RIP Jim Stewart, Who Turned Stax Records Into the Flip Side of Motown
Amid the explosion of the popular music industry in the 1960s, black popular music moved along two tracks.
The first was Detroit’s Motown track, with the Temptations, Four Tops, Supremes, Vandellas, Stevie Wonder and a busload of artists recording what Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. branded “The Sound of Young America.”
Not black America. Young America. White, black, red, brown, chartreuse. All America. And it worked. It became one of the most successful brandings in popular music history, because every kid in America who owned a radio knew “I Can’t Help Myself” and “Fingertips” and “Where Did Our Love Go” and “My Girl.”
The second track ran 744 miles to the Southwest, in Memphis, where a legion of black artists on the Stax and Volt labels, led by Otis Redding, cut their own immeasurably influential music informally called Southern Soul or simply The Memphis Sound. While Stax and Volt had a healthy number of mainstream hits, from “Dock of the Bay” to “Soul Man” and Isaac Hayes’s theme from Shaft, dozens of other Stax and Volt releases played and sold primarily in black communities.
The first of many ironies here is that Stax was founded by two white folks, Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, neither of whom had much history with black music, popular or otherwise.
So when Jim Stewart died Monday at the age of 92, it closed a chapter in one of the most musically fascinating and sociologically complex stories from the modern music game.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Stewart in 2002, hailing the musical platform he provided for the likes of Redding, Sam and Dave, Hayes, Carla Thomas, the Mar-Keys, the Staples Singers, Eddie Floyd, the Mad Lads and dozens of others.
The induction and the tribute, which Stewart politely declined to attend, was as deserved as it was, earlier in his life, unlikely.
Stewart grew up in rural Tennessee listening to the Western Swing music of Bob Wills. He played hillbilly fiddle, even cut a few fiddle records himself, and famously likened discovering black music in his 20s to a blind man suddenly gaining sight.
From that awakening he defied powerful cultural currents in the 1960s South to produce music wherein black and white artists matter of factly played together. While musicians themselves had been doing that for years, the early 1960s was still an era when black artists couldn’t enter the front door of many clubs where they had been hired to perform.
Because way too much of the American landscape in the early 1960s was still separate but unequal, music, musicians and record labels like Stax were instrumental in starting to erase the dividing lines.
Jim Stewart was hardly the first white record label owner to record black music. From the time in the 1920s that major labels like Victor and Columbia discovered there was a black audience with enough money to buy phonograph records, white producers recorded blues singers, instrumentalists, jazz artists and black popular singers from Bessie Smith and Blind Lemon Jefferson to Louis Armstrong and Robert Johnson.
In Stewart’s own time he was only a few years behind Sam Phillips, a fellow Memphis entrepreneur who started Sun Records in the early 1950s. In 1957, taking Phillips as a model, Stewart launched Satellite Records — only to end up doing a kind of reverse Phillips.
Where Sam started with all black artists and switched to white artists after he discovered Elvis Presley, Stewart recorded white pop and country artists for several years before he scored his first hits from the near-accidental discovery of Carla Thomas and then Redding. After that, Stax went pretty much all-black.
In retrospect, the Stax/Volt story sounds neatly romantic — a small independent white-owned label producing music that for 15 years resonated deeply in the black world and was content to mostly reside there, not burning to score more than periodic mainstream hits.
If Redding’s “Dock of the Bay” became a top-40 standard, 10 times as many Stax releases were way more popular in the black community — even recordings now widely acknowledged as classics, like William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water.”
The whole subject of “black music” and its relationship to mainstream music has consumed books, seminars and more books. Stax reminded us that even when some black artists climb into or become the mainstream, there can still be “black music,” which in those pre-Internet days spread largely through the under-recognized medium of black radio.
Long-time black radio host Imhotep Gary Byrd has called black radio, particularly in the post-World War II decades, “the drumbeat” of the black community, spreading the word on matters from Howlin’ Wolf, James Brown and Luther Vandross to the Civil Rights movement and the Million Man March.
As noted in Peter Guralnick’s superb book Sweet Soul Music, black radio lay at the heart of Stax’s strategy. Their relationship was symbiotic and, yes, almost certainly greased by some old-fashioned party favors from Stax.
How important was black radio? In November 1963, Billboard magazine suspended its weekly rhythm and blues charts, explaining that rhythm and blues music was so integrated into mainstream pop that it was no longer a category of its own. In early 1965 Billboard reinstated the rhythm and blues charts, tacitly acknowledging that the records released by labels like Stax were an important part of the musical landscape even if they weren’t being played alongside the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Temptations on WABC.
As for how Jim Stewart’s Stax made that music, Guralnick and many of the people who were on the scene say it often bubbled up out of chaos. Which did not make Stax unique in the record biz.
Stewart was by his own admission reserved and often remote — supportive of the music, a fan of the music, but neither a feel-good cheerleader inside the company nor a natural promoter outside. That role eventually fell to Al Bell, whom Stewart hired in the mid-1960s and who eventually took over, squeezing out Estelle and others along the way. Bell was the schmoozer that Stewart was not, a classic hail-fellow-well-met and consequently beloved of radio stations and industry people.
Inside Stax, Bell was not hesitant to replace musicians and staffers he didn’t like with those he did. Since Stewart had some of those tendencies himself, a lot of departees left with hard feelings, leading to extensive and lingering discussions about whether Stax treated or paid its employees fairly.
Then there’s also this. In 1975, several years after Stewart had turned the business over to Bell, he returned with a large infusion of his own money in an attempt to stave off imminent corporate bankruptcy. He failed and six years later fell into bankruptcy himself.
While Stax still exists today, the original glory years ended in 1975 on that ragged and unsatisfying note.
It was unfortunate, if only because even people who felt mistreated or disrespected agreed that nothing tarnished the best Stax music.
Flawed as some of his actions and interactions might have been, Stewart’s label captured a sound no one else was capturing in quite the same way in the fertile 1960s and early 1970s. When musicians and fans speak reverently of “the Memphis sound” from that era, the sound that artists from Elvis to Dusty Springfield wanted to become part of, Stax lives at the center.
Fans who knew Booker T and the MG’s from their catchy instrumental hit “Green Onions” might not have known that same group, two white guys and two black guys, were the core players alongside the horn section on tunes like “Try A Little Tenderness,” “Hold On I’m Coming” and “In the Midnight Hour.” They made it sound so simple and natural.
Jim Stewart, probably like most kids who grew up in the Depression in the rural South, apparently didn’t shed that upbringing overnight. The late Jerry Wexler said that when Carla Thomas came into town before she recorded “Gee Whiz” in 1961, Stewart arranged to meet her in a hotel because he wasn’t sure he was “ready to have Negroes in his house.” He evolved with the times, though, and Thomas came to adore him.
Race and culture aside, one biographical fact about Stewart is perhaps worth noting.
He founded Satellite Records in 1957, morphed it into Stax in 1961 and signed Redding in 1962. Two years after that he was still working his long-held day job at a Memphis bank, not completely convinced this music label thing would work out.
It did, and if it was often a careening ride down the rapids, it also became the indelible, invaluable and irreplaceable 1960s flip side to Motown.
Berry Gordy Jr.’s sign outside Motown in Detroit read “Hitsville USA.” The sign outside Stax in South Memphis read “Soulsville USA.”
Two things can be true.
