A scene from a Sidney Poitier film: Memphis, on a winter evening in late 1960. Jim Stewart, who has just founded the company Stax with his sister Estelle Axton, wants to work with Jerry Wexler, the vice president of Atlantic Records, and his first stars Rufus and Carla Thomas (father and daughter) douse a distribution deal that gave his company a significantly wider reach.
They did not meet at Stewart's house but in Wexler's hotel suite.
Wexler, the hipster from New York, knew that Stewart wasn't quite ready to invite black people – because Rufus and Carla Thomas were, of course – to his place.
Unintended integration performance
There's no point getting upset about the racism that keeps surfacing;
Memphis was black and white segregated.
What is decisive is the integration effort that was made at that time, and soul played an important part in that.
Jim Stewart was as little "woke" in his life as Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley were;
and yet she and many other white music fanatics have made a difference socially without taking it up on their banners.
Stax, one of the three major soul companies along with Motown and Atlantic, albeit by far the smallest, took up residence in a former cinema.
In order to save costs, a refurbishment was not carried out.
The unique sound that was achieved in the recording studio is probably due to the spatial, almost natural unevenness.
Significant art, which is undoubtedly the case in the vast majority of Stax recordings, is often created without intention or plan.
No one thought of developing a specifically "black" repertoire, least of all Jim Stewart, who did not know any black people at all until adulthood.
He invested the $2,500 mortgage he had talked his sister, a bank teller like himself, into for her house in an Ampex mono recorder;
everything else was taken as it came - the musicians,
hanging out there and the music that was in the air.
The rest is popular culture history.
Who names the names?
It would take us too far to even leaf through the catalog of artists, records and hits that Stax recorded with the subsidiary label Volt in its first, so glorious decade.
Arguably the biggest star was Otis Redding, on whose death in December 1967 the label took a nasty turn, although the legacy of (Sittin' On The) Dock Of The Bay (album and single) secured enduring World Heritage status.
Who else to name?
The two masterminds Isaac Hayes and William Bell, Sam & Dave, Eddie Floyd, the Staples, Johnnie Taylor and the house band Booker T. & The MGs with Steve Cropper (guitar), Duck Dunn (bass), Al Jackson (drums) and Booker T .Jones (organ);
even Wilson Pickett recorded his very first Atlantic records here.
The company logo, found only in 1969, the snapping fingers of a right hand, perfectly expresses the essence and effect of Stax: the flush, earthy sound, but also the fast passing.
They had been ripped off by Wexler, Stax was rid of all rights after the sale to Capitol Records, and Stewart, in a feat of strength, managed to record a second catalog together with newcomer Al Bell.
But the real Stax was dead before its time. Now, at the age of 92, Jim Stewart,