Soul Series: In the Beginning - The Genesis of Stax
- by Joe Nolan
Stax recording studio in the late 1960s.
The Stax record label was founded by Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, siblings raised in Middleton, Tenn. Twelve years older than her baby brother, Axton was born in 1936. Despite her childhood in a small Southern town during the 1940s and 1950s, Axton grew into a strong, independent young woman and eventually moved to Memphis to earn a teaching certificate. Once brother Jim had finished high school, he followed his big sister to the big city with an eye toward making a living as a banker.
Although he resembled any other bespectacled, twenty-something, young man - wandering the campus at Memphis State, taking business classes - Stewart had a secret. He had spent a stint in the military before moving to Memphis, and during his service, he had indulged his hobby of playing fiddle. By the time Stewart started college - despite his business-career ambitions - he had been bitten by the music bug, and bitten hard.
During his years at Memphis State, Stewart became a passionate fiddle player, sawing the strings in popular Western Swing bands in the city, and appearing on live shows on the WDIA and KWEM radio stations. He even shared the stage at the Eagle’s Nest club with an unknown singer from Tupelo, MS named Elvis Presley. After graduation, Stewart began working at First National bank while going on to attend law school. His career seemed to be on a roll and he married Evelyn White, one of his co-workers at First National. But nothing could cure Stewart’s fiddlin’ fever, and he continued to moonlight with various live combos. Meanwhile, Axton, who married earlier, became a mother of two children and was busy working as a teller at Union Planter’s Bank.
With solid educations and bourgeois careers, Stewart and Axton seemed destined for quiet middle class lives that offered no hint whatsoever of their future role as purveyors of some of the most important American music ever recorded. Being white in Memphis, Tenn., in the 1950s should have precluded their involvement with the black community, yet they actively participated in the creation of a hybrid of African-American musical forms that became a soundtrack for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
No one seems more surprised by this than Stewart himself:
I had scarcely seen a black till I was grown. I didn’t know when I started there was such a thing as Atlantic Records. I didn’t know there was a Chess Records or Imperial. I had no desire to start Stax Records, I had no dream of anything like that. I just wanted music. Just anything to be involved with music - one way or the other.
- Jim Stewart, from Sweet Soul Music by Peter Guralnick
Stewart’s first foray into the record business came in 1957, when he released his own country and western single, “Blue Roses.” With the help of KWEM disc jockey Fred Bylar and E.W. Ellis (former proprietor of the Erwin record label), Stewart recorded his composition in his wife’s uncle’s garage, with Bylar on vocals. Stewart, Bylar and Ellis called their new label Satellite, hoping to steal some free publicity from the public hype following the launch of the Soviet satellite, Sputnik 1.
Stewart hoped that Bylar’s connection with “Blue Roses” would result in radio airplay, but his dreams of pop fame were dashed when the single sank with little fanfare. Subsequent attempts to cut a song that would rocket up the charts met a similar fate, including singles by local talents like Donna Rae and Nadine Easton that failed to make an impression on the record-buying public. The music business proved as stubborn as the old, sticking door that served as an entrance to their “studio,” with its motor oil and gasoline smell.
Stewart took “Blue Roses” by Axton’s place and asked her to listen to it and proffer an opinion. The red and white, children’s record-player Axton auditioned “‘Roses” on, was the listening equivalent of the inadequate gear Stewart had recorded the song with. After commenting on the thin sound of the 45, Axton suggested the only way Stewart’s recordings would improve would be if he began laying his tracks down on proper equipment.
Legend has it, Axton promptly took out a second mortgage on her house, raising the $2500 needed to buy an Ampex 300 monaural recorder. The brother and sister were officially partners in the music business, and - in retrospect - Stax records was born.
Sources:
Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music, Harper and Row, 1986
James Dickerson’s Goin’ Back to Memphis, Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1996
Michael Haralambos’ Right on: From Blues to Soul in Black America, Drake Publishers, 1975
Joe Nolan is a poet, musician and freelance journalist in Nashville, TN. Nolan writes about visual art for the journal, Number, published by the University of Memphis. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.