played exactly what was written. Sessions ran by the clock. The studio floor and the control room were separate worlds—musicians stayed on one side, engineers on the other.

Stax threw all of that out.

The sessions ran as long as they needed to. Musicians wandered freely between the studio and the control room. Everyone could make suggestions. Most importantly, they developed what are called "head arrangements"—nothing written down, nothing worked out in advance. The music emerged from the room.

The core of this approach was Booker T. and the M.G.'s, the house band that backed almost every recording Stax made from 1962 through 1970. The group featured Booker T. Jones on organ and piano, Steve Cropper on guitar, and Al Jackson Jr. on drums. Donald "Duck" Dunn eventually became the primary bassist. They also recorded hit instrumentals under their own name—"Green Onions" became one of the most recognizable organ riffs in rock and roll history.

What made the M.G.'s remarkable wasn't just their talent but their composition. In a segregated Southern city, they were racially integrated: Jones and Jackson were Black, Cropper and Dunn were white. This was extraordinary for Memphis in the 1960s. The same pattern held throughout the company—Black and white musicians, writers, and staff working together as equals when such collaboration was nearly unthinkable elsewhere in the South.

How a Song Got Made at Stax

Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler got his first real look at the Stax method in the fall of 1963. He was expecting a new single from singer Carla Thomas, but Stax told him they hadn't been able to record for two weeks—the equipment was broken.

Wexler flew Atlantic's legendary engineer Tom Dowd down to Memphis that Friday. Dowd fixed the equipment in two days. On Sunday, he stayed to engineer a session with Rufus Thomas.

What Dowd witnessed astonished him.

Rufus Thomas had a new song. He didn't hand out sheet music. He didn't explain the structure. He simply sang through the number once or twice for the band, humming suggestions for their parts, clacking his teeth near their ears to communicate the rhythm he wanted. Within minutes, the musicians had worked up a complete arrangement from nothing. Dowd started recording. Thomas and the band nailed it in two takes.

The song was "Walking the Dog," which became Thomas's breakthrough hit. Jim Stewart called it the best-sounding record Stax had ever produced.

Wexler later reflected on what made Memphis different:

Memphis was a real departure, because Memphis was a return to head arrangements, to the set rhythm section away from the arranger. It was a return to the symbiosis between the producer and the rhythm section. It was really something new.

This was the opposite of how Motown worked. Berry Gordy's Detroit operation was famous for its production-line precision—the same strict arrangements played by expert session musicians following detailed charts. Motown sounded polished and professional. Stax sounded like a band playing together in a room, because that's exactly what it was.

The Big Six

By the mid-1960s, a small group of people controlled almost everything that came out of Stax. They were called the Big Six: Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Isaac Hayes, Wayne Jackson, Booker T. Jones, and David Porter.

Isaac Hayes had actually failed his first Stax audition in 1962. But by 1964 he'd become essential, both as a session keyboardist (filling in when Booker T. was away studying at Indiana University) and as a songwriter partnered with David Porter. Hayes and Porter wrote dozens of hits for other artists before Hayes launched his own performing career—his 1969 album "Hot Buttered Soul" and his 1971 soundtrack for "Shaft" would make him a superstar in his own right.

Cropper played guitar on sessions, produced records, wrote songs, and served as the artistic director who helped shape which records got released. The horn players—Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love formed the core of what became known as the Memphis Horns—gave Stax its distinctive brass punch.

These six people, working in various combinations, produced almost everything the label released from about 1963 through 1969. They voted with Jim Stewart on which records would be issued. They knew each other's playing intimately. When one of them came up with an idea, the others understood immediately how to support it.

Otis Redding and the Rise of Southern Soul

The label's biggest star in those years was Otis Redding, though technically he recorded for Volt rather than Stax. This distinction was a clever bit of music industry maneuvering. Radio stations in that era were terrified of appearing to take payola—bribes to play certain records—so many refused to play more than one or two new songs from any single label. By splitting their releases between Stax and subsidiary labels like Volt, the company could get more songs on the air.

Redding arrived in 1962 and quickly became the defining voice of Southern soul. Where Motown cultivated a smooth, sophisticated sound designed to cross over to white audiences, Redding was raw and emotional, his voice carrying the unmistakable influence of gospel and blues. He became so central to the label's identity that his death in a plane crash in December 1967 marked the end of Stax's first era.

The tragedy happened just as Redding was breaking through to the mainstream. His song "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay"—recorded just days before his death—became a posthumous number one hit, the first ever for Stax. He was twenty-six years old.

The Sound of That Sloped Floor

Engineers who visited Stax often wanted to "fix" the studio. The room was all wrong by professional standards—that sloped floor from its movie theater days created bizarre acoustic properties. The ceiling was too high in some places, too low in others. Sound bounced unpredictably.

But those imperfections created something irreplaceable. The room gave recordings a big, deep quality that sounded raw and immediate. The bass seemed to come from somewhere underground. The drums punched through the mix. The horns had a thickness that pristine studios couldn't replicate.

When Tom Dowd first visited in 1963, the studio was still using the old mono recorder from the late 1950s—the one Estelle Axton's mortgage had paid for. Dowd suggested upgrading to a two-track recorder so they could make stereo albums, which sold for higher prices.

The Stax team resisted. They were terrified of losing their sound.

Dowd persisted, pointing out the financial benefits. In 1965, he installed a two-track recorder that could run simultaneously with the mono machine, so sessions were captured both ways. A year later, he added a four-track recorder. The Stax sound survived each upgrade—it turned out the magic was in the room itself, not just the equipment.

The Atlantic Partnership and Its Collapse

From the beginning, Stax had a distribution deal with Atlantic Records. Atlantic, based in New York, was one of the most important rhythm and blues labels in the country, founded by the brothers Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun along with Jerry Wexler. They had the national reach that a small Memphis operation lacked.

The arrangement worked beautifully for years. Stax made the records; Atlantic got them into stores and onto radio stations across America. Atlantic's engineers like Tom Dowd helped improve Stax's technical capabilities. Both labels prospered.

Then, in 1967, Atlantic sold itself to Warner Bros.

When the Stax principals examined the fine print of their distribution contract, they discovered something devastating. According to the agreement, Atlantic owned the master recordings of everything Stax had produced. All those classic tracks—Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the M.G.'s—belonged to Atlantic, not to the company that had created them.

The relationship severed in 1968. Stax lost its entire back catalog. It was like a band discovering that someone else owned all their songs.

The Al Bell Era

After the Atlantic split, a new figure took control: Al Bell, who became co-owner and the driving force behind Stax's second act. Bell was ambitious in ways Jim Stewart had never been. He wanted to compete directly with Motown, to build Stax into a Black-owned entertainment empire.

Over the next five years, Bell expanded aggressively. He signed new artists, launched new subsidiary labels, moved into film soundtracks and concert promotion. Isaac Hayes's "Shaft" soundtrack won an Academy Award in 1972. The Staple Singers topped the charts with "I'll Take You There." For a moment, it seemed like Bell's vision might actually work.

But the expansion was fueled partly by a new distribution deal with CBS Records, and that deal had problems. The terms were brutal. Cash flow became a constant crisis. The early 1970s also brought broader changes in the music industry that made it harder for independent labels to survive. By 1974, the company was hemorrhaging money.

Stax finally collapsed in late 1975, forced into involuntary closure by its creditors. The building at 926 East McLemore Avenue was eventually demolished, though a replica now stands on the site as part of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

The Afterlife of Stax

The Stax catalog splintered into different hands. Atlantic kept the 1959-1968 recordings—all those irreplaceable early sessions. Fantasy Records acquired the post-1968 material in 1977 and began reissuing it, signing a few new artists along the way. By the early 1980s, Fantasy stopped releasing new material and Stax became purely a reissue operation, mining the vaults for CD compilations and box sets.

Concord Records bought Fantasy in 2004 and reactivated Stax as a working label. Today it releases both archival material and new recordings by contemporary R&B and soul artists.

But the real legacy isn't about corporate ownership. It's about what happened in that converted movie theater during the 1960s—a place where the rules of the recording industry didn't apply, where Black and white musicians collaborated as equals in a segregated Southern city, where the flaws in the room became the source of an unmistakable sound.

The Stax approach influenced everything that came after. The idea that musicians should develop arrangements together in the studio, that the producer and the band should be partners rather than separate hierarchies, that imperfection could be a virtue—all of this became common wisdom in recording studios around the world. When people talk about records that sound "live" or "warm" or "organic," they're often describing qualities that Stax pioneered.

What Made It Work

Several factors came together at Stax that couldn't quite be replicated elsewhere.

There was the building itself—that acoustic accident of a sloped floor and mismatched dimensions. There was the record shop in the lobby, providing constant real-time feedback about what people actually wanted to hear. There was the tight-knit group of musicians who played together so often they could read each other's intentions without speaking. There was Estelle Axton, the untrained marketer with the unerring instincts. There was Jim Stewart, the country fiddle player who discovered soul music and devoted himself to recording it with integrity.

And there was the time and place: Memphis in the 1960s, a city with deep musical traditions in blues and gospel, a city where integration remained dangerous but where one studio existed as an oasis of collaboration. The racial integration at Stax wasn't a marketing strategy—it was simply how they worked. Black singers, white guitarists, Black drummers, white bassists, all of them focused on making the record as good as it could be.

The music they made there changed American popular culture. It provided the template for what soul music could sound like when it stopped trying to be polished and started trying to be real. That rawness, that authenticity, that sense of musicians playing together in a room—you can still hear it, almost sixty years later, within the first few notes of any song recorded at 926 East McLemore Avenue.