Unintentionally, Redding’s death has always overshadowed those who died with him and the funerals reflected that hierarchy. The young members of the Bar-Kays were remembered together as a band of brothers; Redding was given a dedicated service, a lying-in-state, and a memoriam that reflected his remarkable status. Although he had become synonymous in music circles with Memphis, it was not a city Redding knew particularly well. Unlike Cunningham, who had lived and breathed the city’s tense discriminations, Redding had a more rural upbringing. He was born in Dawson, in southwest Georgia, and raised in the central state city of Macon; a place with its own claim to fame, it was where both Little Richard and James Brown were raised. Always a creative magpie and not yet fully settled in a distinctive style of his own, Redding borrowed heavily from both of them. At times, his grunting ‘gotta, gotta, gotta’ refrain in live shows made him sound too much like James Brown – and dangerously short of subtlety – but his derivativeness was also a strength.
At seventeen, he was winning weekly talent shows at Macon’s Douglass Theater, wiping away decent opposition. He hung out with Little Richard’s old band, the Upsetters, and then became the featured singer with a local band called Pat T. Cake and the Mighty Panthers, before migrating to yet another Macon band, Johnny Jenkins and his Pinetoppers. With Redding acting as his driver, Jenkins travelled north for a studio session at Stax, and when the house band Booker T. and the M.G.’s wrapped up early to fulfil a local engagement, Redding hustled the gap in the timetable and recorded his first significant release, ‘These Arms Of Mine’ (1962), a ballad as much influenced by country as by soul. His rocking cover version of the Rolling Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ (1965) had the imported energy of the UK R&B beat scene, and his cover version of the ubiquitous ‘Louie Louie’ (1963) was unfettered garage R&B. Redding had never heard of the Rolling Stones, nor had he heard their music, but in his almost naïve enthusiasm he spontaneously burst into their song, mispronouncing words but giving it a unique energy all of his own. He was a steam train who careered into music, recording whole songs live in the studio without a break, looking out to imagined audiences, signing autographs in his mind before the song was finished, and even rewriting songs as he sang them. His manager, Phil Walden, said, ‘He was successful and he liked that lifestyle, being a star and having people like him. He was into being Otis Redding.’
In the Stax studios Redding personified the company’s unwritten philosophy of unrestrained work and live takes. It was not a place prone to much pre-planning or technological aftercare. Wayne Jackson, who sat in on one of the numerous Stax sessions as one of the famed Memphis Horns, described Redding as a hurricane of effort: ‘The man was physical. Emotional and physical . . . He’d just get right in front of you with that big fist up in the air and strut and sing that stuff at you until you were just foaming at the mouth. He’d have you so excited. We had to calm him down sometimes.’ Redding had grown up understanding that hard work was always a bridge to success and he was by some distance the pace-setter in Stax’s fierce cauldron. ‘Otis gave ten thousand per cent,’ said the then-Stax publicist Al Bell. ‘He lost pounds in the studio. He’d come into the studio and strip down to his waist . . . and just sing until the water was coming off him, like someone was pouring out of a bucket.’
Redding was in many ways bewitched by the whole process of being a star. He frequently recounted one of the great myths of African-American music, the story of the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson who ‘sold his soul to the devil’ at a rural crossroads near Dockery Plantation in Mississippi. Redding often embroidered the story, relocating it closer to his own home in Georgia and describing it happening in land that he only knew fleetingly through childhood memories of the dirt-poor sharecropper shacks dotted along the Old River Road near the Jarrell cotton plantation. When Redding faced his own crossroads in the sixties, it was not the devil who stood in his path but his own Christian father and the fragmenting music of the South. The Reddings had by then moved into Tindall Heights, Macon’s first public housing development for black families, and Otis had taken on menial work as a well digger and as a gas station attendant. Much of his money went towards funding his father’s healthcare, yet as his father’s tuberculosis worsened, his loathing of Redding’s musical career deepened, and the singer was forced to conceal his whereabouts at night.
For all his rousing performances, it was as a balladeer that Otis Redding found his true persona. On a tour of New York State in the mid sixties, he was rooming with Jerry Butler, who had been raised in Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green housing projects and had recently left the Impressions to pursue a solo career. It was fortunate happenstance, after one show, that the two sat up together and composed the blistering ballad ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’, which not only became a success in its own right, but was the stand-out song in Redding’s critically acclaimed 1965 album Otis Blue, recorded live over a hectic twenty-four-hour period.
Memphis had grown and thrived on the back of slavery, and then segregation, but history was forcing it to reappraise its ways. The city’s wealth had been founded on the cotton empire that meandered across the Mississippi Delta, a raging river that connected Memphis to the slave port of New Orleans and which Stax guitarist Steve Cropper described as a great thoroughfare. ‘Memphis is in a very lucky position on the map,’ he once said. ‘Everything just gravitated to Memphis for years.’
Schools were acclimatising to the difficult early days of desegregation and downtown restaurants were now required to serve black customers, but the law proved easier to change than attitudes, and inequality and subtle forms of segregation have remained a constant in Memphis society to the current day. In 1968 Memphis had a population of 500,000. Around forty per cent of the population was African-American and fifty-eight per cent of black families lived in poverty. The vast majority of men worked as labourers while most black women with paid jobs worked in the homes of white families or in the service economy. Behind the picket fences and white shutters was a world of orders, hierarchies and thinly disguised racism.
Yet, when Otis Redding first walked into Stax on McLemore as an unknown driver, the studio had already shattered segregationist rules. Drivers were not expected to stay hidden away in their cars or at a parking lot nearby; they were allowed into the studio to watch, listen or drink coffee. Black and white musicians would work and play together, but they were separate in their lifestyle, with the majority living in different neighbourhoods, attending different schools and barely acknowledging each other as they passed in the street. Songwriter William Bell described the situation: ‘Those were heavy times and the best of times . . . When we walked out of the studio, the reality hit us in the face, with all the segregation and everything. But inside the studio it was like utopia.’
Stax historian Rob Bowman, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the company, claimed in an interview: ‘It’s impossible to conceive what Stax did in terms of integration unless you’ve spent time in the South. Stax was in the heart of the Mid South. When Stax began, Memphis was as racially segregated and polarized as a city could get. The city was fifty per cent white and fifty per cent black. But nothing was integrated except Stax. I call Stax an oasis of racial sanity in an otherwise insane world. A lot of the people who worked at Stax commented on how going to work was like going to church. You stepped into the Stax building and the world was somehow different. Black and white people were working together and becoming friends at Stax in a way that was totally organic. Stax was the organic manifestation of Dr Martin Luther King’s dream, where black and white people came together through a common purpose. Working together toward a common goal – making music – black and white people realized that their differences were a matter of culture and not a matter of species.’
The original owners of Stax, Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, whose abbreviated surnames bequeathed the company its name, acted as quiet trailblazers in a society where integration was still a troublesome c
oncept. Jim Stewart was a white farm boy from Tennessee and a part-time fiddle player who had been raised on hoedown and hillbilly music in an Ulster-Scots farming community, where the preferred music was Highland and barndance reels. He had been immersed in country music from childhood, listening to the Grand Ole Opry on Radio Station WSM on his father’s vintage Emerson radio, and so was an unlikely figure on the southern soul scene. He was thin and bookish, and favoured heavy black-rimmed glasses, patterned rayon shirts, pressed flannels and polished shoes. He was, in the parlance of the time, a ‘square’. Having moved from the farmlands of Mississippi to urban Memphis, he worked at the Union Planters Bank, holding down a secure salaried job. Trumpeter Wayne Jackson described him as ‘an accountant and an introvert’ who routinely took pills to combat nerves and anxiety. Deeply insecure about the vulnerable fortunes of the recording industry, he remained at his bank job many years after Stax was formed. Stewart was always more comfortable with country music than with soul, and according to music critic Barney Hoskyns in his pioneering book Say It One More Time for the Brokenhearted, ‘Stax had grown on a country foundation’ and Stewart considered Otis Redding’s ‘These Arms Of Mine’ to be a classic example of ‘black country’.
Understandably, given his upbringing and conservative views, Stewart was concerned that the music could not be trusted to provide an income for himself and his family, and, although they were very different characters, he shared his sister’s strong streak of moral responsibility. Estelle Axton had moved from the family farm to work as a teacher in the Memphis education system, a role that influenced her attitudes to music. She eventually became the likeable matriarch of Satellite Records, the vinyl store next door to the Stax studios which became a gathering place for the neighbourhood’s young and aspiring African-American talent. For a few unsuccessful years, Jim Stewart released country and western records on the Satellite label (named after the record store), but the location of the shop in what was a blighted ghetto area brought black music teeming to its doors. William Bell, then an emergent songwriter, described Satellite as ‘a teenage hangout’ and many of Stax’s greatest acts found their first words of encouragement from the lips of Axton, as they shopped for the latest releases or came to her with their ideas. The songwriter Homer Banks was an assistant at the record store and was patiently guided through the craft of writing lyrics by Axton. Although she was no longer a teacher, it was a profession she never truly abandoned, taking her skills into the community as a mentor of raw and often rough young teenagers. She had pioneered a crude but effective data system within the shop in which she recorded on file cards and a Rolodex all the records that ever sold well in the shop. The data was frequently consulted to try to fathom the appeal of the most successful. Axton claims it was ‘the workshop of Stax Records’ and told the writer Rob Bowman in his book Soulsville U.S.A. that ‘when a record would [become a] hit on another label, we would discuss what makes the record sell. We analysed it. That’s why we had so many good writers. They knew what would sell.’ Next door, within the flaking walls of the old Capitol Movie Theater, the company that became Stax set up home, and for years the shop and the studio worked in mutually reinforcing tandem: improvising, producing and selling records.
Stax could not have flourished without the local Memphis school system, and two pioneering schools stood out, separated not just by the sprawling geography of the city, but by the deep cultural apartheid of Tennessee; they were the exclusively black Booker T. Washington High School and the predominantly white Messick High School. Although black students made up forty-five per cent of the Memphis educational roll, discrimination was ingrained and institutionalised; not a single black parent, politician or elder served on a school board. Divisions ran deep in Memphis life but somehow music found a cross-over. It was at Messick High in February 1955 that the teenage Elvis Presley performed a pioneering show that triggered the moment of rock ’n’ roll, a musical eruption that Greil Marcus described as the ‘Big Bang’ – the event that changed the universe of teenage music. ‘If ever there was music that bleeds,’ Marcus wrote, ‘this was it.’ Messick bled music. It was an urban high school but it had once drawn its students from the farmlands on the periphery of the city. It sat in a tree-lined block on Spottswood Avenue and was exclusively white. Although the legal system was slowly recognising civil rights, segregation was still powerfully in force: the Memphis district had fifty-five all-black schools, eighteen that were all white, twenty-five that were predominately black and sixty-eight that were predominately white. Stax drew on them all, regardless of colour. One Messick High student stood out from the crowd. Charles ‘Packy’ Axton, the wayward son of Stax co-owner Estelle, was a tenor saxophonist, a provocative outsider and one of the school’s teenage delinquents. His father Everett was an alcoholic, and, although he was married to the Stax clan, Packy was kept at arm’s length from the studios and, for a spell, banned from the studios. Packy’s wayward life led his cautious uncle to believe that alcoholism surged through the family and unresolved resentments flared into open warfare. It was a battle of generational attitudes. Packy enjoyed shaming his conservative uncle; he flagrantly hung out with black kids in the wrong parts of town, flaunted the sexual divisions of the day by dating black girls, and drank copiously in feared local nightclubs, such as the notorious Plantation Inn across the Mississippi Bridge in West Memphis. Packy had hooked up with an emergent high-school band called the Royal Spades, who rehearsed in the school auditorium, on the stage that Elvis Presley had once graced. The Spades became the nucleus of Stax road band the Mar-Keys, and among their number were lead guitarist Steve Cropper, Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, a promising bass guitarist who had grown up in semi-rural Tennessee, saxophonist Don Nix, Terry Johnson, a precociously talented drummer who played in his father’s country and western group, trumpeter Wayne Jackson, a latter-day member of the Memphis Horns, and vocalist Ronnie ‘Stoots’ Angel, a talented graphic designer who designed Stax’s original label – an untidy pile of vinyl discs. Most were from Messick High and all from high schools in the exclusively white neighbourhoods of East Memphis. Cropper had arrived in the city as a ten-year-old from his home on a tiny farmstead in Dora, Missouri, on Route 181 – territory steeped in racial suspicion and hillbilly values. According to the Memphis historian and music critic Robert Gordon, ‘Memphis music is an approach to life, defined by geography, dignified by the bluesmen.’ In his obsessively researched local history It Came from Memphis, Gordon describes the uniqueness of the place and its people. ‘This is the big city surrounded by farmland, where snug businessmen gamble on the labor of field hands, widening the gap between them, testing the uneasy alliance. Memphis has always been a place where cultures came together to have a wreck: black and white, rural and urban, poor and rich. The music of Memphis is more than a soundtrack to these confrontations. It is the document of it.’
Civil rights legislation was chipping away at discrimination. In 1964 1.2 per cent of African-American students in the South were attending school with whites, and by the first days of 1968 the figure had risen to over thirty per cent. But Memphis had not yet reflected the scale of that change. Booker T. Washington High School was almost entirely black. It was an urban oasis named after the great educationalist, and was staffed by teachers who encouraged black ambition. Booker was hemmed in between the Danny Thomas Boulevard and East Railroad Avenue, in an area that echoed to the percussion of railroad wagons lumbering along an old rail network that connected the Tennessee River to Charleston, South Carolina, the capital of the slave trade. Many of the teenagers who would go on to shape southern soul walked those tracks: Stax organist Booker T. Jones was named after the educationalist, and his father was a science teacher at the school; another teacher Nat D. Williams became the first DJ to broadcast to black audiences via Radio Station WDIA; Rufus Thomas, the clown prince of Stax, had studied there; Isaac Hayes, David Porter and William Bell were all students there before graduating to the writing rooms and the main studio
at Stax as writer-producers. Even the old bluesmen of a different generation had walked those railroads. John Lee Hooker once said: ‘I hitchhiked, took trucks ’n’ trains – anything that would pick me up. I stopped in Memphis for about six months and they found me and come got me. Staid [sic] about a month and then split.’
In its earliest days, Stax was colour blind. Estelle Axton commented that ‘we never saw colour, we saw talent’. Musicians from all the various strands of music and society found expression in the glorious 1962 hit ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T. and the M.G.’s, which broke through the fragile harmonies of Memphis society to trailblaze southern soul to the summit of the Billboard charts and launch an act with near perfect racial symmetry. The song was improvised at the tail-end of a studio session and hawked around local radio stations, from where it grew steadily into a worldwide club classic. The group consisted of Booker T. Jones and a drumming prodigy called Al Jackson Jr, both of whom were black. Steve Cropper and Lewie Steinberg were white. In time Steinberg was replaced by another white bassist, Donald Dunn. Booker T. and the M.G.’s were the band that openly defied segregation. The celebrated Memphis guitarist Jim Dickinson claims that ‘Booker T. and the M.G.’s was a perfect example of racial collision – four men who under normal circumstances would not have known each other, much less work with each other in ensemble like that.’ It is a theme that runs like oil through the history of Memphis music. According to Al Bell, Stax’s dynamic publicist, producer and, ultimately, its most aggressive executive, Stax was a ‘haven, because it allowed us to escape all of the segregation and racism outside. When we left Stax and went back to our communities, the blacks went back to the black community and the whites to the white community . . . When we left and went out that door, then we went into a different world, but inside of Stax it didn’t exist.’ The label’s greatest achievement was that it challenged orthodoxy and attracted musicians from across the ethnic divide: they came from the hillbilly homes of the Appalachian mountains, from the country bars of Nashville, from the rural roadside shacks of gut-bucket blues and from the glorious gospel churches of the southern states.
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